Two weeks ago, cartoonist Zapiro depicted a recurring dilemma of South African sport when he showed new Springbok coach Allister Coetzee torn between having to catch two rugby balls, one labelled "transformation", the other "winning".That was attacked by many as racist and insulting, implying that the two were mutually exclusive, that transformation meant failure.Forced to clarify, Zapiro followed up with a cartoon addressed to the Minister of Sport, Fikile Mbalula, showing him diving over a try line carrying both those balls, with the words "Dear Mr Sports Minister, with a little imagination, we can catch 'em both".Zapiro is right. Or even more accurately, what could happen is that a bit of imagination, combined with some strategic competence, could combine winning and transformation, so that Coetzee, Russell Domingo, and every other professional coach in South Africa would have to catch only one ball.The frustrating problem, which I've written about before, is that transformation and winning should be two points on the same line, and not two entirely separate lines. One ball, rather than two. That's because a country with, say five million viable players to choose from, cannot continue to pick its best 30 rugby players or cricketers from only 200000 of them.Even if the "untapped" 4.8 million are not the same low-hanging fruit, and are less likely to provide an AB de Villiers or Eben Etzebeth, they represent unrealised potential.And high-performance success is nothing if not the realisation of individual and collective potential. We fail to perform because we haven't managed to marry these two agendas, and neither our individual (transformation-related) or collective (high-performance system) potential is ever realised.Of Zapiro's two cartoons, then, the first is the more realistic depiction of South African sport and Coetzee's situation, where two separate, conflicting agendas are dumped onto a coach. Frustratingly, the people who could change this - government at one level, and sports administrators at another - continue to pursue incremental, compartmentalised thinking. Over the past few generations, we've seen multiple task forces, hearings, internal audits and independent consultants. They always deal with transformation in isolation, nudging it forward. It usually falls to someone else, or a different task force or team, to worry about all the other aspects of elite performance, and never the two shall meet.Imagine your tap is dripping water, slowly. It's enough to satisfy your thirst, but barely. If a plumber comes along and unblocks a pipeline, that slow drip might suddenly turn into a raging torrent, water gushing out faster than you can drink it. That's what we want from transformation - a "plumber" to increase the supply of black players to satisfy our desire.But if you don't think ahead and get a large bucket, preferably without holes, to catch that water, then all you'll have done is create a new way to waste a valuable resource. You've now become better at being wasteful, the consequence of which is a damaged system for the wider community, whose "water" you're now dumping onto the ground. The entire community risks a water shortage because you couldn't plan more than one activity at a time.The bucket, in this case, means things like the standard of coaching from school to the professional game, the competition format and structure, the scientific and medical support you provide to the players you identify by fixing the pipeline, talent ID systems that must include transformation directives, and the commercial, marketing systems that should back up your search for talent and attempts to grow the game.What we are talking about here is alignment - of every single activity that impacts on the ultimate performance of the team aligned so they add to, rather than oppose, one another. Our answer is no, and as long as we fail to appreciate this, we will continue to compartmentalise these functions, and the result will be wasteful thinking.The solution? I'd like to never read about a "transformation" (or any other specific function) task force ever again, or a hearing where sports have to answer for transformation success.I would like to see integration, the destruction of silos, and a single high-performance mindset that recognises that everything matters. Minister? Some imagination?..