The Story of this Workshop

As I entered the work with leaders in business and communities in various sectors here in South Africa in 2005, I have been translating narrative ideas and practices in these contexts. Sharing conversations on the continent of Africa with diverse groups of leaders have taught me that moments and stories of leadership are informed by our relatedness to place, the land and community.

In 2010, I was invited by Charles Holmes to facilitate my first Introduction to Narrative Leadership workshop in Vancouver, Canada. It was the beginning of the translation of narrative ideas and practices into workshop experiences with leaders that have hugely informed my work and also took me on journeys to the USA, Belgium, The Bahamas, Israel, The Netherlands, Denmark and Sweden.

Since 2012 I have had the privilege to annually learn with three diverse communities around the theme, Re-authoring Leadership Narratives with and within Organisations. It has been so interesting to see what matters deeply to leaders every year and to be inspired by their narratives, ideas and practices.

As I invite you into this Re-authoring Leadership workshop with me I stand on the shoulders of all that I have learned and discovered annually since 2012 with the students at the Kaospilot School in Aarhus Denmark, the leaders at the Postgraduate Diploma in Leadership Development at USB and the leaders at the PwC South Africa Altitude Programme.

What will we explore in the Re-authoring interactive online workshop?

Re-authoring leadership ideas and practices are built on the understanding that human beings have the wonderful capacity to make meaning and create narratives from important moments in their lives.

In our two days together, participants will obtain an understanding of their own personal and leadership narratives and their role in organisations to co-author organisational narratives that collectively move the organisation forward into a preferred future. We will name, explore, thicken and enrich the leadership stories we want to fully live into and also explore the theory and practices that enable leaders to live from these explored leadership narratives.

Participants will be invited into the transformational nature of the re-authoring ideas as a way of seeing and doing and engage with the extraordinary gifts, values, hopes and dreams that open up an alternative future for their lives and work.

We will focus on the following themes:

• Leadership identities
• Leadership contexts and its power to shape and maintain
• Leadership gifts and understandings to facilitate conversations
• Working with problem stories as leaders

More information on Re-authoring Leadership

If you are interested to read more about the Re-authoring approach to leadership, you are welcome to follow the links below to book chapters, an article and videos:

In 2013 my learnings in the journeys of consulting, coaching and leadership development work became chapters in the book, Re-authoring the World, which is a translation of the narrative ideas for those interested in organisational and communal work.

In 2013, I was interviewed by The Refinery Leadership Partners: Vancouver, Canada 2013 about themes of leadership and organisational culture in the following videos:

• The Importance of Listening 
• Narrative & Story-Telling in the Workplace
• The Role of Story-Telling in Organisations 

In 2014 I was approached by Gervase Bushe to contribute a chapter in the Dialogic Organizational Book, which I found a wonderful paradigm to situate my work in as consultant and coach. I called Chapter 16, Coaching from a Dialogic OD Paradigm.

In 2016 I contributed an article called Re-authoring Leadership with and within Organizations for the OD Practitioner, Volume 48, Number 2: Co-constructing organizational and Leadership Narratives. You can read and download the article here. 

During the Learning Encounter that was hosted by the Story the Future online summit at the beginning of 2019, I was interviewed by Dave Hutchens in the week where the focus was on: Self as an instrument — working with your own story and in this conversation, we focused on leadership stories.