Gestalt at the South African Treasury Department

I’m stumbling along, trying my best to remain in the single file line the path has forced us to form. We crest the hillside, overlooking a quiet river freckled with boulders and dragonflies. I overhear Jonathan and Kirsten chatting in front of me. They are introducing themselves, having only just met on this day hike organized through the Cape Town Hiking Group. I hear Kirsten say that she works for the National Treasury [...]

An interesting response to our recent talk

The first thing that struck me from the talk and that had me celebrate inwardly was that these insights are now surfacing at various points through various people who have all been keenly and committedly observing their environments and coming to similar conclusions: That organisations are [...]

Social innovation from the inside out

We are excited to share this talk that Warren gave last month at University of Cape Town exploring the organizational dimensions of social innovation. In our experience, few social purpose organizations spend much time looking at how their own organizational cultures support or hinder the kinds of changes in the world they are working so hard to create. In this talk, Warren challenges us to consider how much of our current difficulty in fostering and scaling social innovation is bound up in this disconnect. What kind of change might we create if [...]

Experiencing the giving field

After a talk we gave recently, we had a brief chat with Marion Adamson, a facilitator here in Cape Town. A few days later, after having checked out the Organization Unbound website, Marian sent us the following email:

I read the blog post of the Giving Field – and immediately my son’s preschool came to mind. It’s the place I find myself being drawn to when I’m most struggling with [...]

At The Change Collective

Last week we convened our first workshop in Cape Town, at the invitation of the Change Collective Cape Town. It was definitely one of the more engaging workshops we’ve ever done. It seemed to get under people’s skin- both positively and negatively- in more of an immediate way than we have previously experienced.

A quick dip into anarchy

When I heard that the first-ever South African Anarchist Book Fair was being organized in Cape Town, I jumped at the opportunity to check it out. I had been to the anarchist book fair several times in Montreal, but never with a specific goal in mind. This time, I was going with a more tailored curiosity: How do anarchists go about [...]

A simple practice that caught our attention

We are in Cape Town for a few weeks and just got back from a meeting with Nathan Heller at The Hub, a co-working space for social innovators. Although The Hub Cape Town only recently opened its doors, the model has been around for a while and there are over two dozen Hubs worldwide in [...]