Colleen engages with clients around the world to initiate and organize collaborative efforts to make headway on today’s challenging social and environmental issues.
About
Colleen is co-founder of Reos Partners and led the Southern Africa team for several years. She is now Director of Practice and Innovation. Throughout her working life, Colleen has remained passionate about bringing together committed and diverse leaders to reduce the many divides of inequality. Colleen’s experience includes convening, organizing, and facilitating short- and long-term relationships across sectors that address their most pressing challenges—from violence against women to climate change adaptation in vulnerable parts of the African continent.
Colleen is a scenario-planning expert and has led a number of transformative scenario planning processes around the world. In this capacity, Colleen has worked primarily in the areas of climate change, food systems, land reform, healthcare, education, oceans sustainability, and the insurance sector. She is also a writer and is co-author of Mapping Dialogue: Essential Tools for Social Change, which outlines a variety of transformative dialogue tools and change processes.
Prior to co-founding Reos, Colleen set up the Centre for Leadership and Dialogue at the University of Pretoria’s Business School, GIBS. She’s currently a faculty member at GIBS, and teaches courses in systems thinking for organizations, transformative scenarios, participative practices for social change, and dialogue for solving tough problems. She has supervised a number of teaching case studies and edited the book Dust to Diamonds: Stories of South African Social Entrepreneurs.
Colleen lives in Johannesburg with her family.
Expertise
Scenario planning, strategy, facilitation, social entrepreneurship
Selected Projects
- Southern Africa Food Lab
- Leadership and Innovation Network for Children
- Land Reform Futures
- North Star Scenarios
- South African Food Futures
- The Futures of Independent Education in Northern Tanzania
Publications
News Posts
- Moving through tough terrain: The role of hope
- The System in the Classroom
- Experiments for 2019
- What insights has 2017 left with us?
- Does it have to be so difficult?
- Critique Fatigue
- Facing the unknown can help us shape the future
- The dreaded R Word
- The Good Rains
- Is hope relevant?
- The 100 Point Turn
- Safety does not always mean protection
- Conflict, collaboration and the courage to work with both
- When is it the right time to respond?
- Moving in and out of our boxes as we stay in conflict and relationship
- What's home?
- In South Africa, Transforming the Future of Food
- Talking About Race
- When to say yes and when to say no
- The Invisible Middles
- Fail Again, Fail Better
- Why disillusionment could be a good thing
- How Do We Talk When the Stakes Are High and the Trust Is Low?
- The Southern Africa Food Lab
- North Star Scenarios: Community Activation in South Africa
- World Cup 2010: Why We Must Not Forget What Just Happened