Hi, I’m Peter Willis

I grew up in the English countryside and studied history at Oxford University. My first job was in the UK Department of Industry, liaising with the French government on the building of the Concorde. Deciding, after a year’s sampling, to be a bureaucrat in another lifetime, not this one, I trained as a primary school teacher at the University of London and taught in inner-London schools for four years. Realizing that I loved children and teaching but not schools, I then spent the 1980’s creating and running several small publishing and marketing businesses. In 1993 I moved to Cape Town with my wife (a South African and an early member of the UK Green Party) and our small son, a few months ahead of the first democratic elections.

From 1995 to 2014 I linked up with a small but growing band of pioneers in the field of sustainability, helping leaders in business and city government shift their thinking about critical social and environmental trends and their implications. In the last 12 years of this period I was the South African Director of the University of Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership. There I designed and facilitated numerous senior executive programmes, including the annual 3-day residential Prince of Wales Business & Sustainability Programme.

Since 2014, I have been a freelance facilitator and advisor with a growing interest in helping leaders and their organizations respond exceptionally to existential crises. See here for the five projects I’ve run since 2017 on this theme.

In parallel with my organizational work, I have for over twenty years been mentoring young adults in the nearby township as well as a range of professionals from within my sustainability & resilience ‘tribe’. I have also been running a community dialogue process with residents of my hometown, Simon’s Town, where the presence of several wild baboon troops has caused much polarization. Creating a carefully facilitated space where neighbours can come and hear one another’s differences without rancour and explore common purpose is deeply satisfying work.