Recent Projects
Simon’s Town Baboon Dialogue Process
My home town of Simon’s Town has no less than four baboon troops living on the mountain above it and over recent years they have become habituated to foraging for human food and food waste in the town’s commercial centre and residential areas, causing strongly polarized responses amongst residents. In an effort to reduce the polarization and improve the town’s capacity to negotiate with the authorities for good solutions, I have since March 2022 been running an informal dialogue process involving residents, experts and authorities, with the help of two other equally determined Simon’s Town residents.
Despite many small successes en route, the hopes for a sustainable solution acceptable to a broad majority are still a way off being realized. However, we have realized that although baboons are the central stimulus for the human turmoil our neighbourhoods have experienced, the underlying experiment we are running is to do with the possibility of a functional local democracy in the age of social media.
Here is an early article I wrote about our approach (June 2022):
Shifting Climate Leadership
For the six months leading up to COP26 in Glasgow in December 2021 The Resilience Shift commissioned me to conduct extensive interviews with seven notable climate leaders in the public, private and civic sectors in the UK and Africa. I met them online for half an hour every fortnight, during which time we discussed the challenges they faced in their quest to move the needle on climate change. I found it a deeply thought-provoking experience, which has altered my thinking about what is now required from those of us who have been active around climate change for many years.
From these many conversations I distilled 90 discrete leadership insights, which to date remain unpublished.
Cape Town Drought Response Learning Initiative
As Cape Town started to recover from its near-catastrophic drought (2016-18), I teamed up with documentary filmmaker Victor van Aswegen to interview in depth and on camera 39 leaders, from all sectors, who were involved in responding to the crisis. Our aim was to help both Cape Town and other global cities to learn the lessons from this extraordinary ‘near miss’.
By the end of the project we had produced 95 learning films of varying length, which can be accessed for free on the project’s website. You can see here (1) our short introduction to what happened in the drought; (2) a video made by Arup of an event they hosted to showcase our work in London in 2019; and (3) a longer Arup video in which Helen Civil interviews me about the project.
