ELAINE RUMBOLL
ELAINE RUMBOLL
Services
Leading with PACE
The Agile Leader’s Toolkit
LEGO Group Coaching
LEGO One-on-one Coaching
The Power of Play
Cultivating Curiosity as a Leadership Practice
The Smell of Bravery
Regenerative Resilience (online)
Art Thinking
Overcoming Overseriousness in Optimal Teams
Building Your Inner Coach (online)
Elaine Rumboll
Professor of Play & Founder, The Creative Leadership Consultancy
Elaine Rumboll is the founder and managing director of The Creative Leadership Consultancy, a learning agency focused on building more agile, playful, curious, and energised leaders. She is an internationally accredited Master LEGO® Serious Play® practitioner, a blues singer, and an internationally published, award-winning poet, bringing a rare blend of creative and strategic mastery to her work in leadership development.
Over the past 25 years, Elaine has worked with senior leaders across sectors—banking, automotive, FMCG, creative industries, education, and international development—delivering transformational leadership programmes across South Africa, Australia, the US, and Europe. She has also held senior academic and executive roles, including Director of Executive Education at UCT GSB, where she led the unit to global recognition and chaired the Women in Leadership Advisory Board.
Core Expertise and Impact
Elaine specialises in designing and delivering immersive, creative leadership experiences that unlock energy, deepen resilience, and build capacity for complexity and change. Her "sweet spot" is using the power of play, art thinking, and embodied practice to enable high-performance teams and human-centred leaders. Her expertise includes:
Creative Leadership Development: Elaine has designed and led award-winning leadership programmes for clients including Investec, Discovery, Woolworths, Sorbet, The Coca-Cola Company, Ogilvy, Audi, PwC, Levi’s, SC Johnson, Mr Price, and the United Nations. Her approach blends creative intelligence with business acumen and is anchored in experiential learning and practical implementation.
Embodied Resilience and Regenerative Practice Through programmes like Leading with PACE and Regenerative Resilience, Elaine supports leaders to cultivate presence, recover energy, and lead through ambiguity with grace and groundedness.
Executive Education & Culture Transformation: As Director of Executive Education at UCT GSB, Elaine grew revenues by 4.5x and secured a Financial Times global ranking—the first for Africa. She also held professorships at Curtin Graduate School of Business and Victoria University, shaping sustainable leadership practices and organisational culture in both academic and corporate environments.
Credentials and Approach
Elaine holds an MA in Comparative Literature (cum laude) where she researched a reconfiguration of desire not based on lack or need through the work of Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari, and an MBA from Wits Business School, with a focus on executive coaching. She is currently senior adjunct faculty at UCT GSB and Duke CE.
She is certified in the Time to Think methodologies, LEGO® Serious Play® and holds multiple creative and coaching certifications. Elaine’s methodology is rooted in embodied intelligence, transdisciplinary creativity, systems thinking, and spiritual groundedness. Her work is deeply relational, poetic, and practical—supporting leaders to access new ways of knowing and leading.
A winner of Business Woman of the Year (BWA, 2010), Editor’s Choice award and finalist for the International Poet of Merit (1995), Elaine brings rare credibility across both business and creative domains. She is a sought-after keynote speaker, a mentor to artists and entrepreneurs, and a guiding voice in the emergent field of art thinking and embodied leadership.
LELEMBA PHIRI
LELEMBA PHIRI
Dr. Lelemba Phiri
Transformational Leader in Gender, Power & Inclusive Systems
Dr. Lelemba Phiri is a transformational leader dedicated to dismantling systemic barriers and creating pathways for women's economic empowerment across Africa. As founder of Africa Trust Group, a research, advisory and investment firm, she pioneers leadership that intentionally redistributes power, capital and opportunity to those historically excluded from economic systems.
Core Expertise
With over 20 years of experience across 10+ African markets, Lelemba specializes in designing transformational leadership experiences through three signature interventions:
The Power Audit & Redistribution Framework: Guides leadership teams through comprehensive analysis of organizational power flows, then facilitates design of new structures that center marginalized voices in decision-making. Drawing from her experience deploying USD11m+ in capital across 30+ sub-Saharan African businesses.
Cultural Intelligence & Belonging Architecture: Works with organizations to create environments where all team members can contribute authentically, integrating cross-cultural leadership principles with research-backed frameworks for inclusive design.
Economic Justice Integration: Helps organizations align business models with equity principles, transforming how they create value, allocate resources and measure success.
Her work with institutions like GiZ, UN University and Development Bank of Zambia provides proven blueprints for integrating gender lens approaches.
Credentials
Lelemba holds a PhD from Gordon's Institute of Business Science (University of Pretoria) researching the intersection of gender, race and finance, and a Masters in Development Finance (Distinction) from UCT's Graduate School of Business. She is a Chartered Accountant (Fellow of Chartered Certified Accountants, UK) and guest lectures at ESADE (Spain) and University of Turin (Italy).
Recognition
An award-winning leader recognized as one of Africa's Inspiring Women "LeadHers" by Facebook (2021), one of 50 Change-makers Advancing Gender Equality in South Africa (2017), and a Cordes Fellow for 50 most promising social entrepreneurs globally (2016). She serves as Chair of Zoona, Chair of Novastar Fund III, and Co-Chair of 2X Forum Global.
Her methodology bridges academic rigor with lived experience, enabling organizations to move beyond surface-level diversity initiatives to fundamental structural change that centers equity and inclusion.
CATHLIN MILLWARD
CATHLIN MILLWARD
Services
Employee Engagement including Gallup Q12, Global Engagement Index, Quantum Workplace, Lattice and Workleap
HR Operating Models
Org Design and Job Architecture
Performance Management Philosophy, System and Practice
High Performance Workplace
Gallup Strengths Coaching
Enneagram Coaching
Cathlin Millward
Senior Partner at the Creative Leadership Consultancy
Cathlin is an accomplished Organisation Effectiveness Strategist and an expert in employee engagement and performance, with 25 years of HR leadership experience. Her career spans diverse sectors, including mining, manufacturing, fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG), and financial services, working with both start-ups and multinational corporations.
Core Expertise and Impact
Cathlin specializes in transforming human resources practices into tangible business results. Her "sweet spot" involves designing performance and engagement systems that unlock discretionary effort, leading to increased productivity and retention. Her expertise includes:
Employee Engagement: Her Master's research focused on this area, and she has successfully deployed multiple Gallup Q12 programs that have directly improved revenue, customer Net Promoter Score (NPS), and manager effectiveness.
Performance Management: She has led end-to-end redesigns of performance frameworks, resulting in reduced time-to-hire, halved agency spend, and the development of robust successor pipelines.
Leadership & Culture: Cathlin provides coaching using frameworks like the Enneagram and Gallup Strengths. She is also skilled in solutions-focused facilitation and implementing change frameworks that are sustainable and effective.
Credentials and Approach
Cathlin's strong academic background includes a BA in Industrial Psychology & English from Rhodes University, a PGDip in Management from Wits Business School, a PGCert in Advanced Labour Law from UNISA, and an MSc in Organisational Behaviour from Trinity College Dublin.
She holds numerous certifications, including Gallup Strengths Coach & Q12 Implementer, Enneagram Practitioner, Korn Ferry Success Profiles & ALP, PROSCI/ADKAR, Certified Scrum Master, and LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY®.
Cathlin partners leaders at all levels to diagnose capability gaps, build human-centred talent engines and deliver business impact, fast. Analytical yet warm, Cathlin has a proven track record in helping organisations harness the talent they already have, while winning the results they still need.
JEANNE VON HIRSCHBERG
JEANNE VON HIRSCHBERG
Dr. Jeanne von Hirschberg
Innovation Management Strategist & Product Development Expert
Jeanne is an associate at the Creative Leadership Consultancy since 2019, is a qualified Innovation Management Strategist with over 25 years of product development experience. Her career involved bringing over 700 products to market in the fast-moving-consumer-goods (FMCG) space, working with national and international brands. She has also worked in commercial and brand development of science, agricultural and hospitality businesses by combining a first-principles and brand engineering approach.
Core Expertise and Impact
Jeanne's specialty is developing and streamlining teams for collaborative end-user-centric product development outcomes. This includes brand architecture strategy to support commercial goals, structuring organizational teams for effectiveness, and developing products in B2B, B2C and DTC contexts. Her philosophy in successfully bringing products to market is firmly rooted in end-consumer commercial relevance.
She was directly involved in scaling eight start-ups with specific expertise in initial bootstrapping to appropriate business scaling, achieving organizational effectiveness via smart operations and team development, achieving and maintaining end-consumer relevance, and contextualizing each business' unique aspects to ensure sustainable success.
Credentials & Approach
Jeanne's academic background includes an MBA and PhD in Innovation Management with particular focus on structuring around end-consumer relevance. She completed her doctorate in 2021, focusing on how appropriate leadership, relational quality, and team dynamics ensure commercial success, earning Top Achiever status for her dissertation. She currently part-time lectures at CTCA and designs custom executive leadership development programs.
LIANNE DU TOIT
LIANNE DU TOIT
Lianne Akal
Community Builder
Lianne has been featured in TopWomen Leaders by Standard Bank, nominated for Inspiring Fifty in 2018 and voted as one of Fast Company’s most creative minds in business in 2016.
Lianne’s diverse experience and education from Harvard Business School to providing support as a board member at Girls Do Good has allowed her to develop many skills. Lianne believes in the importance of working hard, dreaming big and actively making an impact.
Core Expertise and Impact
She is a qualified LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® facilitator which is a proven methodology that helps unlocks the potential of all the participants in a workshop environment. At its core participants work together to solve complex issues by building models using LEGO bricks. The metaphors in the models serve as the basis for group discussion, knowledge sharing and problem solving and help foster creative thinking and finding unique solutions
Lianne is the Senior Manager for Forum Placement for non-profit YPO (Global platform for leaders to engage, learn and grow) and certified as a Leadership Coach helping to build the leaders of tomorrow today.
Today,YPO empowers more than 35,000 members in more than 142 countries and through its membership can be considered as the 13 largest diversified among industries and types of businesses. Altogether, YPO member-run companies employ 16 million people and generate USD6 trillion in annual revenues.
Credentials and Approach
Lianne academic background includes a BCom in organisational psychology, she founded theFutureMaphelping individuals find their internal compass.Lianne has hosted over 1000 events in helping uplift the community through raising awareness of technology while she was Vice-Chair of Silicon Cape (ie Barack Obama’s Road to GES, Startup Bus and Get in the Ring). She foundedHackOn (Hackathon Consulting Service) in 2017 combining her passion for events and technology and is an aspiring photographer and artist.
FRANCOIS IRVINE
FRANCOIS IRVINE
Francois Irvine
Creative Entrepreneur & Multidisciplinary Artist
Francois Irvine is a passionate and curious creative entrepreneur. He is a talented artist with a higher diploma in printmaking, a gifted silversmith, an internationally renowned interior designer and collector of beautiful things.
Currently co-owner of the Haas Collective, he spends his days working with unbelievably talented local artists and designers. Conjuring up delicious recipes and jewellery design are part of his daily routine.
Any spare time is spent on exciting new ventures and discovering unknown mediums. Every day is an opportunity to experience something novel. Francois is both generous in sharing what he knows and in collaborating with interested and likeminded people.
He has a keen interest in the simplicity of eastern philosophy and practices and working toward a more sustainable and mindful way of living.
As an Associate of the Creative Leadership Consultancy, he is spearheading the sensemaking experiments we are undertaking focusing on our first initiative, The Smell of Bravery - Creating Incense to mark Bravery.