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.

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, 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.

> Letting Go Responsibly through the Art of Japanese Kite Making

Dr Jeanne von Hirschberg started her career in the food industry as a creative director. Her passion for the creative, operational, and collaborative aspects of branded product development has resulted in her being directly involved in over 700 successful product launches over the last three decades, working with national and international brands. Her toolkit involves both the supplier and retailer perspectives, thereby maximising context and mechanisms for fast-tracking innovation. Jeanne's 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 a specific skillset pertaining to (1) initial bootstrapping to appropriate timely business scaling, (2) achieving organisational effectiveness via smart operations and team development, (3) achieving and maintaining end-consumer relevance, and (4) contextualising each business’ unique aspects and linking it to business fundamentals to ensure sustainable success.

A grain of team and leadership development threads through Jeanne’s career; initial years involved accelerated junior team development, advancing to current part time lecturing at the CTCA, and custom executive leadership development programme design and facilitation as a proud CLC associate. 

Jeanne completed a doctorate degree in innovation management in 2021, with a specific focus on how appropriate leadership, relational quality, and team dynamics ensure commercial success. She was awarded Top Achiever status for her doctorate dissertation.

A ceramicist by night, Jeanne’s off-white bisque dinner plates scribbled with witticisms/aphorisms have become sought-after gifts in South Africa and abroad. 

> LEGO Group Coaching

> LEGO One-on-one Coaching

Lianne currently resides between Cape Town and Johannesburg, South Africa, recent winner of 2018 Inspiring Fifty and voted as one of “Fast Company’s most creative people in business in 2016 and entering nominee of the Digital Leadership Female Awards.

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 Business Network Director 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 25,000 members in more than 130 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.

She has recently embarked on co-founding Care Direct; which is a platform that matches care seekers and caregivers to each other in South Africa.

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). Shefounded Renegade Tech Events (Tech Events Business) and HackOn (Hackathon Consulting Service) in 2017 combining her passion for events and technology. 

Lianne was also on the core team of Future Females; which helps females network, engage and connect with networks in cities like Cape Town, London, Brisbane and Berlin.

Airbnb dubbed Lianne “the Startup Saint” and awarded her rights to run Airbnb experiences where locals and visitors get to meet, talk and share insights about the Cape Town tech startup eco-system.

Lianne sits on the board of
 - Girls do Good. A print and digital augmented reality-infused guide colouring book for girls and boys aged 6 – 12 highlighting stories of real superhero’s.  
 - Soul Donations, a community project, collecting unwanted goods, raising funds or simply creating further awareness for NPO’s, NGO’s, NPC’s and smaller organizations who don’t have the means to do it for themselves and

In her spare time, Lianne is studying towards becoming a qualified mindfulness children practitioner with Mindful Mini’s.

> The Smell of Bravery

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.