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.