Sonja Blignaut
Title: Director
Company: More Beyond Pty Ltd
Geography: Johannesburg South Africa, but happy to practice globally
Bio: Sonja partners with leaders, OD practitioners, and other decision-makers to enable responsive and agile organisations and make sense of complex problems like culture, change, and customer loyalty. She does this through the use of pioneering ideas and tools from complexity theory and narrative practice. Her expertise lies in guiding leaders and practitioners in organisations to shift their thinking and practice toward greater strategic agility and resilience.
Sonja has extensive experience in the theory-informed practice of complexity theory and narrative in industry. She has worked locally and internationally in various domains including Financial Services Industry; Energy; Conservation; Development; Research and Academia.
Focus areas include: research; adaptive change and resilience; strategy and devolved decision-making; complexity leadership; developing competence to deal with complex or adaptive challenges in VUCA environments; sensemaking; and culture transformation.
Sonja is the exclusive South African partner for Prof Dave Snowden’s company Cognitive Edge and supplies training in their open source methods; the Cynefin sense-making framework as well as the Sensemaker software suite. She is also the local coordinator for the Cynefin Center, an international interdisciplinary research Center, founded by Prof Snowden and hosted by Bangor University in Wales.
Sonja is a popular speaker at conferences and events such as TedX Pretoria. She is also an experienced coach, utilising Strengths and Relationship Systems coaching methodologies. She’s part-time faculty at among others GIBS; the University of North-West (Exec Ed) and the University of Pretoria.
Practice Areas:
- Enabling change practitioners in dealing with adaptive change fostering change resilience across the organisation
- Narrative processes: utilised to gain systemic insight as well as for intervention
- Coaching – qualified Organisation & Relationship System Coach
- Facilitation and group relations
- Complexity thinking applied to change, culture, leadership, and innovation
- Enabling intentional self-organisation and collective improvisation
- Designing for emergence
Twitter: @sonjabl
Linkedin: linkedin.com/in/sonjablignaut
Website: http://www.morebeyond.co.za
Change Agents Worldwide 