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About the programme

The Strategic Leadership Intelligence programme is a course, and a set of resources, developed specifically for leaders who believe that there must be a better way to engage with the future. It is designed to show you how to develop strategies that flex and adapt with the every changing context of your industry and world. It will show you how to adapt your leadership style so that you bring your whole team with you. And it will help you develop the personal skills and mindware you’ll need to thrive as an individual in the new world of work.

This programme was birthed out of many discussions, over a number of years centering around how our team has dealt with the frustration of consulting to organizations who have successful pasts, but are challenged by the changing environment and seemingly reticent to take the plunge into the future.

Our work by its nature is forward thinking, challenging and unempirical. The future has not given us either the template on how to cope or proven data on how best to operate. However this doesn’t mean we should ignore it. We can develop a surprisingly good picture of the future if we just choose to ‘look at it’, with an open mind, imagination and enthusiasm. Peter Drucker many years ago said that his work was nothing more that looking out the window and sharing things that others didn’t see, or didn’t have time to see.

A thorough thinking process will produce a highlight key current trends and their potential impact. These trends, when extrapolated out over 5 or 10 years give us a good idea of what the implications for our organizations might be. Of even more significance is what might happen when these trends collide with other, seemingly unrelated trends, creating new challenges and opportunities. That’s the very nature of our work – and the more you do it, the more you build an intuition about the future and what its implications might be for organizations, leadership and what capabilities we might need to respond effectively.

We are unapologetically enthusiastic about the future, not because we are starry-eyed idealists. Rather, because the more we work around trying to understand the future, the uncertainties and enormous challenges we as organizations will undoubtedly face, the more we understand what might work, what definitely will not work and how best we might get there. It is in these processes that we choose to see the future as a huge opportunity – but a different opportunity to the one we have become so accustomed to.

Some of the real joys and challenges of living in a rapidly changing and developing economy such as South Africa is that we constantly have to ‘think the unthinkable’, respond to unexpected changes and grow our adaptive intelligence. It has become a way of life for us. Necessity breeds invention. We are learning both how to do it and how not to do it simultaneously. The more we have shared our ideas with international clients and business schools in the United Kingdom, United States, Europe, Japan and more widely in the East and in Africa and the Middle East, the more we find that they seem to resonate with forward thinking business, government and academic leaders. As such we wish to share them more broadly now.

Our intention in developing this is NOT to offer:


  • Theoretical models about hypothetical ideas in a future that might never happen
  • Ideas that are so based in academic theory that they have little practical value
  • A stereotypical, focused approach to our individual management or consulting disciplines that only work in their isolated domains and offer little value to each other.

Rather we have chosen to combine our three areas of expertise not just because we can, but rather because we believe collectively they address some of the most critical challenges organizations face today, and together build a compelling argument for just how effective organizations of the future might think, the capabilities they might have and how they might be led.

Specifically we aim to:-


  • Help organizations and their leadership to ‘think strategically’ – a very different skill to ‘doing strategy or a strategic plan’. Thinking strategically is a 24/7/365 state of mind. It is a way of perceiving the world that enhances our effectiveness to make appropriate strategic decisions, timeously.
  • Help leaders rethink their understanding of what constitutes effective leadership, and particularly developing the ability to adapt to the changing demands on leaders thereby enhancing their relevance as leaders.
  • Grow your adaptive intelligence or mindware – developing the skills and mindsets required to effectively think strategically, adapt your leadership behaviours and initiate the change required to ensure organizational sustainability and personal relevance.

The ideas offered, both conceptually and in the practical examples and case studies we share, will prove of real value to you and your organization or team, whether they be large multinationals, small family run businesses or non profit organizations.

For more on the team behind the programme, check out TomorrowToday and Pete Laburn International.