Ilka Dunne

About Ilka Dunne

With a career spanning multiple sectors (including 20 years in financial services) and having worked with all employee levels from young talent to exco, Ilka brings depth, insight and real world experience to personal identity, team and system dynamics. She started her career in a theatre company involved in drama and theatre in education before going on to set up and run the English and Drama Department for ORT-STEP (Organisation or Resources and Training – Science and Technology Education Programme) South Africa. As founder and MD of Actions Speak Educational Design, she wrote multiple textbooks and educational film scripts, created online lessons for Guardian UK, Mindset and Learnthings, developed over 250 teachers and principals in rural schools, designed and delivered research programmes for amongst others SAIH (Studentenes og Akademikernes Internasjonale Hjelpefond), and worked with corporates to develop their leaders. She also designed and hosted the South Africa Arts festival for YEAST (The Year of Education Art Science and Technology). In her almost 20-year career in financial services, she conceptualised and headed up the Young Talent portfolio, the Learning Architecture team and the Leadership and Culture portfolio for Rand Merchant Bank. Here she worked directly with the executive team to help deepen the culture through executive leadership development, strategy interventions, yearly conferencing and companywide communication campaigns. She also initiated numerous Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging drives including the launch of the first Women’s programme and network. She was also a member of the RMB Fund committee and designed the RMB NGO Leadership Network, an initiative to grow NGO leaders through CSI partnerships. She went on to become the Group Lead for Organisational and Leadership Culture for FirstRand. In this role she brought together organisational development, leadership, coaching, mentoring and mindfulness and focused on deepening systemic and ecosystem thinking while growing a culture of leadership across the group. As the MD of Ad Infinitum Partners she is an executive coach to leaders who wish to continue building their own self-awareness and personal power. Working individually, she brings together many different domains: having had many years of working with the personal identity, purpose and meaning work of Rabbi David Lapin and Lead by Greatness, she is an Aephoria Group Associate with experience in Enneagram and Leadership Maturity and is trained in the wellbeing science of Neurozone high performance coaching. As a qualified Systemic Team Coach with the Academy of Executive Coaching and the European Coaching and Mentoring Council (EMCC), and as a Renewal Associate, she uses Systemic Team Coaching to support leaders and leadership teams to find solutions to perplexing business problems. Having worked with the Presencing Institute at MIT over many years and as a Presencing Foundations facilitator, she brings Systemic Team Coaching together with the best of Theory U and deep systems work. As a seasoned leadership development, team development and organizational development and culture experience designer, facilitator, and communications partner she seeks to blend the best of experiential learning, with communications strategies and culture engagement activities that help businesses culturally connect their people to their business strategy.

Speaking topics and expertise

• Your Organisation is an Organism: Rethinking leadership
• culture
• and change
• The Entrepreneur’s Edge: Leadership Maturity and the Corporate Lifecycle
• The Power of the Ask: When leadership is deeply personal and inherently collective
• Leadership Character and Why it Matters

Achievements

SAGEA Board member | 20 year corporate career in financial services leading organisational development, culture, leadership and young talent portfolios | Mentor of the Year BASA | Winner SAGEA Best Graduate Campaign and Programme.

Education

BA DA (Wits) | MEd cum laude (UJ) | DPhil (UJ). Presencing Insititute Foundations Facilitator | Aephoria Level 4 Enneagram and Leadership Maturity Coach and Facilitator | Neurozone High Performance Coach | Systemic Team Coach with the Academy of Executive Coaching and the European Coaching and Mentoring Council (EMCC).

Talks and speeches

Your Organisation is an Organism: Rethinking Leadership, Culture, and Strategy The language we use to describe organisations shapes how we lead them. What if your organisation is not a machine? What if your organisation is an organism: alive, interconnected, adaptive, sensitive, and dependent on health as much as performance? If we take that seriously, then leadership changes. Our job is not simply to manage parts. Our job is to cultivate health, connection, adaptation, and life. The Entrepreneur’s Edge: Leadership Maturity and the Corporate Lifecycle So, you came up with a great idea, you inspired others to believe in your dream, you got people bought in and you moved fast with limited resources. Congratulations you started a business! Now, have you considered what kind of leader you need to become for the next stage of your business? How might you be holding your business back? Entrepreneurial skill may start a business, but leadership maturity determines whether it can grow sustainably. Company life cycles and leadership maturity are closely connected because each stage of organisational growth asks for a different kind of leader. The way you lead your business at one stage can become your biggest constraint at the next. The Power of the Ask: When leadership is deeply personal and inherently collective How do we create organisations where ‘what’s in it for me’ can sit comfortably side by side with ‘what’s in it for us?’ Because there’s an uncomfortable truth: many organisations say they want belonging, but what they reward is conformity. When people feel they need to hide parts of who they are to fit in, the collective identity becomes narrow. It may look aligned on the surface, but it loses the creativity, trust, and depth that come from true inclusion. How do you build an organisation where individual identity is not treated as a barrier to unity, but as the foundation for it? Collective identity is not about becoming the same. It is about choosing to belong together while still honouring what makes each person distinct.

Delivery style

As a storyteller at heart, Ilka brings real world examples, practical activities and challenging questions to move an audience.

Why audiences listen

With deep practical experience in organisational development, leadership, culture, communications and strategy, Ilka challenges the audience to think about leadership and organisations differently. Helping to grow leaders so they can tell the story of where their business is going and why, in a way that is compelling, while connecting their employees to 'who am I' and 'how do I count in this story'. Through this she strives to unlock the best of human energy to create limitless possibilities.

What participants will learn

New perspectives, frameworks, models, tools & techniques that connect the latest academic research to practical real world examples.

Benefits for individuals

Challenge the way you think about your leadership, your organisation and how you impact the world for good. Sustainable insights to shift the way you show up.

Benefits for organisations

Bringing together some of the best local and international leadership and organisational development modalities, ensuring local context and flavour with international experience. Deepen awareness of how the intersection of leadership, culture and strategy can deepen your leadership capability while strengthening your organisational sustainability. So you can unlock the best of human energy to create limitless possibilities.