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