4.09: Outside Conversations with Colleen Magner + Mahmood Sonday - On bending the arc of change

Show Notes

Join Tim and Tuesday for a session with Colleen Magner and Mahmood Sonday, leaders of Reos Partners South Africa, who give us a remarkable insight into change making 30 years after the end of Apartheid.

About Colleen + Mahmood

Colleen Magner

Colleen is co-founder of Reos Partners and leads the Africa team. She is a scenario planning expert and has led a number of transformative scenario planning processes around the world. Her experience includes convening, organizing, and facilitating short- and long-term relationships across sectors to address their most pressing challenges—from violence against women to climate change adaptation in vulnerable parts of the African continent. She is also a writer and is co-author of Mapping Dialogue: Essential Tools for Social Change, which outlines a variety of transformative dialogue tools and change processes.

Colleen was project lead on the Southern Africa Food Lab project and on Land Reform Futures and was lead facilitator for the Scenarios for the future of the Northern Mozambique Channel

She loves writing, reading good fiction and taking long road trips with her family through wide open landscapes.

Mahmood Sonday

With a background in project design, development and execution, as well as entrepreneurship, Mahmood brings his experience in the private sector, government, venture philanthropy and building cross-sector partnerships to systems change efforts. 

His experience in collaborative design, innovation and implementation is varied, from digital and process transformation to culture strengthening in financial services. His consulting assignments include scaling distributed renewable energy, public health policy, democratic transitions, economic inclusion, and more recently gender-based violence in the mining sector. 

Mahmood has a BCom (Hons) degree from the University of Cape Town and a MBA from the Gordon Institute of Business Science, part of the University of Pretoria. He enjoys spending time with his wife and three children in Johannesburg. On weekends you’ll find him running, and occasionally training for an ultra-marathon.

Resources

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Poem: “Wild Geese,” by Mary Oliver 

You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body

love what it loves.

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. Meanwhile the world goes on.

Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are moving across the landscapes,

over the prairies and the deep trees,

the mountains and the rivers.

Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading home again.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,

the world offers itself to your imagination,

calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting — over and over announcing your place

in the family of things.