Sonja Blignaut & Mirjam van Vliet
What if you’re not a change manager?
Sonja Blignaut is a complexity practitioner, author, and keynote speaker based in Johannesburg, South Africa, with more than 25 years of experience working at the intersection of organisational life, complexity science, and embodied practice. She is co-author of Cynefin: Weaving Sense-Making into the Fabric of Our World and the creator of the Waysfinding methodology, which draws on the Cynefin framework, Celtic and Polynesian wayfinding traditions, and somatic and field-based approaches to help individuals, teams, and organisations develop the orientation they need to act wisely in genuinely complex conditions. Her clients have included IKEA, Electrolux, Accenture, Microsoft, and Barclays.
Sonja’s current work centres on the question of aliveness in organisations – what it is, how it is recognised, and what practitioners can do to tend it rather than manage it away. She is developing Waycraft, a book on navigating work and change without a map, and co-holds Triskel, a practice space for co-attunement and field-based inquiry, with Mirjam van Vliet. She speaks regularly on complexity, AI adoption, and the conditions that allow people and organisations that allow people and organisations to sense, respond, and adapt in real time.
Mirjam van Vliet is an entrepreneur, strategist, and facilitator who helps visionary founders & leaders align their brilliance with their work for greater resonance and amplification. She guides them beyond surface-level tactics, bridging strategy, audience, and expression to create work that feels alive, magnetic, and deeply impactful.
In her collaborative partnerships, Mirjam works across startups, scale-ups, and established organisations to craft transformative experiences that shift how people see, think, and act. Through facilitation, experiential design, and immersive experience creation, she helps unlock new creative possibilities and translate emerging insight into tangible, lived impact.
Her work is about attuning to what’s most alive and amplifying it, so ideas don’t just land, they ripple outward with undeniable impact. You can read more about her work here.
Come along to this workshop –
What if the way you’ve been trained to manage or create change is quietly limiting the impact you can have? You know the feeling, when change looks right on paper, but it doesn’t live.
What if your role isn’t to manage change at all? What if it’s to steward aliveness?
Aliveness is not a soft idea. It’s a quality you can feel in a system – the difference between a room where people are genuinely present and one where they are performing presence.
Aliveness is contagious. Life creates more life. When the conditions are right, people move without being pushed, ownership forms without being assigned, and change continues long after you’ve left the room. Movement and change come with aliveness – they don’t have to be driven or manufactured, only tended.
Sonja Blignaut and Mirjam van Vliet will take you into direct experience of this – through embodied practice and collective inquiry – so you can feel the difference, not just understand it.
Come ready to move, to disagree, and to be surprised by what you already know.You may find it difficult to return to how you’ve been working before.
