Before founding Decipher Consulting in 2002, I worked as a strategy consultant in Johannesburg and Sydney with leading global firms. My 15 year management consulting career was preceded by a full decade as a successful chemistry researcher and lecturer. I have – after my “science apprenticeship” – served on major consulting engagements with diverse organisations, including high-profile success stories like the South African Revenue Service transformation. My advisory focus has over this time progressively shifted to the domains of organisational effectiveness and leadership development.
I am an institutional innovator first (my day job), and STEM education activist second (volunteer).
My re-engagement with education in 2011 was driven by a desire to increase access to effective STEM (science, technology, engineering, maths) learning via technology and social media for high-schoolers. I have also been appointed as a honourary lecturer by UCT to teach Leadership on a new MPhil programme in Medicine.
Whatever I do, however, I simply seek to promote a life-long love for learning and a deep desire for improvement.
“We all behave like Maxwell’s demon. Organisms organize. In everyday experience lies the reason sober physicists across two centuries kept this cartoon fantasy alive. We sort the mail, build sand castles, solve jigsaw puzzles, separate wheat from chaff, rearrange chess pieces, collect stamps, alphabetize books, create symmetry, compose sonnets and sonatas, and put our rooms in order, and all this we do requires no great energy, as long as we can apply intelligence. We propagate structure (not just we humans but we who are alive). We disturb the tendency toward equilibrium. It would be absurd to attempt a thermodynamic accounting for such processes, but it is not absurd to say we are reducing entropy, piece by piece. Bit by bit. The original demon, discerning one molecules at a time, distinguishing fast from slow, and operating his little gateway, is sometimes described as “superintelligent,” but compared to a real organism it is an idiot savant. Not only do living things lessen the disorder in their environments; they are in themselves, their skeletons and their flesh, vesicles and membranes, shells and carapaces, leaves and blossoms, circulatory systems and metabolic pathways – miracles of pattern and structure. It sometimes seems as if curbing entropy is our quixotic purpose in the universe.”
― James Gleick, The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood
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