In this presentation, we share our perspectives on the Inner Development Goals through a Southern African lens, drawing not only from our academic research, but from the realities we live every day. We explore how the IDGs could be (and are for some already) more than privileged ideals, but essential for navigating the deep, often conflicting challenges of leading and living in contexts marked by inequality, climate vulnerability, economic and systemic pressures. Our aim is to bring voice to both the inner journeys of leaders, and the business contexts of managers and employees in a business, we’ve engaged with for our research and our own, as researchers living and working in a space where the personal, socio-economic, socio-environmental and political, the inner and the outer, are deeply dependant on one another and inherently connected as symptom and cause.

Country: Botswana and South Africa
IDG HUB: IDG Southern Africa Network
Link to website: https://www.linkedin.com/company/idg-latam-hubs-network/
Link to presentation: Bridging Polarities

Our project differs from traditional notions, it emerges from our shared journey in the IDG Southern African Network and our individual PhD and MPhil research rooted in the Global South. Inspired by the original Latin meaning of project “before an action”, our presentation at the IDG Summit focuses on this essential before-work. It reflects the deep listening, mutual understanding, and meaning-making we’ve cultivated over the past 18 months through regular engagement in our hub, our work and research. This is not a finished product, but the foundational work we believe is vital: building connection, trust, and shared understanding before collective action. Without this groundwork, we risk further fragmentation in a world already marked by division. Our ‘project’ is this call to slow down, listen deeply, and come together—because true change starts here.

  1. Individual research synopsis:

Isabel Wolf-Gillespie
In essence, Isabel’s PhD, which explores the role of inner development in enabling eco-responsible leadership within the Southern African is uncovering the need for deep understanding of the lived realities and experiences between people as a focus for inner development.
My PhD research, which began in 2023, explores the role of inner development in enabling eco-responsible leadership within the emerging economy context. In a world increasingly defined by environmental uncertainty, the inner development of leaders is not peripheral, it is foundational to eco-responsible leadership. Phase 1 of my PhD study involved exploratory interviews and analysis that identified three core dimensions of inner development, 1) foundational values, 2) critical skills, and 3) intrinsic dispositions, while mapping leadership challenges across contextual domains (socio-economic, socio-environmental, intrapersonal, and interpersonal, political, philosophical). My findings suggest the need to add a sixth IDG dimension: Understanding, an integrative capacity to make sense of self-in-context. In our region, this includes understanding interdependence, colonial legacy, socio-ecological systems, and spiritual and communal belonging. They affirm that inner transformation is a pivotal yet underexplored driver of eco-responsible leadership in emerging economies and provide a strong empirical foundation for Phase 2.
I’ve completed Phase 1, which involved in-depth interviews with leaders, and I’m now in Phase 2, conducting expert interviews to reflect on and deepen the initial findings. The aim is to complete my PhD in early 2026. Throughout this journey, I’ve had the opportunity to present at various conferences and gatherings, which has generated meaningful dialogue — though one of the key challenges has been maintaining momentum beyond the initial excitement. The demands of daily life and complex contextual realities often take precedence, a theme that is reflected both in my data and in my own lived experience. Our IDG Southern African Network hub is really a space for me where my research findings meet the lived wisdom of others. This has brought greater depth and nuance to our individual work and our conversations.

Leigh Johnson:
Leigh’s MPhil, through exploring how co-creative, emergent possibilities are enabled in a South African retail business, is uncovering how fractures in the business – that correlate directly with historical legacies and a lack of understanding and awareness of each person’s context, background and perspective – are limiting the opportunities for generative, co-create of new possibilities.

My Masters study is rooted in the awareness that we as a collective on this planet need to shift our current paradigm of life and the world away from the current shareholder focused, extractive and growth focused one, to a Sustainability mindset that would allow us to achieve the SDGs. The question I’m most curious about is: How do we create this mindset shift?
My expertise lies in education – and particularly in learning and development in businesses – and so I am conducting a Case Study in a South African business that has been attempting to follow a Conscious Capitalism approach. My project is looking for the enablers of a certain type of learning called generative learning, in the hope that we can learn how to scale this in other contexts learning from this context in the global south.
Generative learning is a self-transcendent process of learning that enhances our capacity to create and recreate ourselves, our paradigms, and our systems. It goes beyond problem-solving to awaken our deepest human potential. Generative learning arises when people engage with intuition, attention, and dialogue, question entrenched assumptions, and co-create in ways that value every voice. It is both a path of humanisation, and a practice of expanding beyond boundaries to imagine and bring forth more sustainable, life-affirming futures. The IDGs are deeply entrenched in this learning perspective.

What have we learnt:
What we have learnt suggests an emerging opportunity: to support IDG Networks and Hubs in becoming safe, inclusive spaces of gatherings “around the fires of our greatest collective hope.” In these spaces, storytelling can foster deep understanding and enable generative learning, helping us move beyond current limitations to reimagine ourselves, our paradigms, and our systems.

From Southern Africa, we offer this insight: such transformation is never the work of one. It happens in relationship in the collective space between two or more. That’s why we will stand together on stage. Not as one person or one project, but as a living expression of “embodying more than one”.

Our research projects deeply resonate with the theme “Bridging Polarities”, as they sit at the intersection of multiple, often opposing forces, of course the inner and to outer development, privileged or unprivileged, individual or collective, between having power or not, between personal and systemic transformation, or environmental urgency and social survival. In the Southern African context, these polarities are not theoretical they are lived realities. Through our research and lived experience, we explore how the Inner Development Goals can serve as a bridge between these tensions: between values and action, awareness and responsibility, global frameworks and local realities. Bridging, for us, means creating space for dialogue, reflection, and connection between leaders and their communities, educators and students, between researchers and participants, and within ourselves. This work is about closing the gap not by choosing one side of the polarity, but by learning to lead from the complexity of both/and, and by embodying being two or more. We believe a key element that could be strengthened within the IDG framework is the practice of deep understanding. Our lived experience and research show that truly acknowledging and integrating each other’s perspectives, contexts, and experiences is essential. Only then can we move forward together and begin to heal the deep fractures that divide us, or in other words Bridge Polarities.