WHO WE ARE
ABOUT ENGAGEMENT DYNAMICS
Engagement Dynamics is a leadership and organisational development specialist partner, founded in 2007 by Janet du Preez and based in Johannesburg, working with an expanding international client base.
The practice works with leaders and organisations in the crucible of Change, Complexity and Conflict. The starting premise is uncommon, and it shapes everything else. The visible problem is rarely the real one. Work that begins by solving what presented usually solves the wrong thing, and the energy spent doing it is energy lost.
what we do
THE WORK THE
PRACTICE DOES
Every organisation has a hidden force competing for the time and energy of its people. Entropy is the dissipation of alignment, energy and time that erodes capacity and returns nothing. It shows up as rework, decisions made twice, meetings that circle, delays nobody can account for, frayed relationships, and teams who are tired in a way a holiday does not fix.
Most leaders can feel entropy long before they can name it. Naming it is where the work starts.
The practice is diagnostic before it is anything else. It finds where a system is losing capacity, names it in language the organisation can use, and then recrafts the parts of the system the loss comes from. What that work turns out to be depends entirely on what Discovery finds.
Janet is not just a coach. She is a strategist and culture shaper. Her work continues to ripple through our business. Executive Director, Change Programme
CORE VALUES
WHAT THE PRACTICE BELIEVES
Complexity is to be understood, not simplified away.
Wicked Problems do not yield to formulae. Work that reduces them to a model the organisation can tidy away has usually just moved the loss somewhere less visible.
The system is the issue, not the person.
When something is not working, the first instinct is to point at someone. Ours is to look at the system they operate in. This is not a softer position but a more rigorous one: people respond to the systems they work in, and the same people often deliver different outcomes once the system changes.
Every engagement is designed for its context.
No fixed programmes, no static curricula. The diagnosis comes first and the design follows it. This costs more to do, and it is the reason the work holds.
Organisations can change, not just cope.
The practice is not interested in helping leaders manage a situation indefinitely. It is interested in changing what produces it.
Generosity is foundational.
The practice has been built on giving more value than it receives. It shows up in how engagements are scoped, in the depth of Discovery before any work is agreed, and in the interest the practice keeps in clients long after an engagement closes.
Lean, virtual, specialist by design.
tHE PEOPLE
JANET DU PREEZ
AND THE CORPS.
Engagement Dynamics is led by Janet du Preez, an organisational development practitioner whose frameworks underpin most of the work described here.
The practice is deliberately lean. It assembles the people each engagement needs rather than carrying a standing team, so that researchers, facilitators, designers and subject specialists come in where Discovery shows they are required. This is a choice rather than a constraint. It is what makes it possible for the work to be designed for its context rather than drawn from a catalogue.
Rory van der Merwe works with the practice as a standing collaborator. A psychologist who has spent his career inside large-scale change initiatives across the public and private sector, he wrote the Hope-Fuel Framework and was the first in Africa accredited in Adaptability Intelligence.
two name games.
Game design and playful learning
partners; co-creators of Leadership Forge.
heather barrie.
Creator of the MARSTA Goal Process,
entrepreneur, and author.
rory van der merwe
Psychologist, Coach, and change specialist.
A specialist partner in leadership and organisational development, working with leaders and organisations across change, complexity
and conflict.
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