Monika Adelfang
Monika is an organizational change and development practitioner, who has been working in the management consulting field for the last twelve years. Her areas of specialization are technology integration, change management, instructional design and facilitation across a broad range of industries. She started her career working for PriceWaterHouseCoopers as a Business Analyst and was the Strategy and Change Community Lead for the African Region at IBM. Currently she works for a leading Financial Services Organisations as Enterprise Architect specializing in People and Performance Architecture. She has her honours degree (BCom (Hons)) in Business Economics, majoring in Human Resources, Marketing and Strategic Management. Monika loves reading, learning about nature be it human or in the animal kingdom, she is fascinated with butterflies, reading, collecting books and writing travel journals.
I have always experienced the work of Don and Russ as an empowering gift. It has hugely influenced my orientation towards self development and human nature. The Riso Hudson teaching fuelled my curiosity about whole system change in organizations, communities, and in my home country South Africa. What became clearer and clearer was the repetitive patterns of behavior that make up how we live and function. I was fascinated and saddened by these observations. In 2007, attending a AWTP workshop in Atlanta where I met like-minded friends who were talking about complex change in society, we recorded the discussions and called them the Yoda conversations. Named Yoda after the Star Wars character famous for saying “Do or do not there is not try.” We wanted to do our bit to influence the living conditions and wellbeing of others in our direct sphere of influence. At this training seminar, I heard from Katy Taylor and Paula Warner that Don was working on the “TOLAT” which was unpacking Levels of health at a grander scale. For me a seed was planted, and I wrote to Don seeing the potential of this work. One thing led to another, and I asked my dear friends Joni and Barry to join me. And so the field testing and our journey with Don, Joyce and Russ as the Nine Domains Group began. My dream for the Nine Domains approach is that it becomes a simple and practical ever growing language for seeing through the complex and stimulating growth within teams, organisations, and communities.