1 Introduction

In keeping with the stated paradigm for this research, namely, that the practitioner-researcher and the participants learn jointly from their past and current experiences, I provide the following autobiographical case study, in which I reflect on the experiences in my own life (entrepreneurial experiences in particular) that I believe qualified me to lead the SHAPE systemic action learning and action research (SALAR) project.

1.1 My Journey Leading to the SHAPE Project

I know what it feels like to be a youth entrepreneur and have been entrepreneurially active for over 20 years. My experience of being an entrepreneur began at age five when I was collecting silkworms, and the neighbouring children caught on to the trend. My parents used to give me a limited amount of pocket money and told me, from a very early age, that if I needed more money, I should make a plan and work for it. So, I started selling both silkworms and the silk they produced to my schoolmates and people at my church. I developed an eye for trends that appealed to other kids, and all through my primary school years, I sold items of one kind or another like stationery, homemade cookies, and lemonade, that gave me a small profit.

In due course, shortly after graduating from North-West University with a cum laude M.Com degree, I co-authored a book titled Guesthouse Management in South Africa, in which my contribution dealt with aspects of strategic planning and business development.

Moving to Mossel Bay at age 23, I launched two businesses, using the skills derived from my academic education to create the business model in each case. The first of these was Tesen Tourism Planning, which provided strategic planning and business development services to the Garden Route Municipality and various private clients. The biggest business success was the development of a four-storey beachfront building, owned by Petroleum South Africa, into an arts and craft centre, which is still in existence. The other business was the Garden Route Tourism Academy, which provided training to several hundred people in the tourism industry along the Garden Route.

Both Tesen Tourism Planning and the Garden Route Tourism Academy drew on the set of intermediaries outlined in Dhliwayo’s model as described in Chapter 1, I was not aware at that time of any existing model of potential sources of support for an entrepreneur. However, I intuitively sensed that this was what was required to bring about the networking that would help grow my businesses. This, I regard as the inner source from which I acted, as set out in Scharmer’s Theory U.

In running my two businesses, I worked hard, put in long hours, made many sacrifices, and often was left with little profit for myself. Much of the time, I seemed to be sorting out problems rather than having any fun. But I also learned life lessons from dealing with a diversity of personalities and cultures as a business owner in South Africa, which prepared me for doing business in the Middle East, where I then decided to relocate.

A quick impression of my overseas entrepreneurial career can best be conveyed by listing the highlights of my early professional activities in the Middle East:

  • Innovating and developing a human resource performance appraisal system for SABIS International, one of the world’s largest privately owned education systems.

  • Becoming business development manager for Al Masah International, a large property development group, where I was responsible for developing the Abu Dhabi branch from scratch to the stage where it was a profitable business dealing with multi-million-dollar accounts.

Making a switch to higher education when the global recession hit Dubai, I saw alternative opportunities in an industry that was showing statistical growth and was not being affected by the global downturn. My professional achievements in this new sector (new for me) in the Middle East included several innovations. As a result, I was named by Deputy Prime Minister Sheikh Hamdan bin Zayed as Best Business Lecturer in the Western Region of Abu Dhabi for innovative approaches in taking learning outside the classroom into the field of action.

  • Being part of a core team, which launched the first-ever water sports festival in the Western Region of Abu Dhabi (a water sports festival in the desert!), attracting over 76,000 visitors over two weeks; the Al Gharbia Water Sports Festival continues as an annual event.

  • Initiating the first shopping festival in the Western Region of Abu Dhabi, hosted by women for women, which continues as an annual event to this day.

  • Initiating the first entrepreneurship conference to be held in the Western Region of Abu Dhabi; and

  • Together with my students, being named winners of the Lion’s Den Business Plan Competition in an award made by the British Ambassador to the UAE.

None of these successes would have been possible without the knowledge and experience gained during my undergraduate and postgraduate degrees and from my hands-on activity as an entrepreneur in South Africa.

Despite all the awards and achievements, there were long periods, sometimes lasting up to ten months, where I was unemployed and had to come up with a plan to take care of myself to survive. It was a time of continuous trial and error before the awards and successes emerged.

After intense corporate involvement over ten years, including visits to more than twenty countries, I felt that I needed a break from business, and I relocated back to South Africa, choosing Durban as a place to ‘settle down’ as a staff member at the UKZN.

In this sequence of personal experiences, I have repeatedly undergone the cycles of Theory U for myself, not only passing from a reactive to a generative response field in the social emergence curve of Lion’s Den Business Plan Competition but also spiralling several times through the social pathology curve, sometimes even to the point of aborting various ideas. Passages of social pathology have been accompanied by feelings of severe anxiety, fear, and stress when it was far from clear how I would cope with this or that predicament.

How is it then that I have managed to keep bouncing back to the level of social emergence, continuously trying to go from left to right through that U-curve? The way it appears to me is that after an interlude of ‘processing thought’ regarding the challenge at hand, a new idea or a new way out emerges in my head. When the solution presents itself, I feel it resonates within me; I experience a ‘rush’. I often get asked by my friends, ‘Thea, why do you always need to be so persistent?’ Is it my Christian belief that God will provide? Or is it my fear of failure that I might not survive financially if I don’t come up with a new plan?

These dynamics in my own life and what I observe from young people around me inspired me to take on this project and the research it involves. I wish to investigate why some young people lack the drive to pursue their own goals and aspirations. Why do some young people have low self-confidence about being entrepreneurial? Why are young people not as entrepreneurially oriented as they may think they are, and why do their entrepreneurial activities lack sustainability? Could a programme be devised to address these challenges?

In the time I have been enrolled for my Ph.D. I have continued to encounter challenges, both professional and personal, that correspond with stages in the spiral dynamics of Theory U; moments when the temptation to abandon my goal is countered by a strong emotional drive that keeps me going; an Inner Source from which I act. I keep a journal of these life experiences and actions in my blog at www.theavander.com.

1.2 Pre-SHAPE

My episteme and ‘ontos’ took me to the point where I was able to ‘lead from the emerging future’ to move from what had been only project conceptualisation to project development and implementation. Without the experience that I gained over 15 years professionally, plus 36 years of personal experiences, both in South Africa and internationally, I would probably never have ended up in Durban, at UKZN, or have decided to tackle the SHAPE project. Life resulted in me being in Durban at this point and engaging in my current activities; God led me to Durban.

Throughout my life, both friends and colleagues used to describe me as a ‘go-getter’, ‘self-driven’, ‘inspiring’, ‘determined’, ‘pushy’, or ‘extroverted’. However, I have perceived my actions throughout my life as having been driven mostly by fear of failure. Even more, I think I was fearful that I would not survive on my own. I saw myself as an introvert, having a public face and a Thea-true face. I was unsure what my purpose was, how I saw success, and what I was constantly driven to. There was always just this drive towards something. A ‘something’ that wasn’t yet crystallised in my mind and heart.

I realised that I first needed to make changes within myself before I could start to explore how to bring about the changes I desired concerning student entrepreneurs, systemic levels, and ultimately socio-economic development in South Africa. I needed to introspectively question my viewpoints and feelings regarding myself versus Self and my work versus Work. The observer of this research, which is me, is thus being observed by me through me. The inner journey made me need to think and feel with an open mind, heart, and will to bring the change I want to see. I was confronted with Scharmer’s three enemies: ‘voice of judgement’, ‘voice of cynicism’ and ‘voice of fear’ and needed to find ways to fight the inner enemies that might block my open mind, heart and will.

Before the SHAPE project phases were begun, I prepared myself spiritually and mentally. I needed to make peace with the inner enemies that confronted me. I needed to find more clarity on the two central questions: What is my Self? What is my Work? To help me progress on my spiritual journey and try to find a sense of peace and purpose, I took certain steps. Firstly, I attended a course with the theme of ‘Church: Freedom in Christ’. This course changed me profoundly and led me through several inner journeys of letting go of the past and letting in the new. Secondly, my PhD supervisor, Professor Kriben Pillay, sponsored me to fly to Cape Town to attend a Theory U beginners’ workshop to familiarise myself with Theory U practices. Thirdly, I attended a course in Johannesburg, presented by a neurologist on psychoneuroendocrinology, to gain an understanding of how the functions of an individual’s mind, body, and soul operate as an integrative whole in relation to all systemic levels: what could be understood as an individual’s reality. It taught me that an individual’s mind, body, and soul cannot be separated from the Whole and gave me an added sense of the significance of nondualism.

After attending the Freedom in Christ course, the Theory U workshop, and the psychoneuroendocrinology course, I felt I had a sense of purpose. Persistent and deep-rooted feelings of anxiety made way for an inner calm knowing that God would provide; that the future would emerge as it should because everything is a nondual whole, and this whole is real and reality at the same time, and that our mind, body, and soul are a conjoined Whole.

It was the first time in almost sixteen years that I had had such a sense of peace and purpose. I felt liberated and free; I felt like a new Me. Essentially, I had travelled through the U-curve’s conceptual framework and was profoundly changed.

1.3 During SHAPE

I felt as if my radical presencing moments had occurred in the pre-SHAPE stage. I also frequently experienced smaller presencing moments as I co-created and co-evolved with SHAPE. I was able to identify open-heartedly with the reflections of the student entrepreneurs because I had had those same emotions and experiences in my life when I was a young entrepreneur. I was also able to identify with the feelings and experiences of the other intermediaries of the student entrepreneurs because I had similar experiences with similar systemic relationships in my own life, both in South Africa and while living in the Middle East.

Although SHAPE brought with it several pressures, I felt equipped to deal with challenges as they arose.

It felt as if I could crystallise, prototype, and bring forward solutions to project challenges.

It felt as if my emotions and feelings were in balance, and I did not experience big emotional highs or lows. I did not have the sense of fear or anxiety which I had experienced before my radical change in the pre-SHAPE stage.

It was as if I had gone into an instinctual project management mode in the ‘during-SHAPE’ project stage because the project was time-consuming and kept me very busy. This intuitive project management mode drew on all the experiences and skills that formed my own episteme, which was, in return, guided by my ontos and, therefore, enabled me to lead intuitively from the emerging future. The ‘changed me’ was filled with enthusiasm, energy, positivity, and readiness to co-initiate, co-sense, co-inspire, co-create, and co-evolve with other individuals. The way I saw other individuals also changed. I used to see others as potential business partners, stakeholders, or investors. My newfound experiences led me to perceive others as potential business friends with whom business friendships could be formed; alliances with like-minded, like-hearted, and like-willed individuals, and not merely as partners with money-making as a primary aim. There was a vision of a much bigger and more beautiful picture inspired by social emergence that had the potential to lead to economies of creation.

Although the SHAPE project lacked sufficient funding for its operations at this stage, I had calm, inner confidence that funding would come and the journey would proceed. Then, unexpectedly and unasked for, some funding was offered by the local municipality, in the form of a ‘municipality mentor’ who would serve as an intermediary to the youth entrepreneurs. The financial support from the municipality was eventuated after the mentor actively participated in the project’s pre-SHAPE stage. Maybe the municipality mentor felt co-inspired too?

I saw this as a sign from God or the Whole that all was on track, and I shouldn’t be fearful. I was READY to start leading from the emerging future, which was now evolving into the during-SHAPE stage.

1.4 Post-SHAPE

One of the primary reasons I chose to tackle the SALAR, SHAPE, was because I wanted to contribute to a deeper and more radical change in young people that would help develop their entrepreneurial orientation and their levels of entrepreneurial self-confidence. In doing so, I was hoping to contribute to developments in the microsystem, which I hoped would, in turn, lead to positive development in meso- and macrosystems, ultimately contributing, in the long term, to socio-economic development in South Africa.

As the SHAPE participants moved through the U-curve, they experienced change and the development of their entrepreneurial disposition. I also underwent a personal change in my movements through the U-curve. The U-curve that I experienced had several repetitive cycles where I moved from the left to the right, re-entered the left phase, and moved to the right phase, repeatedly. It felt as if I was experiencing the same emotions and feelings as the participants but in relation to them, not myself. It was as if my senses and open heart strongly empathised with the motions of the participants.

Also, I felt an open heart towards the systemic challenges being experienced in the support structure for the participants (municipality mentors, chamber of commerce mentors, LED tutors, existing entrepreneurs and operational support staff from UKZN). Repeated site visits to the offices of these intermediaries enabled me to observe the daily systemic struggles these intermediaries face. I empathised with their vision of advancing systemic change, the systemic challenges they experience in actualising their vision, and their perseverance in pursuing their vision for a better South Africa. It was as if a strong emotional link of business friendship and camaraderie had been formed since we all shared the same vision and were working together to bring this shared vision to reality.

I also developed a sense of ‘maternal’ responsibility towards the Aspiring Young Entrepreneurs, looking into possible ways to help them achieve their hopes and aspirations. It was as if I felt and sensed their fears and anxieties as well as sharing their enthusiasms and elations. This open-hearted empathy with all the role-players and participants in SHAPE often brought me to an emotional state in which I found myself crying when I withdrew to somewhere quiet to reflect on events. I’m still not sure what type of tears they were; I think it was tears of empathy. Often after such an emotional moment, I was filled with renewed energy and a new vision of hope for leading this project to further heights.

At last, as reflected above in the pre-SHAPE stage, the SHAPE as a SALAR initiative started with minimum funding, but as indicated, I never lost hope that funding would emerge. At this stage, our hopes were answered by the National Research Foundation, which generously allocated a Thuthuka grant to the research, thereby opening doors to take this research further.

As I cycled through the project’s first iteration and observed the barriers and opportunities to youth entrepreneurship, I reflected on my past. I had experienced the same barriers and opportunities on my entrepreneurial journey as the participants of the SHAPE project were themselves experiencing. As the responses of many of the participants, my reaction when encountering a barrier was usually to take a knock in my self-efficacy and inspiration to continue. But from a source deep within, deep energy emerges to bridge barriers and grasp opportunities. If youths can have a deep shift within their entrepreneurial personality traits, then the biggest barrier is conquered.