What distinguishes Frontier? 

“As South Africans, we have learnt over the past twenty years that our shared humanity, our generosity, our resilience and our capacity to deal honestly with each other present a formidable capacity to fight adversity, to find common ground and to move forward.”
                                                                                                                                                                                          Pravin Gordhan - Budget Speech

Frontier is part of a suite of leadership programmes that GIBS has run since its inception under the Centre for Leadership and Dialogue. These programmes deal with the human and societal dynamics of the country. South Africa is an uncertain place to lead. This uncertainty is a result of being a young democracy and, in many ways, a new country. We are a nation in transition and there exist many potential futures ahead of us. We are also a country of great divides. These divides have their origin in our history and are replicated in the way we behave in the present. These are the divides of wealth and poverty, government and business, race and culture, inclusion and marginalisation, opportunity and obstacle, innovation and stagnation. Frontier leadership is about handling uncertainty and bridging these divides. Across the frontier, great opportunities for expansion exist and the lives of thousands can be impacted.

Whilst people believe that "nothing can really change", nothing will change. In our experience, leadership is activated when people have the ability and inspiration to impact the world around them.  We have found that when people start to see themselves as citizens first and business leaders thereafter, they become more optimistic, understand the bigger picture, have empathy for others and are inspired to create change in their organisations and beyond. This is one of the pillars of Frontier.

The content of the programme emerges from the intersection of the most critical issues in our society and the individuals making a substantive difference on that issue. If we run a learning journey to a public hospital, our focus is on the leadership that it takes to turn around the situation. In this way, a particular set of leadership capacities and complex societal dynamics is demonstrated through the visit.

Because the issues we focus on in the programme are “on the frontier” of what has been solved before, there are no easy answers. It is not possible to give participants a lecture on the issue that they can implement in the workplace.

Therefore, our approach is to work in the overlap between the shared direct experience of participants, experiential learning and external, practical input. The learning is built from the ground up and not from the top down.