The Renewal Award Winner 2024

23/09/202423/09/2024 by Renewal Associates

Congratulations to Rosanna Ponnen from Henley Business School Africa for becoming the inaugural recipient of the Renewal Foundation Award!

The Renewal Foundation is the philanthropic outreach wing of Renewal Associates which is dedicated to creating beneficial positive change in the world, particularly in Human Consciousness Change necessary for future generations to face the great challenges of our times.

Recipients of the Renewal Foundation Award are granted funding to take their project forward, along with one year of free mentoring from Renewal Associates and support in spreading the findings to other practitioners globally.

More Information on the Renewal Award can be found on our website here.

Rosanna is a skilled professional with extensive experience in Governance, Controls, and Risk Management, specialising in Cybersecurity and Information Technology within the South African energy sector. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science and Information Technology, as well as the Certified Information Systems Auditor and Certified Internal Auditor designations. Rosanna is also an alumnus of the International Women’s Forum of South Africa and completed her Executive MBA at Henley Africa in 2023 with distinction.

Her MBA studies inspired her to explore the challenge of employee retention in the energy sector, particularly how organisational purpose and ecological commitment can influence retention positively.

Rosanna’s research on employee retention and organisational purpose was shared with Rosanna’s employer’s Executive Management and the Research departments, receiving positive feedback. She is actively working to create more awareness among employees for implementing the recommendations.

Through the International Women’s Forum of South Africa, Rosanna participated in a Women’s Leadership Programme, which included a trip to Kenya. This experience expanded her global networks and provided platforms to further share her research. Her travels across Africa and internationally have deepened her understanding of global working cultures.

In addition to her career, Rosanna balances her roles as a wife and mother. She is passionate about nature, wildlife, hiking, and sustainability, aiming to make a positive contribution to these areas both academically and professionally.

Rosanna’s MBA project is available to read here.

In the world of Hyper-change and Hyper-connectivity we cannot afford to evolve human consciousness one person at a time?

“The most important task today is, perhaps to learn to think in a new way.”
(Gregory Bateson (1972:462)

We live in a time when our collective human actions are putting the very existence of our species at threat, but also a time when we have the potential to destroy most of the living world of this planet along with our own species. Tim Smit the founder of the Eden Project for sustaining biosphere diversity opened a speech to the UK Institute of Directors with the line: “The next thirty years are possibly the most exciting time to be alive in the whole of human history. For in that time we will either discover if we deserve the title Homo Sapiens, or we will all fry.” (Smit 2019).

Reg Revans the founder of “Action Learning” (Revans 1982) often used the powerful formula L= E.C. (Learning must equal or be greater than the rate of the environmental change) as a way of awakening those who would listen to the Darwinian law of organisational survival. It is only through learning in relation to the contexts we find ourselves in that individual, teams, organisations or species co-evolve, flourish and survive. Bateson (1972), a contemporary of Revans, would also point out to those that would listen the problems we have created by choosing the wrong unit of survival.

In accordance with the general climate of thinking in mid nineteenth century England, Darwin proposed a theory of natural selection and evolution, in which the unit of survival was either the family line or species or sub-species or something of that sort. But today it is quite obvious that this is not the unit of survival in the real biological world. The unit of survival is organism plus environment. We are learning by bitter experience that the organism that destroys its environment destroys itself.