Depthwork®
How you lead shapes what becomes possible for others.
Depthwork® is an African grounded leadership practice focused on leadership, identity and power. It brings the influences shaping leadership into a live challenge so that participants can examine what they want to retain, what they want to reconsider and what they can put into practice.
What it examines
A leadership challenge has more than one explanation.
Depthwork examines a live challenge through three connected dimensions.
- Strategy & governance
- Roles, mandates, targets, policies and formal decision responsibilities.
- Relationships & informal influence
- Trust, loyalties, expectations and unwritten rules that shape how work happens.
- Personal & institutional history
- Experiences and inherited ideas that influence whose authority is recognised, whose knowledge counts and what feels possible.
Different explanations call for different actions.
Borrowed Mirrors
Which ideas about leadership have you made your own?
We learn what leadership looks like through families, communities, institutions and professional life. Some ideas become standards we judge ourselves by before we consciously choose them.
Depthwork is informed by questions also explored through Borrowed Mirrors, particularly how inherited ideas about leadership, authority and success shape judgement. Participants examine where these ideas came from, what they have enabled and whether they still serve the leadership challenge at hand.
African grounding
African intellectual traditions inform how we understand leadership.
Ubuntu asks us to understand leadership through relationships and the effect our choices have on others' ability to contribute and act. Sankofa asks what knowledge, values and experience from the past deserve recovery, adaptation or reconsideration. Ma'at brings truthfulness, balance and responsibility into the exercise of power. Ujamaa invites attention to the shared conditions our choices help create.
Participants bring their own traditions, beliefs and interpretations into the inquiry.
Method
Nexus Arc®
Reveal, Reframe, Rebuild, Regenerate.
- 1
Reveal
Describe the situation, how you are responding and what is at stake. Examine assumptions, relationships and institutional conditions.
- 2
Reframe
Question the first reading. Explore what the response has enabled or protected, what it may make harder and what other choices are available.
- 3
Rebuild
Draw on strengths and identify a specific action to test in a decision, conversation or leadership responsibility.
- 4
Regenerate
Review the response and its effects. Decide what to continue, adapt or address with others.
Outcomes
Leave with a clearer position and a practical next step.
Depthwork supports participants to develop a clearer understanding of their leadership; a considered response to a live challenge; specific leadership practices to test; and a way to review progress.
The purpose is to turn inquiry into deliberate choices about how you lead and the conditions you help create for others.
Ways to engage
Choose the pathway that fits the leadership work ahead.
- Individual Depthwork
- One to one facilitated inquiry around a live leadership challenge, connecting assumptions, relationships, authority and context with a deliberate response to test in practice.
- Leadership cohorts & intensives
- Facilitated group experiences where participants work on their own leadership challenges and learn through different perspectives.
- Within a wider programme
- Modules, intensives or facilitated sequences within executive education, fellowships or organisational leadership programmes.
Depthwork in practice
The journey so far
Depthwork has developed through successive African editions, each contributing to the practice and to a growing community of leaders who have undertaken the work.
2025 · Nairobi, Kenya
Inaugural Depthwork gathering
The inaugural Depthwork gathering brought senior leaders from corporate, public sector and civil society contexts into a small cohort to work on live leadership questions.
2026 · Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe
Depthwork Africa 2026
The second Depthwork Africa gathering brought C level executives, founders and senior officials together for immersive work on leadership, identity, authority and the conditions surrounding live leadership challenges.
Upcoming cohort
Depthwork® Leadership Intensive, Kigali 2026
Kigali, Rwanda · 6 to 9 October 2026 · Applications open
For senior leaders at a point of greater responsibility, transition or complexity. The four day non residential intensive examines how context, relationships, power, assumptions and inheritances shape the authority participants exercise. Participants work repeatedly through Reveal, Reframe, Rebuild and Regenerate on a live leadership challenge.
The cohort is small by design. Entry is by application or nomination and full participation is required.
Bring Depthwork to your organisation or programme.
For organisations, executive education providers and fellowship partners, Depthwork can be commissioned as a cohort, intensive, module or facilitated sequence. We agree the purpose, participant group, time commitment, confidentiality, what is reported to the sponsor, follow up arrangements and investment at the outset.