Join us for a unique conversation with Nicola Robins, consultant and initiated diviner in one of Southern Africa's Indigenous traditions as she explores How Societies Learn to Live with Rupture, in conversation with Sandra Waddock-and you, the audience.
REGISTER HERE. Link also here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/ihma-intellectual-shamans-series-with-nicola-robins-tickets-1982638949469?aff=oddtdtcreator
Please join us for an exciting and novel Intellectual Shamans Webinar with Nicola Robins on Friday, February 27, 2026, at 9:00 am EST (3:00 pm CEST).
War Ancestors: How Societies Learn to Live with Rupture
It feels like a time of transition. But as Mark Carney recently put it at Davos, this is not transition - it is rupture. Rupture does not simply bring about change; it reveals what lies beneath the surface. Resurfaced histories, violences, and dislocations go on to shape how societies think, decide, and act.
Drawing on Indigenous African practices that survived 500 years of colonial invasion, Nicola Robins explores the experience of War Ancestors. These ancestors are not honored heroes, but unresolved entanglements that demand rightful relationship. They are not resolved through denial or simple integration, but by reorganizing lived reality to accommodate difference, ambiguity, place, the conquered, and the dead. Through divination, ritual, and Ubuntu's ethics of "conquest and incorporation", Africans adapted to inform rightful action in times of rupture.
Can Africa's resistance and resilience teach us something about our increasingly imperial present? Participants are invited to reflect on what kinds of "ancestors" today's organizations, technologies, and economies are now producing - and what it might mean to shift from managing change to learning how to navigate rupture. Nicola will draw from and reflect on material in her new book, Diviner Mind: How Organizations Can Learn from the Indigenous Science of Uncertainty.
Biography
Nicola Robins helps leaders navigate transition in uncertainty. Her unique blend of experience includes 30 years as a sustainability consultant across most sectors and emerging markets; 20 years as a practitioner of the Vondo lineage of Ngoma, a local Indigenous tradition; and five years applying the complexity-adapted approaches of the Cynefin company. She has also served as a visiting lecturer for just and sustainable transitions at the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership, the University of Cape Town Graduate School of Business, and Trinity College, Dublin. Nicola lives with her husband and daughter in Cape Town, a short walk from the edge of the Great African Seaforest.
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Sandra Waddock is Galligan Chair of Strategy, Professor of Management, and Carroll School Scholar of Corporate Responsibility at Boston College's Carroll School of Management, USA. This series is based on her book Intellectual Shamans. Waddock's most recent book is Catalyzing Transformation. She was one of many authors of the IBPES Transformative Change Assessment (2025).
Register Here!
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Sandra Waddock
Galligan Chair of Strategy
Boston College
Carroll School of Management]
Chestnut Hill, MA 02467 USA
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