CORE TEAM

Dr. Simon Kettleborough

Simon Kettleborough is a founding partner of Aephoria and a one-to-one and group facilitator.

His career spans 23 years in private, public and non-profit sector organisations engaged in Leadership Development, Strategy, Sustainable Development and Diversity & Inclusion.  His main work is designing and delivering long term leadership development interventions for middle, senior and executive leaders in organisations.  He develops deep relationships with clients, working with many individuals and teams over time.

Simon is currently completing his Doctorate in Existential Psychotherapy at the New School of Psychotherapy and Counselling in London in conjunction with Middlesex University.  He has a MSc. in Sustainable Development with Distinction from London University, a MBA with Distinction from Warwick University, a Postgraduate Diploma in Management from Leicester University and a BA Honours degree in Modern Languages and Music from Durham University.  He is a member of UK Society for Existential Analysis (SEA) and the UK Universities Psychotherapy and Counselling Association (UPCA) and has lived and worked long-term in the UK, South Africa, France, Belgium and Brazil.

Simon speaks English as well as some French and Portuguese, and loves to ride his bicycle around the Western Cape and play keyboards in the 80s band Fifty Shades.

Dr. Julia Kukard

Julia Kukard is a founding partner of Aephoria and a leadership and inclusion professional.

With almost 30 years of experience in learning and development, she has worked globally including in South Africa, UK, Lesotho, Ghana, France, Uganda, Netherlands, Brazil, India, UAE and China with multinationals, nationals, governments and NGOs.  Julia’s experience includes working with individuals and groups as a coach, psycho-educator and more recently as a psychotherapist.

She graduated from University of Cape Town (UCT) with an Honours degree and MA in Art History, an MBA from the Graduate School of Business (GSB) and a BA in Psychology and Art History. Julia is currently engaged in a Doctorate in Existential Psychotherapy at the New School of Psychotherapy and Counselling in London in conjunction with Middlesex University.

During the past nine years, Julia has run the Advanced Leadership elective on the UCT GSB MBA.  Her research focus is on supporting the development of mature leaders and cultures that can enable human maturation.  Julia has co-written a book on this with Dean Kai Peters from Ashridge University and Professor Kurt April from the GSB.

Lucille Greeff

Lucille Greeff is a director of Aephoria and a Chartered Organisation Development (OD) practitioner, facilitator, coach, team development specialist and psychometrist.

Her work focuses on personal, team and organisational change and transformation with an emphasis on balancing health and effectiveness, issue-centricity and deep transformation.  Her clients span across financial services, retail, resources, Information Technology, manufacturing, agricultural, government and non-governmental sectors.  Lucille has enjoyed partnering clients through long-standing strategic projects.  She has also developed numerous scalable and customized tools, processes and interventions, including co-developing the Aephoria Identity Map, an online Enneagram and maturity assessment tool.

Lucille has a degree in Political Science, a BA Honours in Psychology and a MA in Development Studies, all from the University of Johannesburg.  She practices as an International Enneagram Association (IEA) Accredited Teacher and Professional Member.

Lucille has written and published a number of organisational and poetic works.  She enjoys working with micro-narratives in organisations and the way these tell the story of the heart and soul of a business.  She is also a vision quest facilitator and makes use of wilderness-based leadership development and deep ecology work as part of her practice.

Dr. Makgati Mokwena

Makgati Mokwena is a registered Art Therapist with the HPCSA and has taught psychology at two universities (Vista, now UP & RAU, now UJ).  She works as a facilitator, therapist and coach and has also performed professionally on stage.  Makgati holds Graduate Degrees in Psychology, Speech and Drama and Anthropology.  She received her Masters Degree in Dance Movement Therapy and her Doctoral Degree in Psychology.  She has also participated in a 200 hour internationally certified yoga teacher training programme in Rishikesh in India.

Makgati works across corporate and NGO sectors.  Her employment in the corporate sector extends to facilitation on programmes such as Executive Development Programmes, Emerging Leadership Development Programmes, Women in Leadership, Train the Trainer, Leadership Presence, Unconscious Bias, Race Dialogues, Self-Storying in Stillness Retreats, Mentorship Training Programmes, various Diversity Training Programmes, and Having Crucial Conversations.  Her work in the NGO sector focuses on personal and interpersonal leadership development, which is intended towards the improvement of self and society.

Makgati also holds ceremony and facilitate ritual to help individuals journey through various life passages such as marriage, the scattering of ashes, birthdays and other rites which mark important transitions in a person’s life.

Thembi Kgengwenyane

Thembi Kgengwenyane has an Honours degree in Industrial Psychology from the University of South Africa and works as a facilitator and coach.

She has extensive experience in the fields of organisational excellence, change, transformation, and strategic facilitation, and. she specialises in Diversity and Inclusion and team coaching.

She is also an experienced systems Psychodynamic consultant/coach/facilitator.

Thembi is a certified Analytical Network coach, Enneagram practitioner and Aephoria Identity Map practitioner.

Karl Geggus

Karl Geggus is the lead software developer for Aephoria, responsible, in close collaboration with the core team, for the implementation and maintenance of their online assessments and bespoke back-end administration systems.

Past projects include speech recognition systems; online psychometrics; vessel-based and company solutions for fisheries across the world enabling data logging, compliance, visualization and analysis; GIS editing tools to create digital maps from satellite imagery for international GIS solution providers; and mobile app development. This work has collectively been expressed in technologies that include Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, SQL Server, MySQL, Node.js, Angular, C#, Android Studio, and Python.

Karl has a Bachelor of Engineering (Electronics) degree from University of Pretoria. Starting as a child with a home computer in the eighties, he’s still loving the technological wave and its ever-unfolding power and potential. If not immersed in code, he’s often in the actual sea or on the mountains of Cape Town.

Marlon Ford

Marlon Ford, is our junior web developer with experience in front end web development and a host of self taught knowledge and insight into the web development field.

He is a highly motivated and aspires to continually expanding his knowledge by learning in different spheres of web development and social media marketing to help the business grow to its fullest potential.

He believes in growing himself in every aspect of life and hopes to become a well-rounded web developer and social media marketer with a track record that speaks for itself. He spends most of his free time exploring in and around Cape Town looking for that next amazing adventure.

Cherise Nortje

Cherise Nortje is an organisational development consultant at Aephoria in Cape Town.  She manages client programmes, social media, and other diverse online and technology-related projects.

Cherise spent most of her career in the Marketing Research and Human Capital divisions of large corporations in the banking and petrochemical industries.  With a passion for understanding how people and systems work, she started working for a business specialising in the Enneagram for coaches and team development which has paved her way for where she finds herself today.

Cherise has a BA Honours in Industrial and Organisational Psychology from UNISA.  She has worked with the Enneagram for over nine years and is an accredited Enneagram practitioner.  Additional development work has included depth facilitation with Helene Smit and coaching training with Thoughtsmiths (ICF Accredited).

In her quiet time, she studies and explores Metaphysics and alternative healing methods for her family and her furry friends.

Rikus Combrinck

Rikus Combrinck consults to Aephoria as a machine learning engineer, primarily in an effort to automate the marking of maturity assessments that are part of the AIM product.

He started taking things apart before he could talk, studied electronic engineering with a postgraduate specialisation in machine learning, and then slipped into software engineering for many years. More recently, the global thaw after a long AI winter has opened up data science as a viable career. Rikus’s interest in artificial intelligence dates back all the way to high school. He is overjoyed by the fact that the rest of the world has finally caught up and is now prepared to pay him for exploring and solving truly fascinating problems, aspects of which ultimately touch on the nature of life, the universe, and everything.

Rikus can juggle four balls.

Andisiwe Mketo