I left feeling lighter and more expansive; not without gravity, but no longer consumed by the heaviness. It shifted how I think, feel, and show up. –Participant, Think Beyond immersive retreat 2025

The Think Beyond retreat is a high-trust, high-caliber gathering designed to renew the inner and collective capacity of a small group of global impact leaders shaping the future of families and communities. 

About the retreat 

This annual leadership learning journey helps leaders strengthen how they think, decide, relate, and lead in conditions of complexity, uncertainty, and systemic strain. Drawing on systems thinking, creative practices, philosophy, and time in nature, the retreat creates space for reflection, sense-making, and strategic reorientation at a moment when inherited tools and leadership models are no longer sufficient.

Brought to life by Capita in partnership with South African Impact Experience Designer Nicole Biondi, the Think Beyond immersive retreat offers moments of awe and inspiration alongside practical insights and leadership frameworks. The experience offers a variety of practices and tools that help participants return to their work with greater clarity, resilience, and confidence to lead in ways that are both grounded and generative.

Read about the Think Beyond 2025 immersive retreat.

Retreat details

Over three and a half days, participants will be guided through a carefully curated sequence of conversations, creative and embodied practices, time in nature, and opportunities for individual and collective reflection. The program approaches renewal not as a retreat from the challenges of this moment, but as an essential leadership practice: one that asks us to attend to our inner lives, strengthen our capacity for meaningful connection and collective action, and reconsider how we engage with the wider systems shaping our organizations, communities and world. 

Dates: November 16-19, 2026
Location: Spier Wine Farm, Stellenbosch, South Africa
Group size: Limited to 30 participants
Tuition: $2,850

What’s included

• Full retreat experience featuring world-class programming
• Thought-provoking discussions, immersive sessions, and opportunities for meaningful connection
• 3 nights’ accommodation, all meals, and shared airport transfers

Are you a Capita Forward member? Early registration and discount codes are available for Capita Forward Members. Email us at [email protected] to receive your discount code.

What we will explore 

Across the retreat, participants will engage with a series of interconnected themes and experiences, including:

• Renewal and the inner work of leadership: exploring what sustains us, what may need to be released, and how our inner lives shape the ways we lead.
• Ubuntu and relational ethics: considering leadership through the lens of interdependence, shared humanity and our responsibilities to one another.
• Care-full and just futures: asking what it might take to create futures grounded in care, dignity and justice.
• Creating new narratives: examining the dominant stories that shape our systems and reimagining new ones that might shape what comes next.
• Nature as teacher: using the landscapes of Spier as a setting for reflection and inquiry into resilience, adaptation and renewal.
• Creativity, imagination and expression: working with poetry, art, movement and other creative practices to access different ways of knowing and seeing.
• Connection and collective intelligence: building meaningful relationships across fields and geographies, with structured opportunities to discover shared questions, complementary experience and possibilities for collaboration.
• From reflection to action: developing personal action inquiries that connect what participants are noticing and learning with how they want to live, work and lead beyond the retreat.

Register your interest

Retreat Facilitators 

Nicole Biondi is a South African strategic consultant, systems change practitioner, facilitator and impact experience designer whose work centres on human and ecological flourishing. Drawing on more than two decades of experience across strategy, leadership and social impact, she creates immersive experiences that help leaders navigate complexity, deepen relationships and explore pathways towards more flourishing futures. Her approach brings together systems thinking, leadership development and creative practice, grounded in the belief that creativity and imagination are essential levers for change.

Tania Haberland is an award-winning poet and recipient of the Ingrid Jonker Prize whose work sits at the intersection of writing, embodiment and ecological awareness. Drawing on more than 25 years of experience in teaching, facilitation and holistic wellbeing, she approaches creative writing as a living, embodied practice through which inner experience can take form as words, images and insight. At the heart of her work is Imagimotion (imagination in motion); an approach that invites writing to emerge organically from sensation, attentive presence and embodied experience.

Joe Waters is the co-founder and CEO of Capita, an independent think tank and community working towards a future in which families and their communities flourish. Since founding Capita in 2018, he has developed initiatives that anticipate how social, demographic, cultural, technological, environmental and economic change may shape families and communities around the world. An Aspen Institute Ascend Fellow, Joe’s work brings together foresight, narrative change, policy and partnership to help leaders respond to these transformations in service of the common good.

Frances Poe is an organisational change practitioner whose work centres on curiosity, human potential and helping individuals, teams and organisations thrive. Drawing on her graduate studies in Learning and Organizational Change at Northwestern University, including research into curiosity, work design and engagement, she helps organisations uncover their capabilities, navigate ambiguity and imagine new possibilities. Her approach balances the needs of individuals with organisational goals, with a strong commitment to building collaborative cultures in which people experience belonging.

Contributors

Conn Bertish is an internationally awarded creative strategist, speaker and resilience practitioner whose work explores the intersection of creativity, health and human agency. Drawing on his experiences as a big-wave surfer and brain cancer survivor, he creates practical, engaging tools that help people and organisations navigate adversity, uncertainty and change. Through talks and programmes delivered in more than 20 countries, Conn uses creative problem-solving, purposeful action and cognitive reframing to help individuals and teams build resilience and approach challenges differently.

Renata Minerbo is Co-founder and Head of Philanthropy at Be The Earth Foundation, working at the intersection of capital, care and collective decision-making. Drawing on experience across social entrepreneurship, philanthropy, impact investing and participatory processes, she helps family offices, foundations, investors and changemakers reconsider how power is exercised and wiser choices are made. Her approach bridges inner work and systems change, participation and accountability, grounded in the belief that care, joy and truth are essential leadership capacities.