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About your facilitator
Stacey Slinger.
Researcher, practitioner, and systems thinker — working at the intersection of how organisations talk about themselves and how they actually behave.
Researcher, practitioner, and systems thinker — working at the intersection of how organisations talk about themselves and how they actually behave.
How to speak. How to dress. Whose names to know. Which cues to follow. Which ideas to float and which to hold. Some people learn these rules early — from parents who work in corporate environments, from schools that prepare you for professional life, from networks that hand you the code before you even walk in.
And some people spend years on the outside of that knowledge, wondering why capability alone doesn't seem to be enough.
That gap — between what you're able to do and what the system allows you to do — is what my research is about. It's what my practice is built on. It's the reason Unspoken Rules exists.
The system isn't neutral. It's always organised in favour of someone. The question is whether you can see clearly enough to know what that means for you — and what to do about it.
I'm not a neutral observer of these dynamics. I've navigated them myself — as a first-generation professional, as a woman of colour in organisations that weren't built for either, and later, as someone who got access to the language of systems and realised how much it explained.
Unspoken Rules is the attempt to make that language available to more people — and to build the tools that help teams, organisations, and individuals use it practically.
Culture change is a systems problem, not a people problem. You can change every person in a room and still get the same outcomes — if the system producing the behaviour stays intact.
Most people are not underprepared. They are unoriented. They have the capability. What they're missing is a map of the system they're inside — and the language to read it.
The gap between stated values and lived culture is where the most important work lives. That gap isn't a failure of character. It's information about the system.
Context is not a footnote. South Africa's organisational systems carry specific histories, codes, and dynamics that can't be understood by importing frameworks designed elsewhere and applying them as if place doesn't matter.
"I had the privilege of learning under Stacey Slinger. She was an excellent lecturer who provided materials in a fun and engaging way — always going out of her way to ensure we understood the work. Not only was she a good lecturer, she was a genuinely nice person as well. I am grateful I had the privilege to learn under her."
Nanette Basson · Student, Professional Practice · 2025
I have spent the last six years facilitating, designing, and testing learning programmes across higher education, corporate environments, and community contexts. Some of what I've learned in that time made it into my research. Most of it made it into the practice — into how I hold a room, how I design a process, and how I know when to push and when to sit with silence.
I taught Work Readiness and Professional Practice to third-year undergraduates at CPUT, placing 200+ students annually into workplace learning environments. I have worked as a Director and Senior People Operations Specialist in a global technology company. I founded a community-based learning initiative during the pandemic. And I have spent years sitting with the gap between what organisations say they want and what their systems are actually producing.
Every engagement I run is grounded in that accumulated knowledge — not just in the frameworks.
University of Pécs, Hungary · GPA 4.79/5
Thesis: the behavioural codes shaping workforce participation in South Africa
Stipendium Hungaricum ScholarEmakina ZA (EPAM Systems)
Cape Peninsula University of Technology (CPUT) · Dept of Media Studies
Third-year undergraduates · 200+ WIL placements annually
Coach4success · With Distinction · COMENSA-registered
Cert. CA-9 708-2024SETA-registered qualification
Cape Peninsula University of Technology (CPUT)
Summa Cum LaudeSkills Exchange · Community-based peer learning initiative
Great Girls Cape Town
CPUT students · D-school, UCT
Ladles of Love · Mandela Day 2023
Activist Café · Bertha House, Cape Town
Women & Children's Home · Harare, Zimbabwe
Grab A Wish Public Relations Campaign · Carel du Toit Centre
Get Up, Clean Up, Recycle · Oasis Association
In Good Company
Cape Town, South Africa
Alongside the systems practice, I am the founder of In Good Company — a creative home championing the microcultures that give Cape Town its texture. It's the community and creative side of the work: less framework, more field.
The two brands share a founder, a city, and a belief that the informal — the unwritten, the unspoken, the in-between — is where most of the real action happens.
I work with a limited number of clients and organisations at a time — groups, individuals, and early career professionals navigating the systems they're inside of.
If you'd like to explore whether we're a good fit, reach out with a brief description of where you are and what you're trying to figure out.