About Alette Vonk

Spark

Alette Vonk is facilitating change processes for over 30 years and she has a vast international experience. She is a person with a drive. She excels and enjoys working in complex situations and has the perseverance to attain optimal results for her clients. Knowledgeable and witty, she lives up to her name Vonk, which means Spark.

From 2010 onwards she is an independent consultant under the name De Vonk Advies en Diversiteit. In 2013 she became an Associate Partner of the Hofstede Insights Network. Today she is a member of the Cooperative Cultural Insights and she’s one of the Friends of Hofstede. On top she’s a lecturer Intercultural Management at the University of Leiden.

Education and certifications

Alette holds an MSc. in Development Sociology. She has Practitioner’s certificates in Organisational Culture (OC); Intercultural Management (ICM); Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) and Organisation Development (OD).

Publications
The journey

Alette: “As long as I can remember I’ve been excited about the fact that people are similar on the one hand and yet very different on the other. Coming from the Netherlands, my curiosity for different forms of logic has led me from being an exchange student in the US for a year, to the study of (then called) Non-Western Sociology at the University of Leiden. It has taken me to Greece, Spain, Cameroon and Botswana for many months each and after my studies I was captivated by an old fishing community and so-called deprived neighborhood in the Netherlands (Duindorp, the Hague).

The road meandered on to being an organizational advisor in the development industry in West Africa. I spent a fascinating 10 years in Benin and Ghana. Projects were concerned with gender mainstreaming, organizational development and good governance. After returning to the Netherlands I became a social entrepreneur in one of the largest migrant communities in the Netherlands (Schilderswijk, The Hague).

Consequently I was honored to be asked by the Dutch-Moroccan NGO Oumnia Works to co-develop and be one of the trainers in the field of anti-radicalisation. Finally the intercultural management assignments of recent years have taken me to various countries (and back to Africa) on many occasions.

Culture

In the course of this journey I have seen how culture can be taken along into strategic thinking and decision making, how to relate and to communicate in various ways, and it has made my performance far more effective. Therefore, I would like to invite everybody to expand their competence and repertoire in this field. Truth is, it’s a prerequisite for success.

The fact that we, as humans, ‘download’ fundamentally different cultural systems from a very young age makes that we’re hardly conscious of their content. This is also true for the fundamental similarities, where we would be able to find each other and collaborate. It is my ambition to surface the unconscious and make it work.”

You can follow Alette on LinkedIn or Twitter. In case you would like an appointment, feel free to contact her.

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