Written by:
Ingrid Lotze
I heard more than one person say at the end of Thursday night’s PSASA Johannesburg Chapter meeting that it was the best meeting so far this year.
I think I know why.
The first half was a beautifully curated panel discussion around the question: What does it really take to earn a place on a TEDx stage?
And I’m sure I wasn’t the only person who noticed that the PSASA Joburg Committee had rather cleverly assembled a perfectly balanced panel.
Kim Vermaak, Johannesburg Chapter President, knows what it takes to stand on the TEDx stage.
Reneka Panday Licensee and Curator of TEDx University of Johannesburg, knows what it takes to be chosen for it.
Hylton Gudmanz, Focus and Performance Specialist and Coach, knows what it takes to become ready for it.
It reminded me of a perfectly balanced three-legged South African potjie, with a superb chicken potjie bubbling away inside it. Each leg does a different, very important job, but take one away and the whole thing collapses.
Why a potjie?
Because you cannot rush a good one. You have to choose the ingredients carefully, get the heat right, give it time and, perhaps most importantly, know when to stir and when to resist the temptation to keep lifting the lid and fiddling.
Our first gorgeous potjie leg was Reneka, who gave us one of those thoughts that subtly changes the question speakers have been asking. “You don’t earn a TEDx stage simply by being an excellent speaker. You earn it by having an idea worth giving the stage to.”
Which means the question for those dreaming of standing on a TEDx stage is not, “Am I good enough to be on TEDx?” It is, “Is this idea good enough for TEDx?”
This distinction matters.
Then Hylton, potjie leg number two, took us into what happens once someone like Reneka has said yes and a good idea has to become a wonderful talk.
His rule of thumb is that for every one minute of speaking, allow around two hours of preparation. Which rather ruined the illusion that Kim simply wandered onto the TEDx red dot last year and casually delivered 14 minutes and 40 seconds of polished brilliance. By Hylton’s maths, those 14 minutes and 40 seconds represent roughly 30 hours of preparation before she even stepped onto the stage.
And then there was our third potjie leg, Kim herself. I particularly loved discovering that in 2022 Kim was sitting in the audience at TEDxUniversityofJohannesburg. Three years later, she was the person standing on that stage. There is something wonderfully reassuring in that.
The distance between sitting in an audience thinking, “I could do that”, and actually doing it may be shorter than we imagine, but the panel also made it very clear that wishing for the red dot and being ready for it are two very different things.
Together, Kim, Reneka and Hylton made a rather magnificent three-legged potjie, cooking up the ingredients and know-how behind earning a place on that TEDx red dot.
After the break, the evening changed gear.
I am not naturally a fan of organised networking. I understand its value, but there is something about being instructed to “network” that can make perfectly interesting human beings suddenly become awkward. This session was different.
Nick Smit had thought through and facilitated an exercise that took what we had just learnt and made us use it.
We were divided into groups and invited to consider our own idea worth sharing, then share it one-on-one with another person. And another, and another.
By the fourth one-minute conversation, our ideas had become clearer because we had been forced to think about what we were actually trying to say. We had heard where another person became interested or confused. We had adjusted, refined and articulated again.
The idea was becoming clearer through connection, and it worked well, and the networking stopped feeling like networking. It became useful human-to-human conversation between people helping one another think better.
I think this is why the whole evening worked so well, because it reflected so much of what PSASA says it wants to create: community, collaboration, competence, confidence, courage and celebration. Not simply access to people who speak professionally, but access to people who are willing to share what they know, help one another improve and contribute to each other’s growth.
This deserves a big shout-out to the 2026 PSASA Johannesburg Chapter Committee, who are creating these meetings with great aplomb.
If several people independently leave a chapter meeting saying, “That was a fabulous meeting”, something has gone right.
Last night, it wasn’t only the information that made it useful. The design of the evening allowed us to learn from people further along the road, test our thinking against ourselves, and then learn from one another. This is a pretty good recipe for a professional association, and it made for a decent potjie.
