The world is constantly telling people to dream big. So Carmen Murray
took the advice. Her dream is as simple as it is ambitious. To create a better future.
Here’s the thing about dreaming big, at least for women: while many may have exciting plans, Carmen’s own research reveals that only 23 per cent act on them.
Carmen definitely falls into this narrow category. Her vehicle for changing the world … conscious LeadHERS (standing for Human Empowerment, Responsibility and Sustainability), a women’s empowerment platform with a database of 16 000 “powerful, creative, talented” women who see themselves as nation builders, representing a range of professions and across all organisational echelons – not bad for an initiative started with just R600 and a lot of chutzpah.
“It’s all about unlocking opportunity,” Carmen explains. “If you have an issue, someone within our network is bound to have the answer. Or they may be able to introduce you to a lead that could help; or someone may have a skill they can help you develop.
“Say you want to take up public speaking, but you don’t know where to start,” she continues. All you have to do is ask, and she’ll search through the database to find those contacts that might help you close the opportunity gap.
Interestingly, the idea for establishing Conscious LeadHERS came not from another woman, but from Carmen’s father … albeit in a very roundabout way. “We never had a close relationship, because he spent a lot of time with his head buried in his notebooks,” she says. After his death, Carmen learnt that these books were devoted largely to mathematics. Carmen herself had always been intrigued by numbers, and so while she and her father weren’t close – in fact, they communicated very little – numbers became the only way for her to understand him after his death.
This set her on a journey: “I understood that my father must have fallen on the autism spectrum. I became obsessed with numbers in the same way – I even took a year out of my life to study numerology. The practice made me see how everything is interconnected – my world just opened up.”
At the same time, though, Carmen’s journey raised questions of authenticity. Her work sent her down a rabbit hole in a quest to understand authenticity, our human tendency to embrace the artificial, and how this shapes the world we are building. It also uncovered her own relationship with autism (a condition that remains hidden for many women, due to their tendency and adeptness at masking), prompting her to seek insight from a therapist. “Imagine my surprise when she told me – a person whose authenticity had always been remarked on – that I wasn’t who I thought I was.”
Instead of creating a wound, Carmen embraced the comment as an opportunity for rediscovery. It catalysed a second journey, as she sought to find her inner truth – “and that’s how I came to launch ReAI2ssance – a framework to understand authentic intelligence and AI, and to understand the new world we are giving birth to.”
Conscious LeaderHERS is part of the platform, too, as is Carmen’s work with women to raise their profiles. “All machine learning is based on the material that’s available in the public domain. The problem is that most of this work was produced by men. I am passionate about making women publish their work so that they become more visible.” This also involves releasing their ideas and perspectives into the world, helping them to activate their dreams and creating opportunities for them.
Carmen’s enthusiasm for AI is further expressed through her work in the marketing sphere through her business, Carmen Murray Communications. In fact, she was one of the first people in South Africa to use AI in this space. “My focus here is on making sure that businesses understand how to use AI to enrich people’s lives,” she explains, adding that AI is an area that fascinates her because it speaks directly to feminine energies.
“For decades, business has been focused on demands … a very masculine approach. Using generative AI helps us think about the questions we should be asking.”
Her marketing ethos has evolved over time, Carmen says. “I never intended to enter the industry,” she says. Her first interest was hospitality, first on cruise ships and then at a private game reserve; then, when she decided to return to Johannesburg, she put the eventing skills she had acquired to use in different areas, including experiential marketing.
She ‘fell into’ futurism in a similar way – having earned a qualification in digital and mobile, she was approached by Henley Business School to create a solution to the distance learning challenges posed by the Covid-19 pandemic. Her standout success saw her recognised as a ‘nethnographer” (“like an ethnographer, who studies human behaviour and culture, but on the Net”) which, in turn, led the Citizen to ask her to predict the outcomes of the 2024 outcomes – which she did with 80 per cent accuracy, despite “knowing very little about politics”. Carmen has since become a protégée of Faith Popcorn, the grande dame of future forecasting.
What does Carmen’s own future hold? Right now, she’s preparing for Conscious LeadHERS to become part of the Nedbank IMC, the largest marketing event in Africa. She’s excited to see the network’s members taking on the role of field reporters, while her own podcast becomes a key highlight, too. “There will be a wonderful ripple effect, with women gaining fantastic skills and broadening their networks,” she enthuses.
“The thing with dreams is that, if your dream only benefits you, you need to think again. A dream that doesn’t touch the lives of your community just isn’t big enough,” Carmen concludes.
Details: Carmenmurray.com, @iamcarmenmurray
Carmen’s path to empowerment
• Embrace who you are, and create beauty out of it
• We all have something unique. Becoming yourself, or reinventing who you are, isn’t about adding more, but removing the parts that don’t represent who you truly are.
• Get back to your roots. Think about what it means to be a real woman: we try too hard to be like men when the reality is that, when we are the truest version of ourselves, we can change the world.
