While working for a mechanised mining contracting company, Alrien van der Walt discovered the 100-Day Challenge approach in Robert Schaffer’s book The Breakthrough Strategy: Using Short-Term Successes to Build the High Performance Organization.

The first application was with a contracting team, focused on improving loading and drilling operations. By letting the operators, the union representative and the safety team develop their own solutions — and giving them space to implement those ideas over 100 days — the results sparked a lifelong journey of discovery, learning, and using 100-Day Challenges to change lives and organisations.

Alrien led the roll-out of the Rapid Results 100-Day Challenge approach within Anglo American’s Technical Division — running challenges across the group’s iron ore, copper, diamond, platinum, coal, zinc, nickel and gold operations in South Africa, Chile, Zimbabwe, Namibia, Ghana, Ireland and Canada.

Alrien founded iResults, an independent consultancy company, taking the 100-Day Challenge methodology beyond Anglo American to a widening range of clients across mining, corporate, academic and public-sector settings.

iResults began working with the Rapid Results Institute (today Reinstitute) to bring the 100-Day Challenge approach into social-impact work across Africa — including partnerships with the World Bank, UN Women and government departments. This work was the catalyst for a new body of capacity-building material.

The social-impact work prompted a shift in how iResults worked: instead of being the facilitator and designer who runs a 100-Day Challenge for an organisation, iResults became the guide who builds an organisation’s internal capacity to design, implement and support its own 100-Day Challenges.

That shift gave rise to The World of Impact, an online platform built to carry this capacity-building work. It now underpins all of iResults’ capacity-building programmes, including the five-year Ending GBVF (Gender-Based Violence and Femicide) 100-Day Challenge programme, which runs across South Africa.

iResults still facilitates strategic projects and pilots directly, particularly when entering a new sector. But its main focus today is building the capacity of organisations to run their own 100-Day Challenges — which is why, since 2019, the vast majority of challenges in the portfolio have been delivered through capacity building rather than direct facilitation.