A Quiet Closing to 2025 — Welcoming Abel, Honouring the Long Road, Stepping into 2026
As 2025 comes to a close, after the rooms have emptied and the last conversations have trailed off, we find ourselves pausing — not to announce something new, but to mark a moment that feels quietly significant for The Collab Folks.
This year marks 10 years since we first began experimenting with shared play, learning, and collaboration. Over that decade, the collective has grown, contracted, reshaped itself, and evolved alongside the lives of the people within it. Some years were expansive. Others asked for restraint. Many asked us to listen more closely — to the work, to one another, and to ourselves.
As we step toward 2026, this reflection is an invitation into that pause — to welcome a new partner, to share where each of us is standing now, and to honour both the v
Welcoming Abel Maningas
We’re grateful to officially welcome Abel Maningas into The Collab Folks collective.
Abel joined us on 11 December 2025, closing a year that, for him, was marked by new beginnings.
Throughout 2025, Abel travelled with Michael and Andre into different communities, playing Cowtopia, observing teams navigating chaos, and paying close attention not just to group behaviour — but to his own presence within those spaces. These moments of play created room to breathe, notice, and learn in ways that are often difficult to access in day-to-day work.
Alongside this, Abel completed his first year in a new in-house role, launching two products — one in social innovation and one in security. Both carried real impact, and both reinforced a belief he has held for years: that collaboration is not peripheral to product and innovation work — it is foundational.
Looking ahead to 2026, Abel hopes to bring Cowtopia to more teams and communities, and especially to finally see it land in the Philippines. On a personal level, he is continuing to make space for reflection, learning, and the quieter work of understanding himself more deeply.
We’re glad to be walking this next stretch together.
Andre Tan — Learning from the Inside
For Andre, the past few years have been about learning from a different vantage point.
After more than a decade as an entrepreneur, stepping into his first in-house role offered a shift from observing systems to living inside them. That experience brought clarity — not just about how organisations function, but about how Andre himself wants to work, contribute, and grow.
Andre’s long-standing involvement with Cowtopia (since 2017) has continued to be a steady practice ground. Through facilitation, iteration, and feedback, he has deepened his sensitivity to communication, instruction, and learning design. While his roles may look different across contexts, the core remains the same: creating conditions where people can learn, adapt, and discover their own capacity.
As Cowtopia continues to travel across regions, Andre looks forward to deepening his own learning while connecting with others who care about growth that is relational, reflective, and grounded in lived experience.
Gratitude for Past Partners and Fellow Travellers
As we mark this moment, we also want to acknowledge and thank past partners and collaborators who have journeyed with The Collab Folks over the years.
Some walked closely with us for a season.
Some helped shape early experiments.
Others challenged our assumptions, stretched our thinking, or held space during moments of uncertainty.
Many are now on their own paths — building, teaching, leading, resting, or reimagining their work in ways that may look very different from when we last collaborated. Their contributions continue to live on in the practices, questions, and values that remain part of this collective.
We’re grateful for every shared chapter, however long or short it was.
Cowtopia in 2025 — Play as a Serious Practice
Cowtopia continued to be a meaningful thread throughout 2025.
Across the year, we facilitated 16 Cowtopia workshops, spanning both community and client spaces. Different rooms. Different intentions. Different constraints. Yet the same core question kept resurfacing:
What do teams reveal about themselves when pressure, ambiguity, and time collide?
Cowtopia has increasingly become less about the game itself, and more about the conversations it makes possible. A separate reflection on Cowtopia’s journey this year — and where it’s heading next — will be shared soon via cowtopia.space.
For now, we simply note this: play remains central to how we learn.
Michael Ong — Quiet Milestones, Long Roads
For Michael, 2025 carried a quiet but meaningful milestone.
It marked 10 years of The Collab Folks, alongside 26 years of On9 Systems — two threads that began at very different moments in life, and over time grew toward the same underlying practice: helping people and teams learn how to work with themselves, with each other, and with complexity.
Rather than celebrating this loudly, the year asked for slowing down.
Listening back to reflections from clients, what stayed with me wasn’t a method or a framework, but the experience of being met with presence, care, and honesty. Their words became a mirror — reminding me that the work that lasts often happens beneath the surface.
This year also deepened our commitment to longer-form learning journeys — working with organisations over time to develop product thinking, self-leadership, and team capability through cycles of experience, reflection, and practice. It reaffirmed something we’ve known for a while: meaningful learning cannot be rushed.
Across both TCF and On9, 2025 reinforced a simple truth:
How we work is inseparable from who we are becoming.
Stepping into 2026
As we welcome 2026, The Collab Folks remains intentionally small.
We continue to care deeply about learning spaces that are safe and courageous, work that bridges disciplines without forcing frameworks, and relationships built on respect, consent, and readiness.
The intention ahead is simple:
fewer things, held more carefully;
deeper relationships over broader reach;
and learning journeys that honour time, reflection, and humanity.
Not faster.
Just truer.
With gratitude,
The Collab Folks
The Collab Folks 