Designing Desirable Transformations in a Complex World

With Banny Banerjee and a panel of Aotearoa changemakers.

The challenges we face today; from technological disruption and climate change to organisational transformation and societal change... are increasingly complex, interconnected and difficult to solve through any single intervention.

So how do we design transformations in the context of complex, systemic, and interconnected challenges?

Join us for a special conversation with Banny Banerjee, founder of Global ChangeLabs and Adjunct Professor at Stanford University’s Doerr School of Sustainability.

Before launching Global ChangeLabs, Banny founded Stanford ChangeLabs and spent two decades working across fields and exploring how to approach complex and deeply integrated challenges and design genuinely transformative pathways. Earlier in his career, Banny worked at IDEO during the period when the firm was helping pioneer what became known as Design Thinking.

For this special event, Banny will share insights about how conventional wisdom and deterministic approaches are increasingly ill suited to address the deeply systemic and integrated nature of our challenges. He will share how his work across sectors - business, government, technology, sustainability and social systems indicates the need for new capacities, leadership models, organizational functions, and platforms to address an uncertain and increasingly complex future. Given his work on how to leverage a diversity of perspectives, we will also be joined by a panel of local change-makers to explore what these ideas might mean in the Aotearoa New Zealand context.

We’ll explore:

How do we embrace the complexity rather than expect isolated solutions to work?
How must we reframe design and innovation to shape interventions that shift the trajectory of a system?
How do we effectively combine different disciplines, perspectives and ways of thinking?
How do we identify opportunities for meaningful intervention and make them actionable?
What new forms of leadership, collaboration and organisational architecture might be needed for systemic transformation?
How might Aotearoa NZ become a place to demonstrate transformative ways of approaching complex challenges. What can Aotearoa NZ contribute and learn... Especially, as we navigate our own economic, technological, environmental and societal transitions?

This will be an opportunity to hear a distinctive international perspective, connect it with the experiences of people working on complex challenges here in Aotearoa, and consider what it might mean to design the conditions for a different future.

Who is this for?

Anyone working to create meaningful change in complex environments: including leaders, designers, strategists, innovators, entrepreneurs, policymakers, researchers, funders, social-sector practitioners and people working across organisational and sector boundaries.

Come curious.

Bring a complex challenge.

Leave with new perspectives on where, and how, change might be possible.

We'd love for you to join us for this breakfast event, to explore how we can Designing Desirable Transformations in a Complex World

🔹 Date & Time: Wednesday 4 November 2026, 8 - 9:30am
🔹 Location: ThinkPlace Studio (Tāmaki Makaurau / Auckland, NZ)
🔹 Registration: $20 unwaged | $45 waged (To cover venue hire, coffee, tea & breakfast pastries)

Ngā manaakitanga | We look forward to seeing you there!

Contact the host of Global ChangeLabs: Breakfast w/ Banny Banerjee & co (AKL)

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