Global ChangeLabs: Breakfast w/ Banny Banerjee & co (AKL)
Description
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!
Lineup
Banny Banerjee
Banny Banerjee is the Founder and Managing Director of Global ChangeLabs and an Adjunct Professor in Change Leadership for Sustainability at Stanford University. Originally trained as an architect, Banny has spent more than three decades working across design, technology, systems innovation and sustainability.
Jim Scully
Jim Scully is a New Zealand design and innovation leader, facilitator and leadership mentor with more than 30 years’ experience helping leaders across government, business and global innovation tackle complex challenges. He pioneered human-centred design capability in the New Zealand public sector, led innovation and transformation work across multiple countries, and has worked with organisations including UNLEASH Innovation Labs, Better by Design, the UN Development Programme, the New Zealand Government and the Singapore Government.
Martin Grant
Martin Grant is a facilitator, sensemaker, and designer who helps organizations and sectors navigate complexity, make strategic choices, and adapt to change. With extensive experience spanning commercial, government, and non-government sectors, his work focuses on multi-stakeholder engagement, systems thinking, strategy, and human-centred design. He has contributed to a wide range of complex national initiatives in Aotearoa New Zealand—including regional economic development, resource management transitions, industry transformation plans, and vocational education. Known as an action-focused and pragmatic strategist, Martin is dedicated to helping leaders align resources and foster collaboration to deliver meaningful, long-term outcomes for people and communities.
Jade Tang-Taylor
Jade Tang-Taylor is a design strategist, innovator and educator focused on co-designing better futures. As an Associate Consulting Director at ThinkPlace NZ, she applies human-centred and systems design to complex social challenges. She also co-founded Design Futures Aotearoa, championing strategic foresight and futures to support communities embrace long-term thinking. Across both roles, her work bridges participatory design, systems innovation, emerging tech and AI for Good.
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