House of Complexity, A First Gathering

Eighteen speakers. Six conversations. One poet, several CEOs, doctors, cognitive scientists, social scientists, artists, futures thinkers, researchers, policy-makers, philosophers, designers, innovation strategists, activists and a mindset coach. Come and think with us.

Hear from practitioners and researchers who cross disciplinary boundaries as a matter of practice, from CSIRO, the UTS Transdisciplinary School, UNSW, the University of Sydney, Macquarie University and House of Complexity.

What does it look like when leaders take complexity seriously? Hear directly from people navigating it at The Smith Family, QLD Health, NRMA Insurance and Prevention United.

How do human systems actually work? How do you design for change you can't control? What happens when poetry, science, philosophy and organisations think together? Where does thinking really happen? What can philosophy offer organisations? And what becomes possible when you resist the obvious? Six conversations. One gathering. A different kind of intelligence for a complex world.

This gathering will be recorded live, with a small in-person audience in Sydney and a live stream for those joining online.

Info: The world's most pressing challenges, in organisations, communities, and institutions don't yield to simple explanations or linear solutions.

This opening session introduces the insights animating House of Complexity: that human systems are shaped by relationships, meaning, and emergence rather than parts and plans.

Bringing together perspectives from strategic design, creative intelligence, and transdisciplinary practice, this conversation makes the case for why complexity thinking isn't an abstract intellectual exercise but a practical necessity for anyone trying to lead, create, or change anything that matters.

Info: Leaders are trained to set goals, build strategies, and drive results — but transformation rarely follows the plan. Real change in organisations and society moves through thresholds, tensions, and constraint.

This session reframes the work of leadership: rather than engineering outcomes, what does it mean to design the conditions in which change can actually emerge? Drawing on experience across health, education, and social impact, this conversation offers a more honest and ultimately more effective understanding of how complex change happens.
This conversation explores how leaders can design the conditions that allow change to emerge, rather than attempting to engineer outcomes.

Info: What do a poet-intensivist, a professor of transdisciplinary design, a CSIRO concept lab convenor, and a strategic designer have in common? They each work at the edges of their fields, where the most generative thinking happens.

This session explores what becomes possible when different ways of knowing are brought into genuine dialogue, not as metaphor or decoration, but as distinct lenses that illuminate what no single discipline can see alone. For organisations willing to think beyond their habitual framings, this is where new possibilities begin.

Info: What if intelligence isn't confined to the brain?

Decades of research in embodied, embedded, enacted, and extended cognition are reshaping how we understand thinking itself — revealing that mind emerges through the interaction of bodies, environments, tools, and culture.

This session brings together philosophers of AI and cognitive science to explore what this shift means in practice: for how we design organisations, make decisions, build technology, and understand what it even means to be intelligent in a complex world.

Info: Philosophy has always been where the deepest assumptions get examined: about knowledge, identity, change, and what it means to act well. Yet it rarely enters the rooms where organisations make decisions.

This session makes the case for philosophy not as a luxury but as a practical resource: a way of loosening the hidden framings that constrain imagination and opening new territory for sensemaking, innovation, and change. With scholars drawn from business, sociology, and transdisciplinary design, this is a conversation about what organisations could think if they thought more deeply.

Info: Every organisation, every person, every field has default patterns: familiar grooves of perception that make some things visible and others invisible. Creativity, at its most powerful, begins not with new ideas but with the disruption of the obvious.

This closing session brings together a photographer, an academic, a mindset coach, and a scholar of creative intelligence to explore what it takes to genuinely interrupt habitual seeing. Playful, provocative, and practically urgent, it's a fitting end to a day that has asked us to look at the world differently — and a beginning for what comes next.

Info: We'll share a snapshot of what we're building at House of Complexity: upcoming talks and courses on complexity, innovation practice and philosophy, and how we plan to bring together leading thinkers and practitioners from around the world.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

The Dale Studio, 27-39 Abercrombie Street, Chippendale, Australia

Concerts, fests, parties, meetups - all the happenings, one place.

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