David Ireland

Principal at ThinkPlace, Australia, and Faculty of Business and Law, University of Queensland, NSW

Sept 5, 2018 – Jan 8, 2019, working with Prof. Banny Banerjee, ChangeLabs

The sustainable development goals represent some of the most complex and pressing challenges humanity has faced. Traditionally, our approach to addressing this class of challenges has involved a reductionist and linear mindset, where we reduce the system down to its component parts. However, this approach ignores one of the fundamental laws of complex systems, reciprocal causality, the notion that the parts of the system affect the whole system and the whole system affecting the parts. This dependency is critical and is a central feature in the dynamics and behaviour of systems. Working with ChangeLabs, I am developing new systems methods for understanding complex systems and designing sustainable interventions focused on generating intergenerational wellbeing.