A warm welcome to Purpose from our MC Matt Wicking and opening remarks by creator of Purpose, Sally Hill.

Paul Hawken is a legend of sustainable business, co-author of ‘Natural Capitalism: The Next Industrial Revolution’, which Bill Clinton described as one of the most important books in the world. Paul is a committed activist and an entrepreneur who has founded several successful, ecologically-conscious businesses – and he’s in Australia in February 2018 to talk about his latest project, Drawdown.

Drawdown is the most comprehensive plan ever proposed to reverse global warming: mapping, measuring and modelling the 100 most substantive solutions to climate change. For each solution, the book describes its history, the carbon impact it
provides, the relevant cost and savings, the path to adoption, and how it works. Leading companies such as Interface Flor are basing their climate strategy on the work in Drawdown.

This keynote is not to be missed and will set the scene for Purpose 2018 – one of urgency, inspired resilience and revolution.

We all know and understand the Einstein quote: “we cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them” but how often do we see this in practise? After decades of watching climate talks stall and targets get missed, how badly are we failing and how do we course-correct? It’s time to look to brand new ways of seeing and acting and this panel brings together people who are pushing at the edges, calling for action and urging us to approach this problem with very different thinking. Local speakers will join Paul on stage to place the insights from Drawdown into a local context and help us understand how we might apply radically new thinking to the challenge of global warming.

Hosted by UTS: Hatchery this session will examine what it takes to be a responsible entrepreneur in a world that worships high tech, high growth and ‘unicorns’. Talking to founders who are doing it, we’ll examine the conditions for success as well as the challenges creating an enterprise designed for social impact. We’ll look at practicalities of getting socially-driven enterprises off the ground, invested in and keeping them above water when purpose and mission don’t always equate to huge profits. This session will also look at the mindset of the responsible entrepreneur – because it’s not just about tech startups, “everyone’s entrepreneurial”.

Facilitator Tida Tippapart is a creative entrepreneur and strategist, and also the Program Manager of UTS: Hatchery, a pre-accelerator program to teach people how to think like entrepreneurs: “The program is centred on creating entrepreneurs not companies.. entrepreneurship is much more than just a subject that a student will take at university; it’s a way of thinking that will ultimately shape how a student envisages their future career path.” 

This interactive session will teach you what an MBA doesn’t – how to get your business model right for profit AND purpose. Whether you’re from the Not for Profit, Corporate, Government or Philanthropic sectors, identifying and pulling the right levers in your business model can be the difference between a bright idea and large scale social impact. Using practical tools that you can take back to your workplace, we will explore the benefits and challenges of different approaches. Whether you’re a Social Business, Corporate or Not-for-Profit Leader, this workshop is for you. George is MD of Spark Strategy, a social business advisory firm supporting organisations to be more sustainable and impactful through innovative and collaborative business models.

Each week on his podcast ‘Humans of Purpose’, Mike Davis brings you meaningful conversations with inspiring and purpose-driven individuals from our community.

Mike will be recording a set of podcast interviews live at Purpose with special guests – Purpose speakers – joining Mike for a relaxed conversation to discuss their career journey and purpose, how they aim to create change and how they leverage their impact. These interviews can be watched and enjoyed live at The Mezzanine on the morning of Day 1 and Day 2.

It’s clear that the future is female, but for now we’re still counting. Women’s representation and decision making power is not where it should be in business and elsewhere in society. The pay gap persists (did you know it will take us to 2080 to rectify at the rate we are going?). Worse still, the Super Gap means that women are retiring with, on average, 47% of the super of men. In this session we hear from women from a range of industries: the media, the legal profession, finance and tech to hear first hand how and why gender inequality is persisting in their industries and what can be done about it.

Australia faces some serious future challenges when it comes to how we live together in housing and in cities, and they require visionary solutions.

In this visioning workshop we ask the question ‘How might we live together in the future?’. We’ll hear from subject matter experts on creating cities that work – and practise the art of futurism and foresight in a visioning exercise.

The conversation will be opened up with a look at topics like:

• Creating cities that are meaningful, diverse and inclusive
• Designing cities that are sustainable and enhance public health
• The purpose and potential of banks to house Australia’s future

Join this session, hosted by Bank Australia (‘the bank Australia needs’), and together we’ll envision solutions to Australia’s housing and development challenges.

This session will not only get you thinking about the future, but will also help you learn how to think like a futurist, gaining practical skills for practising art of futurism and foresight.

There is no single answer to fixing capitalism, and no single organisation to lead the rebuild. Or is there? Do we all really have a role to play? Or are we all suffering from ‘terminal uniqueness’?
While we’re all striving for the same goal of building an inclusive economy we’re still stuck in the 20th century paradigm of competing, cannibalising and sometimes when there is money on the table – collaborating.

How do we move beyond the ‘same same but different’ mentality and reimagine a new way of working across the purpose movement?
What does the 21st century ‘purpose’ movement look like? Can we reimagine how to do business with each other?

In this important roundtable, new Executive Director of B Lab Australia & New Zealand Andrea De Almeida will facilitate a discussion about where we are as a sector and whether we should go forward together or apart. Andrea will lead this no holds barred conversation as well as present B Lab’s perspective, along with the Future Business Council, Conscious Capitalism Australia, Fairtrade and PwC Indigenous Consulting.

Mental Health is a huge challenge for Australia, for us as individuals and for us as humans at work. Some recent statistics paint the picture for us: SafeWork NSW estimates that the cost to NSW businesses of absenteeism due to mental ill-health is $1.5 billion per annum, 45% of all Australians will experience a mental health problem in their lifetimeand 92% of which are attributed to work related mental stress. From the big picture problem to the practical challenges of organisations and entrepreneurs, this session will examine mental health at work. Our experts will explore the research at hand and together ask: what can be done to change workplace culture for better mental health? This session is hosted by icare Foundation who are calling for ideas to address concerns around Mental Health at Work. Visit http://purpose.do/icare for more information.

Technology is changing us.

It is transforming the way we learn and interact with each other. Is consumer technology and artificial intelligence changing what it means to be human? Will we become ‘unnecessary’? How worried should we be? Or should we be hopeful? What are the ethical implications and how will companies respond to this entirely new set of considerations for corporate responsibility?

This is the terrain of technology, ethics, science fiction, attention, privacy, trust, addiction and humanity. It’s the part bionic arm of the Amazon warehouse worker and what the relationship between ‘the machine and me’ might be.

This session digs even deeper into the topic of technology, ethics and humanity.

Our hosts, Huddle, will delve into data – as machines begin to make decision for us, are they making good ones? Are they more or less discerning than humans? Do they discriminate? What are the pros and what are the cons?

We’ll hear from Ian McLelland, founding CEO at The Guardian about the impact of the tech giants on the media as a whole as well as some of the darker sides of ‘comment culture’.

And we’re excited to hear from moral philosopher and ethics and tech expert Dr Matthew Beard from The Ethics Centre on the relationship between humanity and technology.

Who wants to publicly declare they fucked up?

Thousands of people, actually. And their stories are surprisingly inspiring.

On any given night in over 170 cities around the world, a group of strangers will gather in pubs, theatres and bars to divulge their grandest personal and professional failures in front of an audience of hundreds. It’s call a FuckUp Night.

Garry Williams, GM of Inspire9, will be running a special ‘Purpose edition’ of F*ck Up Nights to get us all a lot more comfortable with failure, for the sake of creating the conditions for experimentation and innovation, and just being a little gentler on our less-than-perfect selves.