Opportunity Discovery & Systems Thinking
A promising sustainability opportunity starts with understanding what keeps the challenge in place. Whether your team is exploring sustainable energy, water, food, or heat resilience, the visible problem may be shaped by patterns and underlying conditions that are easy to miss. How can you discover an opportunity to make a meaningful difference?
In this interactive, one-hour workshop, Praewa Satutum will introduce an Opportunity Discovery approach grounded in systems thinking. Using the Iceberg Model, you will explore a challenge connected to your project or community, looking beneath visible events to identify recurring patterns and the conditions that shape them. You will consider whose perspectives you need to understand, identify a potential leverage point, and draft a question to guide further investigation.
The workshop welcomes participants with an early solution idea and those still deciding where to focus. You will leave with a first-pass analysis of your challenge and a practical next step for learning from stakeholders as you develop your GSC project.
About the speaker:
Praewa Satutum is Associate Director of Curricular Ecopreneurship Programs at Stanford University, where she designs and develops learning experiences that help emerging ecopreneurs address complex sustainability challenges. She co-founded Circular Design Lab, a citizen-driven innovation lab that brings changemakers together to develop systemic responses to sustainability challenges involving air pollution, food, waste, and sustainable fashion.
Before joining Stanford, Praewa was an Assistant Professor of Social Innovation at Thammasat University in Thailand. She previously co-directed a university social innovation lab and supported social entrepreneurs through incubation programs. She has also led an innovation program for students from seven University of California campuses in partnership with communities along the Thailand–Myanmar border, and the Asian Sustainable Agriculture Innovation Lab, which convened leaders from more than 10 countries to co-design strategies for sustainable agriculture in Asia.
Praewa holds a Master's in Public Administration from Harvard Kennedy School and an MSc in Global Innovation Management from the University of Strathclyde and Hamburg University of Technology, for which she received a European Union scholarship.