The Roundtable
Beca, one of the largest employee owned engineering and professional services consultancies in the Asia Pacific region, convened the roundtable at Beca House in Auckland on 14 May 2026, hosted by its Head of New Ventures. Professor Ghaffarian took part as the representative of AUT, among a small group of senior leaders drawn from national transport, housing and infrastructure agencies, primary industry exporters, consultancies, venture investors, a research centre and a university commercialisation office. The participants were chosen for their influence over where New Zealand’s infrastructure, property and export sectors invest next.
The discussion was framed by Pam Henderson’s approach to opportunity driven growth, which defines opportunity as the meeting of an enduring need, the value creators who can meet it, and the conditions that make the moment right. Its argument is that needs endure and value creators change, but conditions are the real starting point for growth, and that organisations are best read as systems shaped by the trends around them. The session’s visual record and notes captured the themes below.
- Opportunity as need, value creators and the right conditions
- A systems approach to an organisation and its trends
- Designing and aligning, so that people are brought along and buy in
- Visioning through mission, capability and a changing world
- A common organisational DNA to unify units, reduce silos and reveal shared opportunities
Professor Ghaffarian’s Place at the Table
The invitation reflects standing that extends well beyond the university. As Head of the School of Future Environments, Prof Ghaffarian leads more than 100 academic and professional staff in the School that educates the architects, engineers, construction managers and quantity surveyors on whom the organisations around the table depend. The relationship with Beca itself is substantial. Beca was primary partner and sponsor of GDI 2025, the international conference Prof Ghaffarian founded with Professor Amirhosein Ghaffarianhoseini, and hosted its opening day at Beca House; it was also among the sponsors of EMCONZ 2024, the national electrical and mechanical engineering conference of Engineering New Zealand held at AUT while Prof Ghaffarian led Built Environment Engineering.
Prof Ghaffarian also brought the perspective of someone whose judgement already bears on national investment. He is a member of the Artificial Intelligence Reference Group at the Office of the Prime Minister’s Chief Science Advisor, an Evaluator for MBIE, a Delegate of the College of Assessors at Royal Society Te Apārangi, and the sole academic advisor to the BIMinNZ national committee. Internationally, Prof Ghaffarian assesses proposals for the European Research Council, the Marie Skłodowska Curie Actions and Horizon Europe, across schemes with a combined requested value above NZD 100 million. That vantage point, across national and international funding, gave the roundtable a view of where research capability is being built and paid for.
A Framework Already in Practice
The roundtable’s themes map closely onto decisions Prof Ghaffarian has taken in leading the School. The call for a common organisational DNA that unifies units and reduces silos describes the operating model developed under Prof Ghaffarian as Head of Department, Built Environment Engineering, and then applied across the School: academic leadership roles redesigned, units redeployed, and allied and academic streams integrated so that specialist capability is shared rather than duplicated. Combined with rationalised staff to student ratios, cost efficiency modelling and revenue diversification, that model has given the School a strong and sustained annual surplus. The emphasis on bringing people along has its counterpart in the workload allocation, transparent performance review and structured recognition of teaching and service that Prof Ghaffarian introduced alongside it.
The systems view at the centre of the framework is equally familiar ground in Prof Ghaffarian’s research. Doctoral work under Prof Ghaffarian’s supervision has used system dynamics modelling to show how improved BIM uptake can strengthen Green Star certification, applied a system dynamics approach to whole life cost estimation for New Zealand homes, and built a causal loop model of housing prices. Reading conditions as the starting point of growth also describes the founding of GDI, launched in 2025 when the convergence of green, digital and intelligent agendas made an Auckland based international conference timely, and one of three international conferences that generated substantial external income for AUT.
Consequence for the School and the Sector
The School’s research speaks directly to the sectors that were represented. Prof Ghaffarian’s programme on decarbonising heavy freight and smart mobility moved from a national plan for decarbonising New Zealand’s heavy freight transport in 2020 to an externally funded total cost of ownership comparison for long distance heavy freight for Ara Ake, completed between 2022 and 2024. The urban digital twin work he leads, which began with a model of the AUT City Campus in 2022, now underpins a 2026 Transition Research Fund expression of interest on the urban microclimate of Auckland. These are the questions that transport, infrastructure and housing agencies bring to any discussion of growth: how to decarbonise movement, how to build resilience into cities, and how to make investment decisions with better evidence. A university able to bring tested methods and trained people to those questions belongs in the conversation about where opportunity lies, and the invitation recognised that.
Presence at a forum of this kind matters to a university for reasons that are easy to understate. Decisions about infrastructure, housing and export growth are increasingly shaped in conversations between executives before they become programmes, tenders or policies, and a School that is absent from those conversations learns of them late. Prof Ghaffarian’s participation placed AUT among the organisations considering what New Zealand needs next, and carried into the room the perspective of an institution that trains the workforce those plans will require. It also confirmed the depth of the School’s relationship with Beca, which has continued through Beca’s role among the partners of the GDI 2026 Industry Chapter and a Beca keynote at the AACE New Zealand Conference hosted by the School in September 2026. The partnership that began with Beca joining GDI 2025 has become a standing relationship at executive level.