Tania de Jong AM
Most organisations talk about innovation and treat creativity as a workshop activity, not a leadership capability. The result is incremental change, fatigued teams and a culture that cannot generate new direction when the operating context shifts. The deeper question is whether creativity, inclusion and collective purpose can be designed into how a workforce actually runs, or whether they remain decorative.
Tania de Jong AM is an Australian social entrepreneur, soprano and innovation advocate who helps organisations treat creativity, inclusion and collective purpose as operating disciplines rather than cultural decoration.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Tania de Jong AM
- A working body of evidence that creativity is buildable inside an organisation, drawn from six businesses and four charities she has founded, including Creative Universe, Creativity Australia and The Song Room.
- Co-founder and Executive Director of Mind Medicine Australia, the organisation behind Australia’s 2023 rescheduling of psilocybin and MDMA for treatment-resistant depression and PTSD, the first national framework of its kind in the world.
- A keynote format that pairs argument with live performance, used at Thinkers50 European Business Forum in Denmark and the International Forum on Consciousness in the United States, and tested across more than 40 countries.
- Eight editions of the Creative Innovation Asia Pacific Global Forum, awarded Corporate Event of the Year at the global Eventex Awards, giving her direct exposure to how international leaders are framing innovation, AI, wellbeing and the future of work.
- A position on social inclusion through the With One Voice programme that is grounded in operating practice, not theory, having reached thousands of participants across community choirs in Australia.
Biography highlights
- Co-founder and Executive Director of Mind Medicine Australia, the organisation behind the world-first 2023 rescheduling of psilocybin and MDMA in Australia for treatment-resistant depression and PTSD.
- Member of the Order of Australia (AM), 2008, for service to the arts and to music and arts enrichment programmes in schools and communities.
- Founder of Creativity Australia, Creative Universe, Creative Innovation Global, The Song Room, MTA Entertainment & Events, Dimension5 and Pot-Pourri.
- Keynote speaker at the Thinkers50 European Business Forum, Denmark, 2018, and the International Forum on Consciousness, United States, 2019; TEDxMelbourne speaker, “How singing together changes the brain”.
- Named in the Australian Financial Review 100 Women of Influence, Richtopia’s 100 Most Influential Australian Entrepreneurs, and Psychedelic Invest’s 100 Most Influential People in Psychedelics.
- Ernst and Young Australian Social Entrepreneur of the Year; Churchill Fellow; AGSE Entrepreneurs Hall of Fame, Swinburne University; Bachelor of Law (Honours), University of Melbourne.
- Special guest performer on Dr Bessel van der Kolk’s 2026 four-city Australian workshop tour for The Body Keeps the Score, presented with Mind Medicine Australia; speaker on psychedelic-assisted therapies at Dave Asprey’s BEYOND Biohacking Conference in Austin, Texas.
Biography
Australia became the first country in the world to reschedule psilocybin and MDMA for the treatment of depression and PTSD in 2023. Mind Medicine Australia, which de Jong co-founded with Peter Hunt and now runs as Executive Director, did the regulatory and clinical groundwork that made it possible. That outcome is the clearest statement of how de Jong tends to work: a long-running campaign to change a system that most assume cannot be moved.
The same pattern runs through the rest of her record. Six businesses and four charities, including Creative Universe, Creativity Australia, The Song Room and Creative Innovation Global, each built around a specific argument about creativity, inclusion or social repair. The Song Room alone has reached over a million Australian students through music programmes in schools that would not otherwise access them.
Her speaking work is unusual in form. She is a classically trained soprano who has performed in over 40 countries, and her keynotes weave argument with live singing. Thinkers50 invited her to keynote its European Business Forum in 2018, and in 2026 she performed as special guest on Dr Bessel van der Kolk’s Australian tour for The Body Keeps the Score. Her TEDxMelbourne talk on the neuroscience of group singing is often cited in workplace wellbeing writing.
The substantive claim underneath all of it is that creativity and collective purpose are operating disciplines. The Creative Innovation Asia Pacific Global Forum, which she has run eight times and which won Corporate Event of the Year at the Eventex Awards, is the working venue for that argument across AI, leadership, wellbeing and the future of work.
Key speaking topics
- Creativity as a strategic discipline
- Innovation culture and the future of work
- Entrepreneurship and social enterprise
- Mental health, wellbeing and the neuroscience of connection
- Diversity, inclusion and collective purpose
- Leadership in disruption and reinvention
- Storytelling and performance in business communication
Ideal for
- CHROs and culture leads designing engagement, wellbeing and inclusion programmes that need to land beyond the slide deck.
- Innovation leads, transformation directors and strategy teams looking to move creativity from training programme to operating practice.
- CEOs and boards in sectors facing structural reinvention, where the soft conditions of change are as material as the hard ones.
- Conference organisers seeking a keynote that combines argument with live performance and high audience engagement.
Audience outcomes
- A specific case for treating creativity as a leadership capability, not a workshop output.
- A working view of how social inclusion and collective practice change individual and team performance, drawn from the With One Voice programme and supporting neuroscience.
- An updated read on the global innovation agenda, informed by eight editions of the Creative Innovation Asia Pacific Forum.
- Exposure to one of the few global voices arguing for psychedelic-assisted therapy as a serious instrument of mental health policy, with evidence from the Australian rescheduling.
- A keynote experience that uses live performance to shift the energy of a room, useful for conferences that need a tonal lift alongside content.
Talks
A keynote making the case that an organisation’s sharpest advantage as AI spreads is not its technology but the creativity, voice and connection of its people, and showing leaders how to build cultures that release it.
Key takeaways:
- Why psychologically safe cultures, where more voices are actually heard, produce better innovation and adaptability than technology investment on its own.
- What disengagement, silence and workplace isolation cost an organisation, and the practices that turn them into contribution.
- How diversity of thinking and deliberate collaboration create a repeatable pipeline for new ideas.
A keynote arguing that creativity is a board-level capability an organisation can build on purpose, linked to neuroscience and to measurable gains in innovation, wellbeing and performance.
Key takeaways:
- Why creativity belongs on the leadership agenda, not in the training catalogue, as routine cognitive work is automated.
- What the neuroscience of creative confidence means in practice, and how organisations build it across a whole workforce.
- The working link between creative practice, employee wellbeing and productivity.
A keynote on how diversity, collaboration and a willingness to learn from failure turn an organisation’s own people into its innovation engine.
Key takeaways:
- Why diverse teams outperform on innovation, and what that means for how leaders hire and design teams.
- How to build a culture where new ideas surface from every level, not only from the top.
- Practical methods for treating failure as information and building resilience into how teams work.
A keynote on building entrepreneurial capability inside an established organisation, drawn from the six businesses and four charities de Jong has founded.
Key takeaways:
- How large organisations create the conditions for intrapreneurship and new business models from within.
- Why fast, low-cost experimentation beats long planning cycles when markets shift.
- What a durable culture of innovation looks like once the initial programme has ended.
A keynote on the human capabilities that hold up under accelerating change, and how leaders build agile, resilient organisations able to face problems that outrun existing institutions.
Key takeaways:
- The specific human skills that compound in value as the pace of change increases.
- How leaders build agility, resilience and adaptability into teams facing constant reinvention.
- Why complex, cross-cutting problems demand collaboration across sectors and functions, and how to lead that.
A keynote on what people still bring to work as technology accelerates, addressing rising loneliness and mental illness, the neuroscience of reconnection, and psychedelic-assisted therapy as an emerging clinical instrument.
Key takeaways:
- Why human creativity, meaning and connection gain value, not lose it, as machines take on more cognitive work.
- What current mental health data means for leaders, and practical steps that support wellbeing at work.
- A grounded view of psychedelic-assisted therapy as a clinical and policy instrument, drawn from the Australian rescheduling.