Dr Maggie Buxton

Strategic Advisor | Speaker | Creative Technologist

Strategy, foresight, and facilitation at the edge of technology, culture, and change.

About Me

I’m a strategist, facilitator, and creative technologist with over 30 years of experience supporting individuals, organisations, and communities through complex change. My work blends futures thinking, practical strategy, and systems awareness — often at the intersection of technology, culture, and deeper ways of knowing.

I’ve worked across diverse contexts: from ecovillages in West Africa to Indigenous-led organisations in Aotearoa, public institutions, and emerging creative industries. In each setting, I focus on helping people navigate uncertainty with clarity, purpose, and values-based direction.

Through keynote speaking, advisory work, and one-to-one coaching — as well as through AwhiWorld, the creative research platform I co-lead — I support clients to engage with the future in grounded, thoughtful ways. Whether it’s integrating AI, responding to cultural shifts, or exploring more ethical and conscious forms of leadership, my work is about making space for clarity, creativity, and integrity in times of change.

For the past fifteen years, I’ve led AwhiWorld (pronounced aa-fi world), which blends transdisciplinary approaches to foster innovative outcomes. AwhiWorld collaborates with not-for-profits and grassroots community groups in the environment, politics, spirituality, culture, and the arts.

We’re committed to mutually enriching initiatives that build interconnectivity, criticality, and consciousness. Our initiatives are designed to weave connections and manifest generativity and resilience.

I hold a transdisciplinary PhD from AUT-Colab focused on place, spirituality and augmented and geo-locative mobile technologies. Additionally, I have an MSc in Organisational Development and Consulting from Sheffield Business School, and a BA in Politics and Education.

My thirty-year career spans strategic consulting, leadership coaching, facilitation, curating and producing interactive installations, poetry, experimental photography, and videography. I’ve been involved in tertiary education as a lecturer, programme designer, examiner, and supervisor for sixteen years.

I’m also active in the voluntary and civic sectors, holding board positions and providing pro bono work for many not-for-profit arts, youth, and business groups. This includes past experience as Chair of Aotearoa Digital Arts, Committee Chair of Creative Communities Whangarei, Management Committee Member of Youthline, and Northland Chamber of Commerce Board Member.

I co-founded the Creative Technology Northland Network, boosting the creative digital sector in Northland, New Zealand. I’m a member of SEADS Collective, CIRET, ITD-Alliance, NZSA, NZPS and a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (FHEA)