Advising in Strategic Foresight
Reinvent Futures has a line of business where we take what we know and are constantly learning about those four questions and help senior leaders of companies and other organizations understand them as well.
We do advisory work in what people call strategic foresight, the business term for helping leaders better understand the near-term future and evolve their strategies.
Most leaders, let alone most people, have no idea about how to think more rigorously or systematically about the future. They may be super-smart people and experts in their respective fields, but they have no idea how to think about the next 10 years let alone the next 25.
Reinvent Futures helps them do that in several ways: through tailored talks, strategy workshops, foresight coaching, and special projects.
Tailored Talks for Companies
Peter Leyden has spent the last 25 years giving keynote talks about the future on roughly a monthly basis to business and general conferences throughout America and Europe. His talks essentially are a constantly evolving presentation of the answers to those four key questions about the near-term future.
Leyden primarily works through Keppler Speakers as a leading futurist, tech expert and strategic foresight advisor for those more public events. He’s an exceptionally gifted speaker who uses big data worked up into powerful info-graphics to make a compelling case for what probably lies ahead. His positive, can-do attitude about what’s possible to achieve often leaves audiences energized and inspired.
However, Leyden works through his Reinvent Futures for private engagements where he tailors his talks to apply more directly to specific industries or fields, or even more specific companies and organizations.
These often take the form of smaller groups of senior executives or other senior leaders, including the most senior in C Suites, or boards. Private talks like this often are used to help open up strategic conversations on leadership retreats and the like.
Strategy Workshops & Roundtables
Sometimes a private engagement needs more than an hour or two of a talk with robust questions and answer time. Sometimes you might need a morning or day of a full strategy workshop.
These workshops might start with a tailored talk but then have interactive sessions that help senior executives gauge how probable they see these future developments impacting their field, and then thinking through the strategic implications to their organization.
We also do roundtable sessions that where we can take a deep dive in an industry and explore a key question surrounding AI: Are you thinking big enough?”
Check out the adjacent video of a full interview Leyden did with Big Think Media about the coming reinvention of America around AI and consider whether your executive team would benefit from a deep conversation about it.
Special Tailored Projects
Not every challenge can be solved using a preconceived format so we’re always open to strange new ones.
Leyden has done recent projects with Autodesk and a pioneering construction firm that are described in more detail on his other PeterLeyden.com website. He also gives more of his career history of how he learned the foresight business working with the legendary Stewart Brand.
Check out the advisory page on that website or just reach out and contact us.
Foresight Coaching for Executives
The people running companies or other organizations are usually smart and knowledgeable with considerable expertise of their own. However, few have been trained in strategic foresight or can spend much time at all systematically thinking about the near-term future.
So we have provided what we think of as "Foresight Coaching” to a CEO or other senior executive who could use some outside help on thinking through the decade ahead. These can take the form of regular check-ins each month that keep building on a wide-ranging conversation that goes where that organization needs to go.
One engagement over the pandemic took the form of a six month project where Leyden spent time with the CEO as well as his Chief Strategy Officer to help them think through their new 10 year vision.
The adjacent video was part of a project with the principals of 60 family offices each worth more than $1 Billion that recently convened at Stanford University.