Advising in Strategic Foresight
Reinvent Futures has a second 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, learning journeys 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?”
Here we focus more on the immediate implications on strategy on a company or organization. We can moderate one outward-facing conversation on the strategic implications of developments like Generative AI and another inward-facing conversation on the operational implications.
We can often bring in a remarkable innovator or two from our network to add their special expertise to the strategic conversation as well.
Learning Journeys at Ground Zero
Reinvent Futures is rooted in San Francisco, ground zero for much of the innovation that took place in technology and the economy for the last 25 years and that can be expected to take place in the decade ahead. We literally operate out of the iconic Ferry Building in downtown San Francisco in a new club called Shack15.
Founder Peter Leyden has been in the middle of all that innovation since he moved out here to work at the early WIRED magazine in the mid-1990s. Managing Director Joe Boggio has spent the last decade building up business relationships throughout the region too.
We are well positioned to design and lead learning journeys that take senior executives and other leadership teams who are less familiar with Silicon Valley and the innovation ecosystem of the region on immersive experiences that can last a day or two or more.
These learning journeys can help outsiders quickly get oriented to the new Generative AI world that is burgeoning in San Francisco right now. We can bring them to hot new startups, to experienced VCs, to labs at Stanford University, or even to a fun sail on the bay.
These experiences can go a long way toward expanding your understanding of what’s really possible in the decade ahead.
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.
Special Projects
Not every challenge can be solved using a preconceived format so we’re always open to strange new ones. Some involve advisory work on documentary film projects or the development of new video games. If you have something interesting, contact us.