Strategic Foresight Advising
Everything Peter Leyden knows about the future and learns from his network can be synthesized for smaller groups and tailored to the needs of a particular industry or field, company or organization.
Leyden often does private projects and internal sessions with senior executives or leaders of organizations where he makes a presentation to expand their thinking but then drives conversations that help them figure out what to do.
He works thorough his company Reinvent Futures to put on everything from internal talks, to half-day workshops to full six-month projects.
Reinvent Futures — a New Advisory Company
Reinvent Futures is a new company born out of the pandemic to help people better understand what’s really going on in the world right now, what’s probably coming in the next 10 years, what’s possible to achieve in the next 25 years, and what you should immediately do to prepare.
The firm was founded by Peter Leyden initially as the vehicle for his advisory work in strategic foresight with senior leaders in companies and other organizations in the philanthropic and political worlds. He frequently works with C Suites and boards to help them re-think their strategies in light of looming changes in their industries or fields.
Leyden often acts like a “foresight coach” helping leaders think more rigorously and systematically about the many system changes coming in the decade ahead, Projects can take place periodically over the course of a year or six months. Or Leyden can design and conduct half-day workshops for board retreats and the like. He can even do tailored one-hour talks for company off-sites to open up the horizons for teams that are stuck in the status quo.
Reinvent Futures also has another line of business in convening and hosting innovative events that can gather innovators from diverse fields around themes exploring the future. These can range from invite-only events of 150 people to smaller roundtable discussions of a dozen people or so over dinner.
Check out Reinvent Future’s new website for more.
Advisor on Strategic Foresight to Senior Executives
Leyden often gives strategic foresight advice to senior leaders of companies and organizations, including in the world of philanthropy.
Leyden gave a keynote speech that kicked off a four-day summit of 60 family offices each worth billions at Stanford University in the fall of 2022. He was asked to participate for all four days to work with the generation who currently controlled the fortunes and the younger generations who stood to inherit the fortunes. At issue was how these fortunes could best be applied to helping solve climate change.
The adjacent 10-minute video of Leyden gives a great overview of how we can largely solve the challenge of climate change in the next 25 years and the role the fortunes of billionaires could play in accelerating that transition.
Leyden’s remarks were directed to the senior leaders of family offices and foundations, but you can get a sense of how he would advise senior leaders in a wide range of fields.
Senior Advisor to Autodesk During the Pandemic
Leyden spent most of the pandemic year of 2021 working for much of his time with the tech company Autodesk on a project as their Senior Fellow for Strategic Foresight.
He acted as an outside advisor carrying out an internal project looking at what’s the most impact that Autodesk could make in the next 10 years to help the world slow global warming and get a handle on climate change.
Autodesk is the leading tech company developing the key design tools used by industries now on the frontline of climate change: architecture, construction, engineering, manufacturing, as well as media and entertainment.
He conducted a wide range of conversations with the entire C Suite and then innovators throughout the company who can figure out the best case of what’s possible to develop in the next 10 years.
He also advised the company on how to best build out its Strategic Foresight capabilities in order to continuously navigate the critical uncertainties of the tumultuous times ahead.
How Leyden Learned the Art and Science of Foresight
Leyden has gone through a range of work experiences that contribute to the strategic advice he can give. He has founded two of his own companies and run them as the CEO as well as run other organizations like WIRED.
All three of those startups were all about taking early advantage of new technologies and pioneering an emerging new market. For WIRED it was the very first online media on the Web 1.0. For his last company Reinvent it was interactive group video that became commonplace in the pandemic. He has learned a lot about innovation over the years.
He also worked at the pioneering foresight and strategy consulting firm Global Business Network, which has since been bought and absorbed into Deloitte Consulting. He worked there in the heyday with the founders in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Peter Schwartz was a world-renowned scenario planner, and he learned the tools of the foresight trade from him - as well as coauthored a book with him.
Stewart Brand (in the nearby photo) was the curator of a truly incredible network of remarkable innovators from a wide range of fields impacting the future who were brought together to help solve complex problems and help global corporations and government agencies make important long-range plans. Leyden considers both Schwartz and Brand mentors who influence how he works to this day.
The Value of Strategic Foresight in these Uncertain Times
Everything Leyden learns from his constantly expanding network of remarkable innovators, everything he comes to understand about what’s probably coming next, and what’s possible to achieve in the future, can be used in public and private ways. His value is in being able to synthesize all these myriad inputs into strategic foresight about the future.
Some of what he learns about the future he shares privately with smaller groups of senior executives, leaders of organizations, often those working in the C Suite or serving on boards. In those more intimate settings he’s able to tailor what he’s learning to the specific challenges of industries or fields, or companies and other organizations.
His main value is helping these smaller groups to expand their thinking about what could lie ahead and see both the opportunities as well as dangers.
He’s also done quite a bit of work in Europe to help business leaders understand the implications of new technologies emerging from his base of Silicon Valley.
A Visioning Project to Maximize Sustainable Construction
Leyden used what he knew about what’s coming in the 2020s to help one of the premier construction companies in the San Francisco Bay Area with their vision process about what they want their company to accomplish in the decade ahead.
XL Construction works with top tech firms like Google and biotech labs like Genentech to build state-of-the-art buildings. Google in particular wants to make the most sustainable buildings possible and has encouraged XL to pioneer the field of sustainable mass timber to help replace the traditional carbon-heavy materials of steel and concrete in large buildings.
XL hired Leyden for a six month project during the pandemic to help the CEO and senior leaders of the company create a new vision for what the company can hope to achieve in the next 10 years.