Advising Senior Leaders on Strategic Foresight
Everything 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 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 through his company Reinvent Futures to put on everything from internal talks, to half-day workshops to full six-month coaching projects.
You can learn more on a page on this website or go directly to the Reinvent Futures website for a deeper dive.
Reinvent Futures — Leyden’s Advisory Company
Reinvent Futures is a 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 could immediately do to prepare.
The firm was founded by Peter Leyden for his advisory work in strategic foresight with senior leaders in companies. as well as other organizations in the philanthropic and political worlds.
Leyden also can draw off his extraordinary network of remarkable innovators in a wide range of fields to participate in sessions and help expand the thinking of those senior leaders.
Leyden works with C Suites and boards to help them re-think their strategies in light of looming changes in their industries or fields. One way to do that is through half-day workshops that use a talk or two to expand the thinking of the participants and then drive conversations to think through the implications of what’s probably coming.
Leyden can do tailored talks for company off-sites to open up the horizons for larger teams that are stuck in the status quo. This gets participants energized and inspired to make the most of the day or retreat.
Leyden also can act like a “foresight coach” helping individual leaders think more rigorously and systematically about the many system changes coming in the decade ahead and plan for what to do.
Check out Reinvent Future’s separate website for more.
The Four Key Questions that a Leader Needs to Know
What if you knew what was really going on in the world right now? If you had insights that went against the conventional wisdom but were more accurate and true?
What if you knew what probably was coming in the next 10 years? What new technologies were going to emerge, what trends actually play out, what systems were going to fundamentally change?
What if you knew what’s possible to achieve in the next 25 years — for the world, for America, for your field or for your organization? What if you understood the best case about what is truly possible in solving our many challenges?
And what if you knew what you could do now to help hit those ambitious long-term targets? Or what could be done now to prepare for those changes inexorably coming in the decade ahead?
If you knew the answers to all those four sets of questions, how useful, how valuable would it be? It would be very valuable.
If you even had early insights into what’s really going on now, what’s probably coming in the next 10 years, what’s possible to achieve in the next 25 years, and what you could do today to make the most of it - that would be very useful indeed.
That’s what Reinvent Futures does.
Helping European Leaders in their Visits to San Francisco
Leyden has carved out a niche as an interpreter to European business leaders about the latest developments in technology coming out of the San Francisco Bay Area.
Sometimes he is asked to come to Europe to give talks in executive summits filled with senior business leaders. You can see some of those talks in Brussels, Paris and Cannes in other speaking sections on this website.
In recent years he has helped visiting delegations of senior leaders from other countries make the most of their relatively short visits. In the last couple years with the explosion of AI, Leyden has anchored sessions with visitors from Norway, Sweden, Mexico, Asia, and quite a few delegations from Italy (see the adjacent photo with the Italian flag).
Sometimes Leyden does talks, sometimes moderates panels of experts who he can help bring together, and sometimes hosts dinners and drives conversations about what’s happening in the Silicon Vally region around them.
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 investor-backed startup 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 startup Reinvent it was interactive group video that became commonplace in the pandemic.
Leyden 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 The Long Boom 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 worked closely with both Schwartz and Brand for years, and now considers them mentors who influence how he works to this day.
Driving Roundtable Discussions About the Implications of AI
In 2024, a year after Generative AI had burst onto the scene, senior leaders in a wide range of businesses were trying to figure out what they should be doing to adapt to this powerful new tool.
Reinvent Futures helped the global consulting firm Slalom design and produce a series of roundtable discussions called The New Ways Forward. The participants were senior leaders representing many of Slalom’s top clients in the Northern California region.
Leyden hosted the events which gathered a dozen senior leaders in each of six roundtables. He started the events with a big-picture talk, then interviewed some of the entrepreneurs pioneering AI, then set up the discussions that took place at the tables.
Leyden ended by drawing out the key insights to come from the discussions in real time, and then synthesizing them all in a final written report.
Advice to those in Philanthropy & Politics
Leyden mostly works with business leaders but he has given similar strategic foresight advice to senior leaders in the worlds of philanthropy as well as politics and government.
In fact from 2005 through 2008, he worked almost exclusively with elected leaders and political groups in Washington DC in helping them make use of the new wave of tools like YouTube, Facebook, Google Ads and text messaging (you can blame him for all those texts asking for donations).
In 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. This gives a sense of how he tailors advice to a field.
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.
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.