About Jonathan
An inventor and designer, he has led experiential design for theme parks, 27,000 SQF of exhibits for the US Pavilion at Expo Milano and over 3,300 Verizon Retail Stores.
The former the Global Futurist at HP, he is currently the Executive Chairman of the Center for Radical Change, the Senior Fellow at HBR’s China New Growth Institute and a Board Advisor at Frost & Sullivan, a major global intelligence firm.
His companies have invented 325 products and created $27B of new revenue for clients.
He is the author Rogue Waves: Future-Proof Your Business to Survive and Profit from Radical Change, McGraw Hill, 2021. He is a thought leader, speaker and contributor to media platforms like: ABC News, CNBC, HBR, Forbes, SXSW, TED, Stanford University and Thinkers50.
Some Visionary Partners
Architect Your Future: Change is Opportunity
In today’s fast-paced world, M&A is about more than deals—it’s about successfully navigating cultural integration and the uncertainties that come with change.
Jonathan Brill, former Global Futurist at HP, CEO of an environmental design firm, and international bestselling author, will show you how to turn disruption into your greatest advantage. Drawing from his experience guiding top organizations through transformation and his study of 2.7 million managers, he will reveal four best practices that will help you lead through uncertainty and achieve sustainable success.
You’ll walk away with new skills and actionable strategies to architect your firm’s future, ensuring success in an unpredictable market—long after the deal is done.
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Don’t just watch your future happen — architect it. Take a thrilling journey to the frontlines of tomorrow, where technology, geopolitics, and society collide to create what’s next. If you know how to turn disruption to your advantage, it’s your biggest opportunity.
There’s no better guide to the changes we face — or coach on how to take advantage of them — than Jonathan Brill, HP Global Futurist, bestselling author, and celebrated inventor. His repeated ability to spot disruption and flip it into opportunity is why Forbes recently ranked him as the #1 Futurist in the world.
Your assumptions will be challenged by hard data. You’ll be inspired by extraordinary people who are changing the world. Your imagination will be ignited as you gain the same exclusive access as the Fortune 50 CEOs and government leaders Brill advises. In this inspiring talk, you’ll learn how to:
• Navigate Uncertainty — Discover the 10 trends shaping the 2020’s.
• Invent Tomorrow — Leverage AI on your org chart.
• Do What Matters — Learn the ABC’s, the three actionable tools to Architect Your Future.
As Adam Grant said, this is “an actionable framework for driving change, instead of being blindsided by it.”
Which path will you choose?
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How will AI make you a better leader? ‘Silicon Valley Legend’ Jonathan Brill will take you on a behind the scenes tour of the world’s advanced technology labs to find out. This talk is not about science fiction. It’s about inspiration and action.
There’s a reason HBR called Brill, “The world’s foremost transformation architect”. As HP’s Global Futurist, an AI inventor and the bestselling author on transformation, he has successfully helped both legacy and AI native companies transform to win.
In your time together, you’ll have access to the same customized insights as clients like Microsoft and the Secret Service. In the process, you’ll learn to:
• Align your team with vision, values and goals that take advantage of AI.
• Find new ways to solve complex problems with speed and creativity.
Perhaps, most importantly, you’ll discover that AI doesn’t replace humans. It is making us more human.
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Most people think luck is coincidence, fate or that you make it yourself. It’s none of the above.
It is, however, a science-based skill that your audience can get dramatically better at it — in less than an hour.
Luck isn’t chance. It’s a choice. Your audience can have more joy, success and ease with less effort through this science based, interactive keynote — no matter how lucky they are. Brill, an international best selling author and scholar on decision making, and principal investigator of the largest study on luck, persuasively argues that luck isn’t an option, it’s perhaps the most impactful factor of success. It’s strategic in your business and in your life.
Throughout your time together, he’ll create a sense of wonder and opens up a world of practical possibility through hilarious personal stories, intimate interactive moments and hard data. Along the ride, you’ll learn how to find rainbows, dodge riptides, survive meteors and make gold.
More importantly, you’ll learn four science-based methods to turn uncertainty into opportunity in nearly everything you do.
Once you understand the science of luck, uncertainty won’t ever paralyze you. You’ll embrace it! Would you like a little more luck in your life?
Strategy Tours
Keynotes
“Jonathan blew us away.”
— Alexis R., TED
AI on Your Org Chart
"Our executives walked away changed.”
— Anne Devlin, Head of Learning and Development, J.P. Morgan
Architect Your Future
#1 Ranked Futurist in the World.
— Forbes
Strategic Luck
“His rigorous, unifying message drives results.”
— Doug Warner, Head of Innovation, Amazon
Architect Your Future®
Workshops
Jonathan and his team help you stake your claim on the future through workshops that focus innovation and transformation efforts in the right places. Based on his international best selling book, Rogue Waves, this approach helps leaders to enhance their organizational performance in three ways.
A
Awareness
Make the case for a better future.
C
Culture
Make your transformation last.
B
Behavior
Make faster, better decisions.
“An actionable framework for driving change,
instead of being blindsided by it.”
—Adam Grant, #1 New York Times bestselling author of THINK AGAIN and host of the TED podcast WorkLife
First Principles
Disruption isn’t the problem. It’s the opportunity.
We can’t know the future, but you can know more than most imagine.
Effective change leverages what we can know, instead of ignoring it.
Innovation Bingo
Workshop 1
Will your innovation programs deliver results in our increasingly volatile world? This impactful program cuts through the hocus pocus of innovation and gives you the two tools you need to reliably deliver radical value in our time of radical change: the Four FOES model and Risk Switches. This powerful tool is based on futures best practices developed for the US Secret Service to protect national leaders and the financial system. It was recently published in Building Resilient Organizations a survey book of best practices from PMI, the Brightline Institute and Thinkers50.
You will work in facilitated small groups (either on or offline) to explore a specific business problem (chosen by you) and work to identify the key risks and opportunities. Depending on your needs, this can be framed as either a product or a process innovation exercise. It will help you identify:
The existential challenges that you, your competitors and customers face.
Identify the places where you have leverage and where to build it.
The criteria for a successful innovation solution.
In a debrief conversation, we will learn where the key challenges were in the experience and tools to overcome them. We’ll also discuss best practices for running innovation workshops (many of which were facilitated in the workshop).
You’ll Walk Away With Immediately Actionable Skills
A new approach for identifying and prioritizing the most valuable innovation.
Insight into customer needs as well as your own strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats.
Tools to communicate to build rapid alignment around innovation initiatives.
Venue & Time
Venue – This experience can be run both in person at your facility or at our innovation training center at the Chef’s Garden in Ohio (the farm featured in ROGUE WAVES).
Time – This program can be run in one segment or, ideally, in a large group session to cover core content and then a series of smaller group workshops.
Reward vs. Risk
Workshop 2
Why do some leaders make better bets? They have better tools for making sense of the future. Risk and reward aren’t causally related, but they operate on the same underlying equation. This means that the same tools that help you manage volatility can help you turn into opportunity. In this exciting, highly interactive workshop, your team will learn tools and techniques to make bigger bets while more effectively managing risk.
Over the course of a few hours, you and your team will play three games that prepare a startup, Bayou Bob’s Pizza to benefit from a broad range of possible futures:
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Bayou Bob’s Ouja Board
In this interactive game, you’ll help Bob become resilient to the types of catastrophic shocks he is likely to experience in the coming decade.
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Rogue Waves
Rogue waves occur when individually manageable trends overlap, making them unmanageable.
You’ll learn about the major trends that are likely to upend business in the coming decade and work with your team to reshape Bob’s business from one that won’t survive a rogue wave to one that will thrive when it occurs.
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Experiment Portfolios
You’ll take your innovative ideas, evaluate and prioritize them as a whole, instead of as individual opportunities. Where can a set of low risk experiments add up to more than the sum of the parts and how do you make sure you can recover if a big experiment fails late in the process?
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The Four Causes of Failure
Throughout our time together, you’ll discover the four primary reasons that new businesses fail, how to mitigate them and most importantly, how to identify opportunities that deliver outsized value. You’ll explore the range of external disruptions that emerging opportunities face on the path to scale, and how to increase your resilience, no matter what the future holds.
You’ll walk away with immediately actionable skills
Rapidly evaluate new opportunities for resilience and growth
Prioritize activities and identify short term experiments that have long-term impact
Language that will help you discuss new opportunities and threats in ways that financially and operationally-oriented leaders take seriously
Visual Futuring
Workshop 4
The problem with the future isn’t that it’s unknowable. It’s that each of us can only imagine a small part of it.
Invigorate your audience as they work together to visualize the future over the course of your event. At the end of the event, the video can be used as a capstone. The video can also be sent our to your attendees, so they can share the excitement of your show. An opportunity to discuss the future is both a great way to enhance conversations at the event and to stay top of mind and build excitement for your next get together.
Approach
Develop a series of of experiences, starting with depth interviews, progressing to small group events and then a large group event in the fall that helps them to identify and articulate the key challenges they are facing and to recognize KPMG as a valued partner in solving them.
Our futurist, screenwriters and concept artists will build a creative bond with your community as your vision of the future, moves from words to a tangible future. Conversations rapidly turn into illustrations, then White Board Animations and then potentially a short movie or series of films that are used to promote and frame an event in Fall 2023 or Spring 2024.
Interviews result in ‘Postcards from the Future’ inviting attendees to a series of gatherings where we all share and debate a White Board Animation. This work then progresses into a high end presentation that can promote the event of be broken into shorter pieces for social media.
Other Creative Deliverables
Postcards from the Future
Books
Flims
Examples of the Process
The 5 Reasons We Fail to See the Future
Workshop 3
We can know a tremendous amount about the future, but organizations consistently fail to for five reasons.
Using Binoculars instead of a radar — Coming to the wrong conclusion because you only analyzed part of the data.
The Elephant Problem — Looking at the parts instead of the whole.
Fighting the Last War — Assuming the future will look like the past.
Packing for the Wrong Trip — Preparing for a future that won’t occur.
Surrendering to Reality — Failing to change probability through innovation.
• What are you choosing to ignore about the future?
• What are you giving up for the illusion of certainty?
• What are you going to do about it?
JONATHAN BRILL
Business Futurist // Transformation Architect
Jonathan Brill writes, speaks and advises on how to create, manage and turn radical change to your advantage. Brill is an expert on strategic foresight and technology innovation. His warm style, compelling stories, and intellectual rigor inspire visionaries and open even the most hard-boiled executives to new ways of thinking and doing.
A renaissance man, Brill blends the worlds of business and content.
Harvard Business Review recently called Brill, “The world’s leading transformation architect.” His visionary, yet pragmatic approach to the future is based on years as the Global Futurist at HP where he directed long-term strategy and planning. He is the Senior Fellow at HBR’s China New Growth Institute and Board Advisor at Frost & Sullivan, one of the world’s largest market intelligence firms, with offices in 46 countries.
He is the author of Rogue Waves, Future-Proof Your Business to Survive and Profit from Radical Change (McGraw-Hill), the #2 selling economics book in China. The Economist called it, “A very important book for managers.” and Adam Grant called it, “An actionable framework for driving change instead of being blindsided by it.” He has taught the techniques in it to over 27,000 executives, ranging from startups to the Fortune 500 to the United States Secret Service.
He also serves as the Futurist-in-Residence at Territory Studio, the creative visionaries behind the sci-fi tech in Stephen Spielberg’s Ready Player One, Ghost in the Shell and Blade Runner 2049, where he develops products and better worlds for both super villains and real-life heroes.
Inc. magazine called Brill “A Silicon Valley legend.” because his innovation consultancies developed over 350 products and generated over $27B USD for clients like Samsung, Microsoft, Verizon, PepsiCo and the US government. These projects have ranged from AI, search engines, and metaverse technologies to theme park rides and design of the US Pavilion at the 2015 World's Fair (Expo Milano) to Taco Bell’s Gordita.
He is a frequent thought leader, speaker and contributor to HBR, TED, Global Peter Drucker Forum, SCMP, SXSW, J.P. Morgan, Singularity, Forbes, Korn Ferry, The Economist Global Business Report, Bloomberg, Sirius XM, Fast Company, The Project Management Institute, Brightline and Thinkers50. He has educated corporate leaders at Harvard and Stanford Universities.
He holds a degree in industrial design from Pratt Institute, spent years as a research consultant to the MIT Media Lab and in management training at the Stanford University Graduate School of Business.
Value
Let’s keep it simple.
Jonathan’s rate is $12,500 for site days and $6,500 for prep days.
inclusive of workshop materials for the audience.
Any Visual Futuring options will be priced separately.
Any travel, AV, hospitality and location costs
will be passed through or paid directly by the client.
50% on signing. 50% fourteen days before the event.