Working with Lisa

It can be difficult to take the long view when problems seem overwhelming.

Lisa creates environments, experiences and classes to help people expand their futures, adapt to complexities, and build civic fellowship. Her work blends imagination with possibility, building the capacity to take the long view when today’s problems seem overwhelming.

Passionate about igniting positive agency and leadership capacity for the long term, Lisa’s work is intergenerational and cross-sector. Her projects, courses, and partnerships help leaders and learners become the best version of themselves while shaping futures they want to be a part of.

Classes and Courses

Lisa teaches classes on futures thinking and leadership at the Stanford d.school, LinkedIn Learning, the Aspen Institute, and with organizations and education institutions around the world.

Inventing the Future

The famous computer scientist, Alan Kay, once said, “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.” As such, we are all responsible for inventing the future we hope that we and our descendants will experience. The class will feature debates on frontier technologies in which we present utopian and dystopian scenarios, and will include class guests who are inventing the future right now.

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Redesigning work in 2021

As we imagine a future after COVID-19, we have a chance to make some very different choices about work. We can make work engaging, sustainable, and blended into our lives, while also supporting well-being and human flourishing. This course offers guidelines for making strategic and human-centered choices to redesign how people work together at your company. Lisa Kay Solomon explains how to reimagine leadership practices, help your employees feel supported and safe, and create a resilient culture, driven by shared purpose and trust.

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Leader as Futurist

Futures-centered thinking may be the most important leadership skill you've never been taught. It’s a discipline and set of practices that everyone can learn. This course is about helping you see, shape, and share the future by improving your strategic thinking and foresight skills, your comfort with ambiguity, and your ability to communicate opportunities in a way that gets others excited, too. In this course, you’ll learn how to imagine new futures, avoid being blindsided, and take steps to bring preferred futures to life.

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Futures Series

As the world locked its doors in 2020, the d.school looked outward to build a global community through conversations with futures scholars, practitioners, artists, activists and pioneers to explore, expand, and extend how we see and shape a more positive, inclusive, just future. We wondered: what are the practices we could all learn to approach the future with a sense of personal and collective agency, steeped in possibility and imaginative hope.

These questions framed the foundation of our new d.school futures series, a monthly public collaborative learning session where we invite future focused thinkers, scholars, artists, community connectors and amplifiers to share ideas, practices, experiences, mindsets and possibilities with us.

New View EDU

In the past few years, school leaders have faced a constant need to innovate and respond to rapidly changing conditions in their communities, our nation and our world. Now we’re all seeking ways to bring healing and strength to our schools in the year ahead. But what else can we learn from these challenging times, and what inspiration can we draw for the future of schools? National Association of Independent School’s Chief Innovation Officer Tim Fish teams up with Lisa Kay Solomon, author, educator, and designer of strategic conversations for leaders, to host NAIS New View EDU, a podcast that probes the questions that matter most right now.

Keynotes and Moderating

Lisa offers keynotes on futures thinking, navigating ambiguity, and bold imagination. She also designs and hosts strategic conversations and conferences that explore new terrain and inclusive possibilities.

Aspen Institute: Power of Scenario Planning

While we can’t predict, we can learn how to “rehearse” it to be more prepared. Scenarios are multiple, alternative stories about how the future could play out, which encourages teams to challenge their own assumptions and think creatively about change. In this session, we’ll explore a range of possible futures for how the pandemic and recovery might play out to help inform our own solutions, and choices we may make as leaders in our communities.

Stanford: Shaping the Future

Hear from Lisa Kay Solomon, designer in residence and lecturer at the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design (d.school) as she discusses designing the presidency and shaping the future.

Boma France: Full Stack Learning Organization

Lisa Kay Solomon shares a new “full stack” model that reimagines learning as a scalable leadership stance of adaptive, future-focused, collaborative practices.

Civic Futures Projects

Lisa has infused design, imagination, and her passion that tomorrow could be better than today to fuel a number of cross-sector civic imagination projects,

Vote by Design

While we can’t predict, we can learn how to “rehearse” it to be more prepared. Scenarios are multiple, alternative stories about how the future could play out, which encourages teams to challenge their own assumptions and think creatively about change. In this session, we’ll explore a range of possible futures for how the pandemic and recovery might play out to help inform our own solutions, and choices we may make as leaders in our communities.

#AllVoteNoPlay

#AllVoteNoPlay on November 2, 2021 offers a historic moment. For one day, coaches can focus on helping their athletes become not just the best players in their sport, but also to be leaders as engaged citizens and community members.

Building America’s Teammates

Building America’s Teammates is a nonpartisan, accessible, coach-friendly program that helps all athletes see themselves as capable and confident participants in a thriving, democratic society.