Lisa Bodell

“Complexity is crippling our organizations. It’s stifling our people and keeping them from doing their most meaningful and impactful work.”

Lisa Bodell, a global leader on simplification, collaboration, and innovation, has a solution. Lisa shows organizations how to eliminate complexity and leverage simplicity – unleashing creativity and sparking the energy so essential to innovate and compete in a rapidly changing world.

FutureThink, which she founded in 2003, works with leading brands worldwide and has become the largest source of innovation research, tools, and training in the world.

Lisa is the author of two groundbreaking books, Why Simple Wins: Escape the Complexity Trap and Get to Work That Matters and Kill the Company: End the Status Quo, Start an Innovation Revolution. She ranks on the list of Top 50 Speakers Worldwide and captivates audiences with her energy and humor. Lisa’s keynotes leave audiences inspired to change and arms them with radically simple tools to get to the work that matters. +

After earning her business degree from University of Michigan, Lisa launched her career at Leo Burnett in Chicago, where she discovered a gift for uniting strategically-driven ideas with forward-thinking themes. She went on to build two successful businesses before moving to New York and focusing on the simplification and innovation space with FutureThink.

Lisa brings a compelling perspective to the sought-after topics of simplification and innovation to over 100,000 people each year. A thought leader and serial entrepreneur, her transformational message has inspired executives at top-ranked organizations such as Google, SAP, Citigroup, and the Department of National Intelligence.

Lisa has contributed her expertise to a wide variety of media. She is a monthly contributor to Forbes and has frequently appeared in other media including: Fast Company, WIRED, The New York Times, Inc., Harvard Business Review, and CNN. She has also been featured in many major books such as Warren Berger’s A More Beautiful Question, Adam Grant’s Originals, and AfterShock, the 50-year celebration based on futurist Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock.

Lisa has taught innovation at both American University and Fordham University and has a TED talk on the topic. She has served on the board of advisors of several organizations, including the Global Agenda Council for the World Economic Forum, the United States National Security Agency, the Association of Professional Futurists, and the Novartis board of Diversity & Inclusion. --

Lisa Bodell Speaking Presentations:

Live or Virtual:

Key Speech Themes:

• Embracing Simplicity
• Leadership
• Change
• Innovation
• Agility
• Banish Complexity
• Transforming the Culture
• Unleashing the Power of People
• Increasing Employee Engagement

Killing Complexity: Why Simple Wins +

Complexity is crippling our organizations. Unproductive meetings, irrelevant rules and reports, and endless emails keep people from doing the work that matters most. Worse, complexity dampens morale and creates feelings of futility. It doesn’t have to be this way. CEO and TED-talk veteran Lisa Bodell shows organizations how to unleash the energy, collaboration, innovation, and engagement lying in wait by embracing a mindset of simplification right now. This spirited presentation shows how small changes can have a profound impact on the organization’s people, competitiveness, and ability to adapt. Lisa offers techniques used by the nimblest of companies to save time, kill rules, and simplify everything. Drawing on research from her book, Why Simple Wins, Lisa’s energy, engaging stories, and interactive exercises prove that using simplicity as an operating principle is the surest path to organizational transformation.

You will learn:

• How simplification sparks action and enables groups to move faster with more focus than everyone else.
• Why simplification is not just a method but a mindset and a habit – a key to resilience and adaptability.
• How to create a workplace where there’s more time to innovate and think.
• How asking questions helps eliminate organizational and individual busywork that’s outlived its time.
• Web-based real-time interactive exercises reveal what’s holding people back from embracing simplification.
• How killing complexity increases trust, engagement, talent retention, and helps people be their best. --

Leading Simplicity - A Roadmap +

Embracing simplicity as an operational mindset can unleash the power of people to be their best and focus on work that really matters. But simplicity needs an advocate and leaders who step up to send a message that simplicity is a priority that will reap outsized results. In this presentation, Lisa Bodell delivers real world tools leaders can use to create a culture with simplicity in its DNA and a bias for action. Lisa, author of the bestseller Why Simple Wins, unpacks stories and insights leaders can use to inspire their people, ignite disruptive thinking, build agility, and turn problems into possibilities. With energy, humor, and revealing online interactive exercises, Lisa shows that simplicity is the catalyst that accelerates innovation, collaboration, engagement, and growth. Simplicity will create a sustainable competitive advantage because it’s the absolute foundation of resilience in the face of never-ending change.

You will learn:

• How to cultivate a dynamic culture of simplification that makes challenging outdated practices the norm, creating space for more innovation to happen.
• Drive an agenda that makes simplification a seamless part of your operating system, placing equal importance on eliminating work as adding it, fostering a more balanced approach.
• Align teams in identifying and eliminating time-wasting habits, allowing them to reach their goals more quickly.
• Set the groundwork for enduring change and improved problem-solving by reducing stress and giving teams the space to think.
• Create a strategic advantage by better focusing teams, driving proactive change, retaining talent effortlessly, and outpacing the competition with increased agility.
• Online interactive exercises reveal what’s holding your organization back from embracing a mindset of simplicity. --

Unleashing Innovation +

If your organization is not innovating as fast as you’d like, it’s time to address it – before it’s too late. In most organizations, the very structures put in place to help them grow all too often hold them back. If you want people to approach change differently, you have to help them change their approach. In this presentation, Lisa Bodell delivers a high energy and inspiring call to arms to start a revolution in how we think and how we work. Lisa is founder and CEO of FutureThink, the largest source of innovation research, tools, and training in the world. Her insights help increase the capacity for innovation by shifting mindset and engaging everyone in the process of killing off the status quo. In this presentation, Lisa inspires people to think differently and provides the tools to solve problems that stand in the way of breakthrough innovation in your organization.

You will learn:

• How our current organizational values and structures, designed to help innovation take hold, often hold it back – and how to change that.
• How to unleash the dormant potential in teams by reigniting critical aptitudes such as curiosity, inquiry, and creative problem-solving.
• Practical yet provocative techniques for reinvention and innovation with current products and services.
• Proven methods that reignite change and transformation and make everyone a change agent.
• Examples of how even the smallest changes can have big impact.
• What’s holding your organization back from innovating through the use of online interactive exercises. --

A global leader on culture and behaviour change, Lisa Bodell is the founder and CEO of the skill-building firm FutureThink. She has helped transform hundreds of thousands of employees from Fortune 500 companies by showing them how to eliminate the complexity that holds them back and get to the work that matters.

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*Note: Lisa Bodell is one of the top 50 business innovation keynote speakers in the world. Please click on the Fee Range box, before contacting us about this speaker. The fee range box is located at the top right of this web page if accessing from a desktop computer, and directly underneath the main image if accessing from a smartphone.