Roger Spitz
The operating assumptions most organisations still use for strategic planning come from a more predictable century. Leaders are running multi-year capital plans, technology roadmaps and workforce strategies against scenarios that are now changing inside the planning cycle. The real discipline is no longer long-range forecasting; it is anticipation, antifragility and agility, and most leadership teams are not yet trained to reason that way.
Roger Spitz is a futurist, Disruptive Futures Institute Chair and bestselling author of Disrupt With Impact who helps leaders replace fragile planning with antifragile strategy when the future refuses to stay predictable.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Roger Spitz
- His background gives him unusual commercial authority. Before Techistential and the Disruptive Futures Institute, he led Technology M&A at BNP Paribas globally, where he advised on more than 50 transactions with a combined value over $25 billion. That record matters to boards and institutional investors whose advisers often lack operating experience.
- His book Disrupt With Impact won the 2024 Chanticleer International Book Awards first place in Business and Enterprise, and the four-volume Definitive Guide to Thriving on Disruption is used as a practitioner reference on strategic foresight.
- The AAA Framework (antifragility, anticipation, agility) gives leadership teams a concrete lens to apply to their own operating environment rather than another abstract call to “embrace change”.
- Techistentialism, the concept he coined, is specifically about human agency and decision-making under AI, which is the question most executive teams are quietly asking themselves about the technology their organisations are deploying.
- Institutional anchors at the World Economic Forum’s Global Foresight Network, Thinkers360 Top 10 for Management Leadership and the AI Council of the Indian Society for Artificial Intelligence place him inside the forums his audiences either belong to or want to.
Biography highlights
- President of Techistential and Chair of the Disruptive Futures Institute, San Francisco
- Former Global Head of Technology M&A at BNP Paribas; 50-plus transactions with a combined value exceeding $25 billion
- Author of Disrupt With Impact and the four-volume Definitive Guide to Thriving on Disruption
- 2024 Chanticleer International Book Awards first place in Business and Enterprise Non-Fiction
- Thinkers360 Top 10 for Management Leadership
- WEF Global Foresight Network member; AI Council, Indian Society for Artificial Intelligence
Biography
Traditional strategy runs on prediction. The trouble is that the systems senior leaders now operate in, AI, geopolitics, climate, capital markets, are non-linear in ways prediction cannot catch. Roger Spitz’s work is built around the alternative: a discipline of antifragility, anticipation and agility that allows organisations to benefit from volatility rather than simply endure it.
His authority starts in finance. He was Global Head of Technology M&A at BNP Paribas, where he advised on more than 50 transactions with combined value over $25 billion, which is a different foundation to most futurists and is visible in how he handles boards. He now runs Techistential, the climate and foresight strategy advisory he founded, and chairs the Disruptive Futures Institute in San Francisco, where he coined the term “Techistentialism” to describe human agency and decision-making in an AI-mediated world.
The body of published work is substantial. Disrupt With Impact: Achieve Business Success in an Unpredictable World won first place in Business and Enterprise Non-Fiction at the 2024 Chanticleer International Book Awards, and the four-volume Definitive Guide to Thriving on Disruption is used as a practitioner reference on strategic foresight. He sits in the World Economic Forum’s Global Foresight Network, ranks in the Thinkers360 Top 10 for Management Leadership, and serves on the AI Council of the Indian Society for Artificial Intelligence.
For CEOs, boards, institutional investors and policy leaders, what Spitz offers is both specific and operational. The AAA Framework gives them a lens. The AI and techistentialism work gives them a language for what autonomous systems are doing to their operating model. And the M&A record gives them a speaker who has been on the other side of the capital-markets conversation they are probably also having.
Key speaking topics
- Strategic foresight and the AAA Framework (antifragility, anticipation, agility)
- AI, techistentialism and human agency in an automated world
- Non-linear disruption and scenario thinking
- Geopolitical and technological risk
- Boardroom strategy under unpredictability
- Building antifragile organisations
Ideal for
- Boards, CEOs and executive committees revisiting strategic planning assumptions under accelerating disruption
- Chief strategy officers, chief AI officers and heads of corporate development
- Institutional investors, asset managers and private equity leadership teams
- Policy leaders and central banks running foresight and resilience briefs
- World Economic Forum and high-level industry forums
Audience outcomes
- A clearer view of why linear forecasting is failing and what replaces it in current conditions
- A working grasp of the AAA Framework and how to apply it to the audience’s own strategy cycle
- Specific framing for human-AI decision-making drawn from Disrupt With Impact and the techistentialism work
- Case material from M&A, frontier technology and foresight consulting usable in the audience’s own sector
- Reference material from the published books that leadership teams can circulate after the session
Talks
A keynote on how leaders move from linear forecasting to anticipatory, antifragile reasoning.
Key takeaways:
- Why traditional planning cycles fail under non-linear disruption
- The core moves inside the AAA Framework, applied to the audience’s sector
- Specific prompts for how a leadership team re-writes its strategic planning routine
A session on human-AI collaboration and the techistentialism frame.
Key takeaways:
- How to think about agency, judgment and accountability when AI is in the loop
- The governance and organisational design questions most teams are postponing
- Practical heuristics drawn from his work with boards and AI councils
A session on building antifragile organisations that gain from volatility.
Key takeaways:
- The operating choices that distinguish antifragile organisations from resilient ones
- Specific interventions for strategy, talent and capital allocation
- Case material from frontier-technology M&A and foresight consulting