Rita J. King Speaker Biography
Futurist, Writer, Entrepreneur, and
Specialist in Applied Imagination
Rita J. King is a futurist, writer and entrepreneur who works with senior leadership teams around the world to align values with business goals and advise on pragmatic action. Rita designs dynamic plans for the development of collaborative culture.
Futurist
Rita has served as Innovator-in-Residence at IBM and futurist at NASA Langley’s think-tank. Rita is currently a futurist at the Science and Entertainment Exchange of the National Academy of Sciences, for which she invents technologies, novel characters and story architecture for Hollywood and TV projects.
Imagination Age
Rita is the creator of the Imagination Age, a way to think about navigating between the Industrial Era, which is fading, but not gone, and the Intelligence Era, which is coming, but not here.
Affiliations
She is a Salzburg Global Fellow with a focus on art, science and culture, and a LinkedIn Influencer with more than half a million followers, including many senior leaders and technologists across industries.
Media
Features by her or about her work have appeared globally, from The New York Times to CNN, TIME, Fast Company, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Inc., Entrepreneur, The Design Observer, the BBC, Le Figaro, Psychology Today and many more.
Keynote Speaker
Rita is a frequent keynote speaker for many companies including Amazon, FedEx, GE, IBM, Manpower, Samsung, Saatchi and Saatchi and more. She speaks at many conferences from CUSP to the Business Innovation Factory.
Rita J. King Speaking Topics
Creativity and Design of Identity and Community
Rita thinks of technology as a prism held up to the bright beam of the imagination to create a new global culture and economy. Rita J. King is innovator-in-residence at IBM's Analytics Virtual Center, a security futurist at the Aspen Institute, and a senior fellow at two think-tanks. She works globally across platforms to produce creative mixed media, mixed-reality events, research projects, broadcasts and related products. Storyteller, artist and writer, she is the founder and Creative Director of Leveling Up, a company that develops business strategy, immersive narrative, multimedia, games, conferences and other events for the Imagination Age. King espouses the creative use of digital technology to inhabit ideas, facilitate new dialogue and collaborate on solutions to challenging issues.
Sense and Adapt
What if, for the entire lifespan of a major, strategic project, you could monitor and measure what’s really going on from the perspective of the people who are doing the work day in and day out? What if you could share this qualitative and quantitative data directly with senior leaders, who could then take immediate action to fix problems, create clarity and keep the project on track? Surveys are often impersonal, with incomplete information that flows one way, often out of context. Instead, Science House created the Sense and Adapt system to bring teams together across levels to build a flexible and agile capability on big projects. Sense and Adapt generates an honest assessment of key project metrics on a monthly basis, along with anonymized feedback from members of the team. This report includes the monitoring of metrics that are relevant to your project. Sense and Adapt also contributes to real time leadership training and problem solving. Teams continuously learn and adapt to optimize their own contributions to the mission, while senior leaders have a new view into the reality of the work they are entrusted with completing. The key to the Sense and Adapt system is to get better at sensing issues and adapting the organization to solve the problems and challenges discovered.