Eleanor Winton

Director, Foresightfully

Eleanor is a foresight and innovation specialist whose career has spanned legal policy, money laundering investigations, innovation and future thinking. She designed, built and led KPMG’s Future Institute in the UK, the firm’s first foresight capability, and has worked with the senior leadership teams of organisations spanning multiple sectors and industries from healthcare through to mining, logistics and financial services.

Today she is the owner of Foresightfully, a boutique consultancy, which specialises in supporting C-suite leaders to think and act differently in the face of rapid and unpredictable change; that might include refreshing strategy, motivating the leadership team, bringing the ‘outside-in’ perspective or providing one to one challenge. Eleanor specialises in creative thinking on strategy, leadership and culture and brings experience, insight and provocation around global trends, future ready leadership, scenario planning, strategy, innovation and disruption.

Using value as the anchor, how it is built, sustained and lost, Eleanor helps her clients to understand the impact of external change on their sector and industry dynamics and, critically, to react by developing clear short and long term action plans. She provokes her clients to be curious about what’s changing and to be bold in taking advantage of the opportunities that change presents.

Eleanor is co-author of The Disruption Game Plan: New rules for connected thinking on innovation and risk and a member of faculty on the Kings College London and Duke Corporate Education Executive MBA programmes.

She is trusted by clients including Mars Foods, Aviva, the UK Green Building Council, British Airways, the NHS, KPMG, First Group, Associated British Ports, Hiscox, JLL and many others, to provoke different thinking and inspire action.

Whilst Eleanor’s work today is focussed on foresight, she spent the early part of her career specialising in hindsight as an investigator of misconduct, fraud and money laundering at the Scottish Legal Services Ombudsman, the Financial Ombudsman service and in KPMG’s Forensic group. Through this work she developed an ability to quickly assess and understand a client's business and bring analytical thinking to their challenges. In 2009, frustrated by the need to constantly look backwards and fix problems rather than helping her clients to look forward and create opportunities, she took advantage of an invitation to join KPMG’s first ever innovation group. Trained by the ‘?What If!’ Innovation team in creative facilitation and innovative tools and behaviours, she was part of a select team of ‘Innovation Mentors’ driving the growth of an innovation culture within the firm. Her work required close collaboration with specialist teams to integrate innovative thinking and creative approaches into existing projects and new pursuits. As a result, she has a proven ability to quickly get under the skin of a challenge, no matter how complex it seems on the surface.

Eleanor went on to design and lead KPMG’s first ever foresight capability, The Future Institute, which worked directly with the Executive teams of key clients to identify and act on disruptive trends and to create live opportunities for both clients and the firm. In 2017 she set up Foresightfully to continue this work through speaking, design, facilitation and coaching. Foresightfully has a passion for, and focus on, sustainable business and the urgent role of business leaders in designing an equal and inclusive future.


Strategic Curiosity - How asking the right questions can open our eyes to alternative futures and opportunities for growth