Committing to Change (Back to the Futures #13)

With world moving at a high speed that often rewards the individual, commitment can start to feel… optional.

We can get a lot of what we want without needing each other all that much. We can optimize, outsource, scroll, unsubscribe. We can avoid friction. And if friction shows up anyway, it’s often easier to step back than to stay in it.

But most meaningful change still asks for the opposite. It asks for people who commit, to each other, to the work, to the slow, imperfect craft of doing things together. Not because it’s efficient (it rarely is, at least in the first place, but because it’s how barriers get crossed and trust gets built. Turning agency into something collective.

As part of that, hope can be a strategy, but only when it’s backed by commitment: to show up, to follow through, to repair when things get messy, to keep going when the incentives point the other way. This has been sitting with us for a while, and our director Mathias Behn Bjørnhof wrote more about it here.

It’s also part of why we’re building what we’re building at ANTICIPATE right now: the Impact Foresight Project, talks on Democratising Futures, and more accessible learning experiences like The Foresight Facilitator. Teaching foresight is both about having a strong set of tools, but also about growing futures literacy.  Ideally as a civic capability - it’s something that belongs in more rooms, with more people, across generations.

Because the futures are still in the making. And the question isn’t only what we can imagine.

It’s what we’re willing to commit to, together, when the work demands patience, participation, and the kind of productive friction we can’t get from AI.

So here are a few questions we’re carrying into next month:

→ What does commitment look like when change feels more exhausting than exciting?

→ Where are we avoiding friction that we actually need?

→ What futures become possible when we commit to each other?

Let’s dive in.

LOOKING BACK

📍 Anticipatory Governance in Practice — Masterclass

We contributed a practical guest masterclass for the Anticipatory and Collaborative Governance program on how institutions build anticipatory capacity that survives political cycles and “weekly fire drills.” The focus was on recurring blockers (one-off exercises, weak links to decisions, mandate loss) and the enabling conditions that help futures work stick: a decision hook, an institutional home, meaningful participation, and learning loops.

📍 Democratising Futures with byStudents(Copenhagen)

At byStudents, we took “democratising futures” seriously by getting out of lecture mode fast and into practice. Using Berkana’s Two Loops, the room mapped what to phase out (insider futures, performative inclusion, narrow credibility norms) and what to build (futures literacy for many, local sensemaking spaces, agency, and emotional scaffolding for uncertainty).

📍 Webinar on Critical Hope for a Greener Future

We ran a webinar for HK and their members on climate progress and “critical hope”: hope that becomes useful when it’s tied to preparation, better choices, and shared direction. We worked with Dragons of Inaction to name real blockers, then grounded the conversation in where momentum already exists, so sustainability work becomes less paralysing and more actionable.

📍 Tomorrow Matters — AI panels series and Circle

Across a ConsilioNexus DanmarkCircle and the first of three public talks/panels (Tomorrow Matters for Bühlmann Hotels), we saw the AI conversation mature: less “tools for everything,” more governance, responsibility, organisational choices, and real value. Our role has been to hold the nuance and help rooms separate transformation signals from hype cycles.

📍 Selling Foresight — Article in Compass Magazine

In a new article for Compass (by Association of Professional Futurists - APF) by Mathias and Chloé de Ruffray, focus was on how many parts of “selling” foresight can feel uncomfortable like the politics, the language, or the patience of it all. In the piece, they name three frictions many of us run into and share concrete examples.

LOOKING AHEAD

📍 Impact Foresight Project (Pro-bono)

We have now chosen our partner for theImpact Foresight Project, a rare pro-bono strategic foresight process for an impact-driven organisation. A practical way to democratise futures and test a new “foresight for strategy” approach. The aim is a real, decision-relevant process (Scanning → Scenarios → Strategy) with commitment, participation, and follow-through, and then sharing the learning openly so others can build on it.

📍 Causal Layered Analysis — Pan-African think-and-do tank

We’ll be facilitating a CLA session to go beyond surface-level trends and into deeper narratives, worldviews, and system myths together with an ambitious and systems-changing Pan-African think-and-do tank strengthening how strategy connects to culture and meaning.

📍 The Foresight Facilitator (Live learning experience)

Our live learning experience with Darwin Sy Antipolo is coming up in March, with only a couple seats left. It’s for people who want to get better at holding futures rooms: designing, delivering, and debriefing sessions so the learning sticks.

📍 Find Your Futures Voice (mentoring)

Mathias is wrapping up one coaching journey and kicking off another in March. The programme stays tailored to the person, from method confidence and project sparring to network-building and finding a clearer futures “voice".

📍 Leaders visit in Copenhagen — democracy, anticipatory leadership, human + artificial intelligence

We’ll host a group of leaders visiting Copenhagen for a half-day session at Thoravej 29, focused on democracy, anticipatory leadership, and how to make better use of both human and artificial intelligence (without letting either flatten the other).

📍 Youth research on technology and futures

We’re kicking off a new research project on young people’s relationship with technology and the futures, how they experience agency, anxiety, and possibility as AI becomes more ambient in everyday life.

📍 Circles — Megatrends + Data as a strategic resource

Four Circles are coming up: two on megatrends, two on data as a strategic resource, plus an additional megatrends session with a leadership network, continuing to turn big shifts into practical choices.

📍 Startup Growth programme — alumni session

Mathias will return to the Startup Growth programme run by AKA to share lessons from building ANTICIPATE over the past 3 years, what changed, what held, and what it takes to keep momentum.

📍 Podcast recordings (x2)

Two podcast sessions we’re excited about: one on new visions and blueprints for the futures, and another on thinking forward as a discipline.

💡 SPOTLIGHT

The Foresight Facilitator (Live Learning Experience) - only 2 seats left

The Foresight Facilitator is our upcoming live, online learning experience for people who want to get better at guiding futures conversations, with teams, clients, and communities.

Foresight often lives in abstraction: uncertainty, tensions, and questions that don’t come with neat answers. That’s exactly why facilitation matters. It’s the craft that turns futures thinking into a shared experience people can move through — and decisions they can carry forward once the room clears.

Across two 3-hour live sessions, participants work through a practical arc: Design, Develop, Deliver, Debrief, and build a facilitation style that is clear, grounded, and adaptable. Between sessions, you team up to prepare a micro-workshop with a light coaching touchpoint. In the second session, you deliver it, receive coached critique, and sharpen the debrief muscle so the learning sticks.

Format: 2 live online sessions of 3 hours each (+ light mentoring/homework in between)

Dates:

S1: Design & Develop — March 11

S2: Deliver & Debrief — March 25

(Joining both is strongly recommended for the best learning outcome.)

Time: 13.00–16.00 CET / 7.00–10.00am ET / 16.00–19.00 GST / 20.00–23.00 SGT

Cohort size: 12 participants

Price: €200 per person (excl. VAT)

Learn more: https://www.anticipate.dk/store/p/the-foresight-facilitator

✴️ RECOMMENDATION

Thinking About Tomorrow handbook — Centre for Strategic Futures

We’ve been enjoying this new handbook from the Centre for Strategic Futures. It’s the kind of resource that works on two levels: accessible enough to hand to someone new to foresight, and still rigorous enough to spark new notes if you’ve been in the field for a while.

What we especially appreciate:

• Pedagogical without being simplistic — clear language, no jargon for the sake of it.

• Practical all the way through — it guides you from “what is foresight?” to “how do we actually do it?” with a usable structure and grounded examples.

• Focused on capability — treating foresight as something that helps people prepare and act better under uncertainty.

Download it for free here: https://www.csf.gov.sg/thinking-about-tomorrow/

🌀ARTICLE

Refracting the Futures — Megatrends PRISM

We’ve had this thought for years: megatrends frameworks keep getting published… and then people are left alone with them.

Most teams either don’t know where to start, or they zoom in on a single trend (hello AI) and miss the broader system reshaping their space. That translation gap — from “this is happening globally” to “this is what it means for us” — is exactly why we built Megatrends PRISM.

Over the past year, we’ve tested and refined PRISM across very different contexts — from OECD community sessions to design education strategy in Spain, from Danish leadership workshops to research on the futures of impact investing.

We’ve written up more of the thinking behind it (and what we’ve learned in practice) here:

👉 https://www.anticipate.dk/insights/refracting-the-futures-megatrends-prism

Back to the Futures is your monthly glimpse into what we’re doing at ANTICIPATE. If you’d like to collaborate, bring foresight into your work, or just stay more plugged into the futures space, we’d love to hear from you at hi@anticipate.dk.

Until next time, stay curious.

— The ANTICIPATE Team