Decoding the In-between (Back to the Futures #15)
April has been a month of moving between layers.
Between the past and the present. Between the present and the futures. Between what we can observe at the edge of change and what people actually experience in their everyday lives.
That feels increasingly important. Foresight is often described as looking ahead, but the work is rarely that linear. We are constantly moving across time, context, systems, and meaning. We look back to understand the legacies still shaping us, we look around to notice what is shifting now and we look forward to explore what those shifts might become. And somewhere in between, we try to understand what it all means for people, organisations, and the choices being made today.
This month, that “in-between” has shown up in many forms.
In youth futures work, where questions about technology, agency, anxiety, and participation are deeply tied to both personal experience and wider societal change. In cultural foresight, where signals are rarely useful on their own, but become powerful when we decode the behaviours, narratives, identities, and values underneath them. In regional futures work, where geography, economy, history, and imagination all shape what collaboration can become. And in organisational foresight, where the challenge is often to move from the outside world back into the self: what do these changes ask of us, our strategy, our leadership, our assumptions?
Maybe that is where much of the real work sits in interpreting the layers between signal and meaning, between possible futures and present action, between what the world is becoming and who we are becoming within it.
Because futures are shaped through culture, systems, memory, technology, institutions, everyday choices and so much more. They are really not just out there as static images. They live in the edges we scan, but also in the rooms we facilitate, the questions we ask, and the ways people make sense of change together.
So this month’s issue is about decoding those layers in between.
Let’s get into it.
LOOKING BACK
📍 Cultural Foresight Masterclass
Together with Chloé de Ruffray, we hosted the fourth and final masterclass in our current series: Cultural Foresight. The session explored how culture can be read as futures intelligence, from behaviours, rituals, symbols, aesthetics, identities, and narratives to the deeper assumptions that shape what people find normal, desirable, threatening, or possible.
Much futures work still starts with technology, but change rarely lands through technology alone. It lands through norms, meanings, social expectations, and everyday routines. Cultural foresight helps us understand what might spread, what might meet resistance, and what is quietly shifting beneath the surface.
The replay is now available, and you can also see Mathias’ reflections before and after the session + insights on the behaviour lens
📍 Futures of Youth 2036 — Impact Foresight Project
Our pro-bono Impact Foresight Project with Ungdomsbureauet moved from preparation into practice. We created the first Futures Brief before Workshop 1, followed by a Sensemaking Brief after the scanning session, and facilitated both the Signals and Scenarios workshops.
The process explores what may shape young people’s lives, engagement, and agency in Denmark toward 2036. In the first workshop, we worked with signals, drivers, and legacies, stress-tested key trends from the brief, and translated them into implications for Ungdomsbureauet. The following scenario session moved the group into different possible futures of youth life, bringing staff, young people, and external stakeholders into the same process.
It has been a reminder that even a lightweight foresight sprint can go deep when the arc is clear: brief first, shared exploration, scenarios, then strategy. Read more about the Futures Brief and the first workshop.
📍 Circles on Megatrends and AI
We facilitated several Circles in April, including sessions with Columbus and ConsilioNexus, focused on megatrends, AI, and emerging technologies. Across them, one theme kept returning: translation.
Megatrends only become useful when people can connect them to their own context, customers, choices, and role. In the Columbus session, we used the ANTICIPATE Megatrends to explore future implications across business verticals and strategic direction. In the AI-focused circles, the conversation moved beyond tools into leadership, governance, capability, and the practical question many organisations are still facing: where do we even begin?
The value of these spaces is often not another framework. It is the time and structure to think properly together. More reflections from the Columbus session and the ConsilioNexus.
📍 Business Delegation from Brandenburg
In collaboration with WFBB and 4sing, we hosted a business delegation from Brandenburg for a cross-border learning and networking visit in Copenhagen and Malmö. The group included companies from pharma, tourism, software, maritime, and more, all exploring opportunities across the Øresund region.
We also hosted the Bridging Opportunities networking event at House of Creative Denmark, where we shared a megatrends lens on Northern Europe and discussed how collaboration across Denmark, Sweden, and Germany can become a real regional advantage.
The bigger learning was simple: there is still no substitute for being in the room, visiting another ecosystem, and letting someone else’s context shift how you see your own. Read the case overview, the event invitation, and Mathias’ reflection after the visit.
📍 Guest Lecture at Parsons School of Design
Mathias guest lectured virtually at Parsons School of Design as part of Monica Belot’s course on trend analysis. The session focused on foresight for trend research and forecasting, with students asking sharp questions about the futures of futurists, how to spot the non-obvious, and what happens to human insight when AI changes content and research work.
It was a late-night Copenhagen session, but very much worth the lost sleep. Read the short reflection.
📍 Democratising Futures with Design Futures Aotearoa
Mathias joined the Design Futures Aotearoa community for a session on Democratising Futures Thinking. The conversation explored why futures literacy still needs to spread far beyond expert circles, and how participation, power, agency, and collective imagination shape the futures that become visible.
The session was also a reminder that futures work can feel like a practice of care when held by the right community: generous, serious, inclusive, and grounded in responsibility. Read the reflection here.
📍 ANTICIPATE Megatrends Turned One
One year ago, we published the ANTICIPATE Megatrends. Since then, the work has become less about the individual megatrends and more about the interconnections between them.
What has become clearer is that people do not need another list of trends. They need translation. What does this mean for us? What should we do with it? Where do we have agency?
That is also why the Megatrends PRISM has become such an important part of the work: helping teams move from global shifts to practical choices.
LOOKING AHEAD
📍 The Foresight Facilitator — Cohort #2
We weren’t planning to run a second cohort of The Foresight Facilitator until autumn, but the first round made us want to keep going. So Darwin Sy Antipolo and Mathias are hosting cohort #2 this summer, on July 14 and 28, with an earlier time slot to make it easier for participants in the Eastern hemisphere to join.
Most foresight trainings focus on methods and outputs. This one focuses on what is often skipped: how you hold the room. The abstraction, the resistance, the time pressure, the “so what?” moments, and the craft of helping futures conversations land.
There are 12 seats available, and a few discounted places for NGOs, civil society actors, and people working with tight budgets.
→ Read more and grab a seat
→ See the announcement
📍 ACT Futures Mosaic at Future Days
At Future Days in June, we will be trying something new: an official side event where Mathias helps frame the session from behind the scenes, while Søs Christine Hejselbæk and Bianca Muresan lead the room.
ACT Futures Mosaic is a 2-hour, hands-on foresight installation powered by the ACT Foresight Framework. Participants will co-create a futures “tile” around a glocal issue, which then becomes part of a growing mosaic that can travel across future sessions, communities, and cities.
It marks an important step in how we want ANTICIPATE formats to evolve: less one-person, one-room, one-city; more shared, distributed, and carried by collaborators who bring their own craft into the work.
📍 Impact Foresight Project — moving toward strategy
The Impact Foresight Project with Ungdomsbureauet continues in May, as we move from scanning and scenarios into the final strategic part of the process. The next steps include the Scenarios Brief and the final Strategy Workshop, where the aim is to translate possible futures of youth life into clearer choices, priorities, and direction.
This is where the arc of the process becomes most important: from signals to scenarios to strategy, with youth participation and organisational decision-making connected throughout.
📍 F5 Megatrends sessions
In early May, we will be running a set of Megatrends sessions with F5, continuing the work of translating large global shifts into something concrete, useful, and relevant for leaders and teams. As always, the focus is less on naming trends and more on what they mean for the organisation, its context, and the decisions ahead.
📍 Youth, technology, and futures research
Our research on young people’s relationship with technology and the futures is picking up speed. We will be moving further into the fieldwork, exploring how young people experience agency, anxiety, possibility, and everyday life in a world where digital systems and AI are becoming more ambient.
📍 Working with Futures
We are contributing to Working with Futures, a developing initiative focused on how futures thinking can be made more usable in professional and organisational practice. More on this soon, but the direction is closely aligned with a question we keep returning to: how do we help more people work with the futures in ways that are practical, thoughtful, and grounded?
📍 Futures Field Trip for Polish education institutions
We will soon host a Futures Field Trip for Polish education institutions, focused on the futures of education and knowledge. The aim is to use Copenhagen as a learning landscape, exploring how institutions, environments, and communities are rethinking what learning can become.
📍 Behind the scenes
There is also plenty happening behind the scenes: short-term proposals, Find Your Futures Voice coaching, and preparation for a June that will take us on the road. It may get quite full, quite fast, but in the best way.
SPOTLIGHT
📍 ANTICIPATE Academy — building foresight capability in practice
This month’s spotlight is a recent ANTICIPATE Academy case on a Future Foresight module for public sector leaders.
The module was designed to help participants move from broad awareness of change into a more practical ability to work with uncertainty, signals, scenarios, and strategic implications. Across the session, foresight became less of an abstract discipline and more of a leadership capability: a way to ask better questions, explore possible futures, and connect long-term change to decisions today.
For us, this is what ANTICIPATE Academy is really about. Not only teaching tools, but helping people build the confidence, language, and mindset to use futures thinking in their own context.
RECOMMENDATION
📍 Intergenerational Foresight
A strong new publication from the World Economic Forum (WEF) explores intergenerational foresight as an approach for long-term responsibility in governance.
It speaks directly to one of the central questions in futures work: how do we make decisions today with people in mind who are not yet in the room? The report offers a useful framing for anyone working with policy, governance, sustainability, or strategy, especially where short-term pressures make it difficult to protect longer-term interests.
At a time where many decisions are still shaped by immediate political, financial, or organizational cycles, intergenerational foresight feels like an important lens for bringing responsibility, continuity, and future generations into the conversation.
ARTICLE
📍 Cultural Foresight: Where Futures Actually Land
Our latest article explores why culture is such a critical layer in foresight.
Change does not land in the abstract. It lands in meanings, norms, behaviours, identities, aesthetics, rituals, and everyday choices. This is where people accept, resist, reinterpret, or ignore new technologies, policies, products, and ideas.
The article builds on our recent Cultural Foresight Masterclass with Chloé de Ruffray and makes the case for paying closer attention to the human layer of change: the signals, tensions, and shifts that often show up before they become visible in strategy decks or market reports.
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
