Much of the effort we see going into horizon scanning goes into collecting. More sources, wider coverage, better tools, a dashboard that (supposedly) catches everything. It seems to be the easiest part to buy and outsource, and it is hardly ever what holds anyone back, because information is already lying around in obscene quantities that nobody can possibly get through.
The claim at the moment is that AI has made collecting close to "free". A pile that assembles itself still has to be read and made sense of by somebody, so the cost has mostly moved from gathering to attention, and attention was the scarce thing to begin with. Arguably, the uninhibited, free collection makes the job harder, because volume crowds out the time for slower, deeper reading where connections tend to appear.
Which is a good moment to borrow a definition of insight from gestalt theory. An insight is when things you already had "arrange themselves" into a pattern. Think of a song you have heard a hundred times, and then somebody points out the bassline, and afterwards you cannot stop hearing it. Nothing was added to the song, yet your account of it reorganised, and it landed as recognition rather than as a conclusion you worked towards.
So the bottleneck is somewhere other than the pile. Information gets filtered on the way in, by whatever you happen to be set up to notice. It gets filtered a second time by the concepts you have available (the ideas and processes and culture that informs your understanding), because registering something you have no way of describing is close to impossible. And a third filter sits at the far end, where somebody decides what to do about any of it. Almost all the investment seemingly goes into the first.
The second filter is where foresight earns a good deal of its keep, though hardly anybody sells it that way. Scenarios and speculative work largely hand people concepts they did not have before, so the next time something turns up that fits one, they can see it instead of filing it under miscellaneous.
Those concepts have to come from somewhere, which is a decent part of why we spent October on culture and cultural foresight.
Let's get into it.
LOOKING BACK
📍 Fifty practitioners told us what cultural foresight might mean
Cultural Foresight: Where Futures Meet People came out on 21 October, written with Katrine Færch Bælum and Chloé de Ruffray and built on fifty responses from people who work with this daily.
Two ways of using culture came through. The first treats it as a method, where behaviours, rituals, symbols and narratives become readable material, and we have put our own cases beside the methods they illustrate so the toolkit can be picked up and used. The second treats culture as the context foresight work already happens inside, which bears directly on the filters above, because the concepts available in a room arrive with the room.
The finding that stayed with us is that respondents leaning towards the second mode tend to be the least confident, most likely because they can see how much work it asks for. Useful to hold onto if you have ever read hesitation in a workshop as a lack of interest. Our sample is people already engaged with the term, so the paper maps a conversation rather than measuring a field. A launch roundtable follows in November or December, and the paper is open for contributions.
📍 Thirty countries and one awkward question about futures literacy
FLARE, Futures Literacy for Anticipatory Societies, began as a European COST Action with researchers, educators, policymakers and practitioners from more than thirty countries, running four working groups over four years.
Our Director Mathias Behn Bjørnhof was named Vice-Chair of Working Group 3 on assessment and evaluation, which he leads with Antje Bierwisch. The awkward question is what futures literacy work gives back, which he has started calling Return on Futures Literacy. Our first brainstorm produced far more questions than answers, and two of them will be hard to settle. How do you tell an individual's growing capability apart from an organisation changing the way it works? And how do you capture shifts in awareness and assumptions when those rarely show up in any indicator? Anyone who has tried to justify a foresight budget has run into both.
📍 What AI changes in foresight, and what it hollows out
We delivered a whitepaper for a government entity on what AI is doing to foresight practice. The productive question turned out to be less about replacement and more about sorting the work into three piles, because some of it is changed, some is augmented, and some gets hollowed out while the output still looks fine. Scanning sits in that third pile, which is roughly where this issue started. Not published yet, so more when it is.
📍 Future readiness is getting a score
Mathias continued as an assessor on a government future readiness assessment programme, writing findings per entity from submitted evidence alongside site visits with an assessment team. The content is confidential, though the format deserves attention, because readiness is being scored, clustered and compared rather than described in prose. Two things follow. Written strategy counts for a good deal less than what holds up when somebody visits, and organisations will increasingly be asked to demonstrate anticipatory capacity where asserting it used to be enough.
📍 What a leadership group did with eight megatrends
We presented the ANTICIPATE Megatrends and then let the room follow whichever tension seemed most interesting, because hardly anyone wants to take megatrends one at a time. Which ones they placed next to each other turned out to be the thing worth watching. Blurring Realities ran into Wealth Polarization through the comparison society, and somebody pointed out that comparison bites harder when the gaps underneath it are widening. Then play, where Liquid Lifestyles landed, and the observation that what people do about all this structural pressure is build plastic flowers for an evening or keep a streak alive on an app. No new information had reached the room by then, and the pieces had simply landed in a different order.
Our Megatrends PRISM exists to push that from interesting to decided, and running the move deliberately is most of what Megatrends in Practice teaches, which brings us to the next section.
LOOKING AHEAD
📍 Megatrends in Practice is open for booking
Most megatrend sessions end with a room nodding along at demographic change and then going back to work unchanged, which is the problem this one is built around. The session further up, where a group found their own intersections and talked themselves into something concrete, is roughly what it looks like when it works.
It is a live learning experience through ANTICIPATE Academy on the craft of using megatrends. Pulling the eight apart. Connecting them downward to the signals showing up in your own market. Hunting the intersections where two of them collide and throw out something neither predicts alone, which is where most of the interesting material lives. And then getting from a global shift to a decision somebody owns.
We also open the bonnet on our own process, covering how the ANTICIPATE Megatrends were built, which of them have aged well since 2025 and which we would frame differently today, before you build a set of your own.
📍 Ten sessions around Denmark in five weeks
November and December take Mathias around the country for ten sessions on AI, technology, data, energy, megatrends, leadership and how we might imagine different futures. Some will be interactive, others closer to a presentation with a long Q&A, because the format follows the topic and the room.
Two are open rather than closed. His session at the pej Trend Conference runs in English and is open to the public, and there is an HK webinar on energy in Danish. The ConsilioNexus and F5 sessions are closed forums, held in Danish.
A detail that surprises people when it comes up. Only around a quarter of ANTICIPATE's revenue comes from Danish clients, and that share has been falling. Most of the longer strategic work happens internationally while much of the Danish work is speaking and facilitation, and we would like to shift that balance given how many interesting organisations sit here and across the Nordics. This is also partly why Mathias has decided to take on the role as management committee member for Denmark for the Nordic Foresight Network.
📍 A term on the futures of the EU, in Brussels
Mathias starts in November as Visiting Professor in Strategic Foresight & Futures Thinking at ICHEC Brussels Management School, on the European Union: Business and Society course. The arc runs from scanning for signals through megatrends and plausible European futures, then back into what any of it means for business and strategy today, which is the ACT Foresight Framework with a term's worth of room to run it properly.
📍 Country reports begin for WHO
Our work with WHO now begin, starting with building country reports covering the three participating countries across different income levels, with Katrine Faerch Baelum and Benita Alagha as researchers on the team. Health systems make a demanding case for long-horizon work, because decisions about capacity and preparedness play out across decades and then get judged in the weeks when something goes wrong.
📍 Two projects where the insight is the deliverable
A component manufacturer is taking its business units through strategic scenarios, where much of our job is designing how insights get generated along the way rather than only what the scenarios end up saying. Separately we are starting work with a pharmaceutical company on the futures of insights. Both run at the same problem, where a process produces a great deal of material and still leaves a team without a single thing they would now do differently.
📍 Designing the missions for Singapore
We are building the missions for a Futures Field Trip to Singapore for a bank, timed around the FinTech Festival in late November.
Missions are the briefs participants carry out into the city, so a week away produces material a team can work with afterwards instead of a set of impressions. This one runs across a few tracks. Crawls of the digital labs and garages that open up around the festival. A banking track, where the local players compete directly with the international ones and some have already restructured around AI. And a public policy track, because Singapore keeps its strategic foresight capability unusually close to the centre of government. A synthesis session afterwards does the real sensemaking, given how often collected signals end up as souvenirs.
It runs as a pilot with a single traveller, which raises a question we are curious about. How much signal coverage does one person miss compared with a team, and is the gap wide enough to justify sending several next time?
📍 Our first student assistant starts in November
Three years of building this through collaborators and partners has been the right way to do it, and some of the work now needs somebody steadier than an occasional pair of hands, particularly the internal tooling that never quite reaches the top of the list. So we are excited to bring in our new student assistant (more on them later) to help develop a strong collaboration structure and help set up ANTICIPATE better for the future!
🛰 SIGNAL OF THE MONTH
The social media split and protest 'TikTokisation'
With social unrest and protests happening in many countries around the world these months, often sparked or fueled by social media, a big question is how this impact democracies on a global scale.
Pew asked people in 37 countries whether social media is good or bad for democracy. Taken together, a small majority still says good. Sort the countries by income and the answer flips. In Germany, the share saying it is bad climbed from 41% to 61% over four years. The Netherlands now sits at 70% bad. Meanwhile in Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, the Philippines and Thailand, roughly three in four say it is good.
Why it matters: The same technology has picked up opposite reputations in rich and poorer countries inside four years. Meaning gets made locally, so in theory the same product in two places becomes two different products. It also leaves platform regulation on awkward ground, because rules drafted where opinion has soured will apply where it has not.
Questions to consider:
Where does your organisation assume a global product carries the same meaning everywhere it touches?
If something you depend on acquired the opposite reputation in your largest growth market, how would you find out?
💡 SPOTLIGHT
Futures Research & Intelligence
Plenty of organisations have spotted exactly the right signal and then had nowhere to put it.
Closing that gap is increasingly the part we get asked to build, rather than the scan on its own. A scanning routine somebody keeps running. Shared vocabulary, so an insight survives the journey from the people who found it to the people who decide. A signal library that works as a live body of material instead of an archive. And a path from signal to decision that holds up when one enthusiastic person changes role.
Collection is the half that can be bought and it rarely binds. Most organisations we meet could add twenty more sources tomorrow without changing a single decision, because the constraint sits in the second and third filters.
We do run the research ourselves, through Foresight Outlooks, scanning and signal work, and there is more on the method in how to spot signals. What tends to last is a team that keeps doing it after we leave, which is usually a question of organisational design more than research.
✴️ WORTH YOUR TIME
Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents
Written in the 1990s about the 2020s and 2030s, and the most interesting futures fiction we have read in a couple of years. The America she describes is coming apart through climate disruption, inequality that has stopped being survivable, and institutions that have given up, while people try to build something decent out of what is left.
She predicted nothing exactly, and she had a very good grip on the underlying material, including how fast scarcity changes a community and why certainty becomes appealing when nothing else is stable. Earthseed, the religion that grows across both books out of the idea that God is Change, sits closer to stoic and Buddhist teaching than to anything a dystopia usually offers. There is also a moment in Talents, published in 1998, where a Christian nationalist candidate campaigns on making America great again.
🌀 FROM US
Signals, Trends and Megatrends: The Difference
Signal or trend, trend or megatrend, and where a driver fits. These come up often enough in workshops that it was worth writing down, and the slightly annoying answer is that no universally agreed line exists between them.
The article came out of a conversation about a teaching tool for telling the three apart, where the valuable part was never whether people sorted things into the right box. It was the argument while trying. Asking how new this is, how much evidence there is, how widely it is showing up, and whether we are describing a change or its driver gets you further than ten minutes spent deciding whether something has officially graduated.
More of this sits in our Insights.
📅 ON THE HORIZON
From our Futures & Foresight events calendar:
Vision Weekend USA 2026, San Francisco, 13-15 November, 2026. The Foresight Institute's fortieth-anniversary gathering of scientists, builders and funders.
Global UNESCO Chair Lecture Series, online, starting 4 February, 2027. From the UNESCO Chair in Futures Literacy, on anticipation and education.
World Futures Day: Young Voices, online, 1 March, 2027. A 24-hour global conversation co-led by young people and futurists, and a good one to point a teenager towards.
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
