Invisible Infrastructure (Back to the Futures #9)
Sometimes the most fundamental parts of our systems remain hidden from view. They’re complex, fragile, and often only noticed when they fail.
September has felt like walking a knife’s edge between different layers of this invisible scaffolding, from the hard edges of fundamental rights, extremism, and democracy as a living system, to the quieter but equally vital fields of cybersecurity, AI, and the skills we need to navigate them: anticipatory leadership, strategic approaches to megatrends, and entrepreneurship as a driver of meaningful change.
It’s a reminder that infrastructure is so much more than it's physical dimension but also cultural norms, social fabric, and the technologies now embedded in every corner of daily life. Utilities, mobility, data flows - all shifting, subtly but profoundly.
So the questions I’ve been carrying this month are these:
→ What happens when the systems we rarely notice suddenly fail us?
→ How do we futures-prepare the invisible layers we depend on?
→ And how can we rethink infrastructure, from grids and networks to institutions and culture, as shared, resilient foundations for what comes next?
This issue is about making the invisible visible, and asking what it takes to sustain the basics of modern life in a world of accelerating change.
Let’s dive in.
LOOKING BACK
📍 Future of Leaders and Megatrends talk. Anticipatory leadership is one of the most critical skills for the futures . We hosted a session for marketing leaders on how to prepare for being a leader of the futures for the futures.
📍 Fundamental Rights Futures In early September, we headed to Vienna to support the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights and AIT in a foresight initiative on the futures of fundamental rights in Europe.
📍 YONDERS Mentorship We've been supporting the YONDERS project by mentoring young cultural entrepreneurs and contributing training materials and podcasts.
📍 Podcast Conversations Find our founder Mathias Behn Bjørnhof on a recent episode of the Culture Connectorspodcast: https://lnkd.in/dBGS-35p
📍 ConsilioCircle on Megatrends Our recent peer dialogue with ConsilioNexus explored how senior leaders can and are working with Megatrends as both signal and strategy.
📍 Speaking in Copenhagen Mathias shared thoughts on AI and futures at a Copenhagen-based college incubator, engaging students and young entrepreneurs in how to lead with curiosity and anticipation.
📍Futures of Extremism We helped facilitate experts on extremism and radicalization on a major European foresight initiative to explore how different future scenarios could look.
LOOKING AHEAD
📍 Doing Foresight MasterclassTogether with Chloé de Ruffray we’re running the follow-up to Selling Foresight—a hands-on session diving into scanning, futures wheels, scenarios, and backcasting.
📍 ANTICIPATE Academy Relaunch We are officially relaunching our training and learning offerings under the ANTICIPATE Academy umbrella. Expect masterclasses, bootcamps, and organizational trainings, plus—very soon—our first self-paced course on how to work with the futures. Join the waitlist
📍 Ljubljana Forum: Anticipating City of Wellbeing We’ll be heading to Ljubljana to speak on anticipating futures cities that are designed for wellbeing, equity, and resilience, as well as facilitate a workshop on the Ideal City of 2045.
📍 Thoughts for Future Festival We're contributing to this student-led futures & sustainability event with a Three Horizons session designed to move ideas into long-term action.
📍 ConsilioCircle: Innovation In late October we’ll facilitate a ConsilioCircle in Vejle, exploring how to connect customer needs with strategic and commercial innovation across the value chain.
📍 University of Deusto: Democracy Reimagined Back to San Sebastián to follow up on the Master we helped design last year, this time hosting a workshop on Democracy Reimagined: Futures, Design and Innovation for Shaping the Future of Democracy.
📍 Frederiksbergmuseerne Workshop A session on how cultural institutions can move from anxiety as the default reaction to the future, toward anticipation as a mindset for staying ahead.
📍 Folkeuniversitetet: Megatrends Talk In Copenhagen we’ll explore how megatrends shape the future and how to see them in a new light.
📍 Ecological Transitions Workshop In dialogue with an NGO partner about a session bringing foresight into ecological transitions in Latin America, stay tuned for more.
📍 IED Spain: Megatrends for Design & Education Closing out the month with an online megatrends workshop for IED Spain, bringing futures into the lens of design and education.
📍 And much much more Plenty more in motion: starting new projects, developing collaborations, and preparing for a packed November, including our recently confirmed session at Dubai Future Forum.
SIGNAL / SPECULATION
The era of hoarding every click and scroll might be over.
As highlighted in the Sparkline newsletter by Deborah Hayek, companies are discovering that less is more when it comes to data. Instead of drowning in bloated dashboards and broken trust, leaders are curating data with surgical precision. From L’Oréal’s boundary-respecting personalization to Proton’s no-data productivity suite, trust and restraint are becoming market differentiators.
Gartner predicts 60% of dashboards will vanish by 2028, replaced by AI-powered, context-aware insights. The competitive edge isn’t in surveillance itself anymore, it’s in collecting only what truly matters.
Check out Sparkline for more on this
SPOTLIGHT
Doing Foresight Masterclass
Most people agree foresight is powerful once they try it, but few know how to actually do it.
This masterclass with Chloé de Ruffray and Mathias Behn Bjørnhof is a hands-on introduction to the core methods: horizon scanning, futures wheels, scenarios, and backcasting. You’ll see how the tools connect into a process you can use for strategy, innovation, or risk.
Whether you’re new to foresight or just need a refresher, this session will give you practical skills to make sense of change and shape what’s next.
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
