Light Through the Cracks (Back to the Futures #16)
There’s a Leonard Cohen line worth returning to: “There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.”
It feels fitting for this moment. Because honestly, a lot of things do feel cracked right now. Institutions stretched thin, attention fragmented. People overwhelmed, tired, uncertain, reactive. There are days where the world feels like an endless stream of acceleration, noise, and urgency layered on top of each other. And yet, somehow, there is also still so much light.
Not in a naïve “everything will work itself out” kind of way. More in the small and stubborn forms like people who still care deeply, communities trying to build something meaningful together, rooms where difficult conversations happen honestly, moments of generosity, curiosity, humour, learning, reflection.
One of the unexpected gifts of doing this work is the people we get to meet along the way. The practitioners who openly share what they’re struggling with, the leaders actually willing to admit they don’t have the answers yet. The students asking questions that cut straight through the noise and of course, the collaborators who bring entirely different perspectives into the room and make the work sharper because of it.
That’s part of what keeps us hopeful. And maybe also part of what foresight really is at its best. Creating enough space to keep imagining, questioning, adjusting, and acting together, even when things feel messy. This month has also reminded us how important rituals are in times like these.
The small practices that help us stay grounded while working with uncertainty through reflection and conversations, even returning to books and ideas. And maybe also remembering that growth does not always mean optimisation. Sometimes it simply means becoming a little more honest, more present, or more aligned with what actually matters.
There is a tension in this work I feel more and more: wanting to keep improving, building, exploring, contributing, while also recognising that being enough cannot always sit somewhere endlessly in the future.
Let’s get into it.
Looking Back
📍 Cultural Foresight Whitepaper — early patterns emerging
We’ve started seeing the first patterns emerge from our survey on Cultural Foresight, which will feed into a larger whitepaper currently taking shape behind the scenes. What has already become clear is how differently people define and approach “culture” itself. There is strong belief in the value of cultural foresight, but far less consensus around the language, methods, and boundaries people associate with it.
That tension is fascinating to us because it reveals something deeper about the field right now: many practitioners intuitively feel culture matters enormously, but we still lack shared language for how to systematically work with it in futures practice. A huge thank you to everyone who contributed to the survey so far, and especially to Katrine Faerch Baelum, who helped design and structure the research process.
📍 Impact Foresight Project — from scenarios to strategy
The Impact Foresight Project with Ungdomsbureauet moved into one of the most exciting phases this month: turning workshop material into a full Scenarios Brief.
The scenarios revolve around two questions that kept resurfacing throughout the process:
How much young people feel part of something shared
What role technology plays in everyday life
Those tensions became four very different “images of youth life” in 2036, ranging from bounded and community-oriented futures to fragmented parallel realities shaped by hyper-digital lives.
What stood out most during the scenario workshop itself was how quickly abstract axes became emotionally and strategically real once participants had to actually inhabit the worlds they were creating. The room included staff, young people, and external stakeholders, and the mix made the futures significantly richer, sharper, and more honest. We’re now moving toward the final strategic phase of the process: translating scenarios into direction, priorities, and choices.
→ Read the Scenarios Brief reflection
→ Read the workshop reflection
📍 Working with Futures — making foresight usable
Mathias joined the Working with Futures webinar series hosted by Jan Van Caneghem and Phil Balagtas, focusing on a challenge we keep encountering: Foresight still has a branding problem. Too many people still see it as a fun speculative exercise detached from everyday organisational reality. So the session focused less on futurist theatre and more on a very practical question:
How do you make foresight work on a completely normal Tuesday inside an organisation?
The conversation centered around how the ACT Foresight Framework can support foresight not as a one-off exercise, but as an ongoing capability and practice. Because this is often where foresight breaks down:
Signals never become implications
Insights never become decisions
Decisions never become embedded into actual ways of working
📍 Megatrends dialogues — same framework, different futures
Across three Megatrends sessions this month, two with F5 and one with ConsilioNexus, one thing became especially clear: The same framework can generate completely different conversations depending on who is in the room.
With project leaders, discussions gravitated toward generational shifts, changing assumptions about work, and balancing utopias with dystopias. With public sector leaders, the conversation became more focused on AI governance, experimentation, institutional responsibility, and the challenge of leading systems you can never fully observe from the outside.
And across all sessions, one pattern kept returning: People are increasingly less interested in trends as information, and much more interested in what they actually mean for leadership, culture, strategy, and agency.
📍 Education Futures Safari — Polish higher education delegation
We hosted a Futures Safari for Polish higher education professionals focused on the futures of education and knowledge. Through signals, Futures Wheels, discussions, and site visits, the group explored how education systems may need to evolve in response to changing expectations around learning, technology, identity, participation, and knowledge itself.
More reflections from this one soon, but already now it reinforced something we strongly believe in: changing context changes thinking. Sometimes people need to physically step into another environment before they can properly imagine alternatives for their own.
📍 Sharpening the practice
Behind the scenes, May has also been a month of sharpening. Starting new client conversations. Exploring a Futurist-as-a-Service format further. Coaching C-level leaders. Reflecting on how ANTICIPATE grows sustainably without losing what makes the work meaningful in the first place.
And trying to keep learning without turning everything into productivity. That balance might honestly be one of the hardest futures challenges of all.
Looking Ahead
📍 Future Days side event: ACT Futures Mosaic — infrastructures of imagination
We're incredibly excited to launch the first-ever ACT Futures Mosaic as an official Future Days side event. Built around the theme of "Infrastructures of Imagination", the session explores exchange in all its forms: between people and nature, art and economy, money and meaning, communities and systems.
Rather than a traditional workshop, ACT Futures Mosaic is designed as a collaborative foresight installation. Participants will co-create visual futures artefacts that become part of a growing mosaic, capturing tensions, possibilities, and insights around the future of exchange.
The session will be facilitated by Bianca Muresan and Søs Christine Hejselbæk, two collaborators whose creativity, care, and futures craft have shaped the concept from the beginning. This feels like the start of something new for ANTICIPATE: a format that can travel, evolve, and be carried by many different hands over time.
→ Join the Mosaic: https://www.anticipate.dk/futures-foresight-events/act-futures-mosaic
📍 Future Days — scanning the city
June brings Future Days to Copenhagen, and we're delighted to be part of it in several ways. One of them is hosting a city scanning activity at Demokrati Garage, a place that has become an important part of ANTICIPATE's own journey. It is one of those rare spaces where democracy, participation, experimentation, and community feel less like concepts and more like everyday practice.
We'll be helping participants explore the city through a futures lens, looking for signals, tensions, opportunities, and emerging patterns hiding in plain sight. Sometimes the best way to understand change is simply to step outside the meeting room and pay closer attention to what is already happening around us.
📍 Strategic foresight and scenario planning in pharma
We'll also be facilitating a strategic foresight and scenario planning masterclass for the innovation unit of a German pharmaceutical company. Using the ACT Foresight Framework as a backbone, we'll explore how organisations can move beyond one-off scenario exercises and instead build an ongoing capability for scanning, sensemaking, and strategic anticipation.
A particular focus will be on how scenarios become useful beyond the workshop room: how narratives travel through organisations, how different stakeholders engage with uncertainty, and how foresight can support more continuous conversations about change rather than periodic forecasting exercises.
It's a topic we're increasingly passionate about: helping foresight become embedded practice rather than occasional intervention.
📍 IC² 2026 — futures of intelligent cities in São Paulo
Later in June, Mathias heads to São Paulo to join IC² 2026 as part of the Smart City Business Brazil Congress & Expo. He'll participate in three sessions focused on cities that lead the future, building more human cities beyond technology, and international experiences with smart city implementation.
One of the reference points he'll bring is Copenhagen. Not as a model to copy, but as an example of how long-term vision, political courage, and practical urban design can gradually reshape a city over decades. The conversation, however, is much broader than Copenhagen.
Because intelligent cities are not only defined by the technologies they adopt. Technology also shapes who gets access, where value flows, what behaviours are rewarded, and what kinds of everyday life become possible. A city can become smarter in a technical sense while becoming shallower in a human sense.
The question that increasingly interests us is how cities can become both intelligent and deeply human: places built around belonging, accessibility, care, social cohesion, participation, and regenerative development. We're looking forward to learning from Brazil, from Latin America, and from a region that is developing its own powerful perspectives on the futures of cities.
💡 Spotlight
Futures of Youth 2036 — futures thinking in public
This month’s spotlight is our pro-bono strategic foresight project with Ungdomsbureauet: Futures of Youth 2036. The project is a lightweight version of ANTICIPATE’s full strategic foresight process, moving from scanning to sensemaking, from scenarios to strategy. The difference is that we’re doing it openly and sharing the materials along the way.
Together with staff, young people, board members, and external stakeholders, we are exploring what may shape youth life, participation, belonging, technology use, and agency in Denmark towards 2036. For us, it is a practical way to democratise foresight: showing how a clear process, good briefs, and genuine participation can support real strategic choices, also for impact-driven organisations working close to people and communities.
→ Explore the full project: https://www.anticipate.dk/cases/futures-of-youth-2036
✴️ Recommendation
The Ipsos Generations Report 2026
We’ve been reading the new Ipsos Generations Report 2026, which connects closely to our research and work around Cultural Foresight. The report is useful because it complicates easy generational stereotypes. It shows how attitudes around identity, trust, technology, politics, relationships, work, and social values are shifting in uneven and sometimes surprising ways.
A recent Guardian article on younger men and changing views on gender roles adds another layer to this. Whether one agrees with every framing or not, it raises a very relevant cultural foresight question: What happens when social values stop moving in a straight line?
Progress is rarely linear. Cultures contain contradictions, and some of the most important signals emerge where expectations, identities, and values collide.
→ Read the Ipsos Generations Report 2026: https://ipsos-insight-llc.foleon.com/ipsos-thinks/ipsos-generations-report-2026/?aliId=eyJpIjoiejZKdHR0Um8zdk10MWZ5ZyIsInQiOiIyM0FHajBYd1BSU1pNSXI5TVJZY3d3PT0ifQ%253D%253D
→ Read the Guardian article: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/mar/05/gen-z-men-baby-boomers-wives-should-obey-husbands
🌀 Article
📍 What Even Is Foresight?
One question comes up more than any other: "What exactly is foresight?". It is a fair question. Foresight often gets confused with prediction, trend watching, innovation, strategy, risk management, or futurism. It overlaps with all of them, but it is not quite the same as any of them. So we decided to write a simple introduction.
The article explores what foresight is, what it is not, why organisations use it, and how it can help people make better decisions in the present without pretending to know exactly what will happen next. If you've ever struggled to explain your work, convince a colleague, or simply wanted a practical starting point for futures thinking, this is probably the piece to share for the summer.
→ Read: What Even Is Foresight?
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
