Minimum Viable Foresight (Back to the Futures #19)
Someone in a leadership session this month said that AI governance is mostly being designed like a traffic light, when it probably ought to work more like a roundabout. We have not really stopped thinking about it since.
A traffic light needs settled categories - permitted, not permitted, wait here until the signal changes. Almost nothing about AI is settled in that way right now, so people end up waiting at a junction where the categories keep shifting anyway. A roundabout has rules as well, quite strict ones about how you enter and how you behave once you are in there and when you get to leave but they are just written on the assumption that nobody is going to stop.
It stayed with us partly because a version of the same argument had come up a few weeks earlier in a completely different room, where we spent an afternoon with a group of consultants circling the question of whether you can define a minimum viable foresight process at all.
We are honestly not sure you can, and even if you could, aiming for the minimum is probably the wrong ambition. The more useful question is what makes an organisation futures-ready in the first place, and how much is enough before you get to say that you are. To be honest, most of the organisations we meet have not opened that conversation yet. There has been a workshop at some point, maybe a report somewhere, and a bland vision statement in a drawer that could belong to any company in any sector.
That last one is the expensive failure, and it is everywhere, where foresight turns into a bit of theatre. You can satisfy every box in a framework, ours very much included, and still not be ready for much of anything. So what does count? We keep landing on the same few signs, like whether thinking actually got stretched, whether assumptions got said out loud in front of people who disagreed, whether anyone left with language they did not walk in with, and whether any of it reached a decision that would otherwise have gone the other way.
None of that fits in a checklist, which is a bit awkward, because a checklist (and some KPIs) is usually what people ask us for.
Let's get into it.
LOOKING BACK
📍 An afternoon past the basics
Most Academy sessions spend their first hour making the case for foresight. This one skipped it. Four hours with a strategy consultancy that already practises foresight well without calling itself a foresight consultancy, so we went straight to the harder material: how you find the real question when a client arrives with a fuzzy interest in futures, how much research and validation a decision actually warrants, and where you can simplify before the work goes thin.
Two threads stayed with us. One was chaos, and the case for designing some in, because a process built only from the most plausible and most defensible futures will survive scrutiny and move nobody. The other was the bridge into action, which is why Transform sits inside ANTICIPATE's ACT Foresight Framework. A beautiful scenario is not much of an outcome if nothing changes because of it.
📍 On an expert committee assessing futures readiness
We were invited onto an expert assessment committee looking at futures readiness in a government context. Not something we can say much about, and worth recording because the category barely existed a few years ago. Anticipatory capacity is starting to be treated as something you can assess, which is quite a shift from treating it as something an institution either has or has not.
The ConsilioNexus Danmark Circle that gave us this issue's opening went well past the metaphor, towards governance as something closer to a hackathon: building controlled spaces for people to try things, alongside deciding what is permitted. One group wanted to go back a step further and map everything already happening across the organisation before settling where AI belongs at all. Less exciting, and probably the most sensible thing said all day.
The best moment came when we asked the room to stop discussing and design an actual solution to one of the challenges they had named. It met more scepticism than these exercises usually do, and several of the most sceptical people left the most animated about what they had built.
📍 A cohort closes and the next one fills
This month's Find Your Futures Voice cohort of three wrapped up, one participant is carrying on with further sessions, and two more are signed up for later in the autumn. It stays deliberately small, so it sits close to capacity most of the time.
☑️ Applications are open if you want to be in the queue.
📍 Making foresight matter, with Luis Salas
Mathias joined Luis Salas on ¡Reinventándonos! for a conversation mostly about why rather than how. How foresight takes root inside an organisation, the friction in selling it internally, and how you hold rigour and accessibility together for people who never asked for a futures workshop. Luis introduced him as part of a new generation of futurists, which opened a useful detour into what this field carries forward from the people who built it, and where a bit of boldness is owed instead.
☑️ The full conversation is on YouTube.
📍 From ideated spaces to tested blue oceans
Continuing a piece of work that began as a futures sparring session where we ideated potential spaces. Those are now being converted into proper blue oceans, tested and presented. It is the phase most foresight projects never reach, and the one that decides whether any of the earlier work mattered.
LOOKING AHEAD
📍 Megatrends in Practice: the waitlist is open
Over the past eighteen months the eight ANTICIPATE Megatrends have become one of the most-used parts of the practice. In foresight outlooks, in strategy processes where leadership teams need to look outside-in before choosing, as the opening move in multi-stakeholder conversations, and through ANTICIPATE's Megatrends PRISM in training.
So we are building a live learning experience about working with them rather than presenting them. How do you handle something as enormous as demographic change or geopolitical restructuring without landing on generic implications? How do you connect top-down megatrends to bottom-up signals, and find the intersections that matter?
The waitlist is open early on purpose. Tell us where working with megatrends is difficult for you now, and it will shape what we build.
☑️ While we are at it, the full Megatrends report is still free to download.
📍 A twelve-month project with the World Health Organization
We have won a project with WHO that will occupy a good part of the next year, and we are properly excited about this one. Global health sits across most of the shifts we work with, from demographic change and AI to climate adaptation and the financing pressures reshaping the whole multilateral system. It is also the kind of institution where the long view is not a nice-to-have, since decisions about capacity, surveillance and preparedness play out over decades and then get judged in weeks when something goes wrong.
The work sits within our organisational advisory practice, which is where foresight stops being a project and starts shaping how an organisation is set up to see and decide. More on scope and shape once we are able to share it.
📍 Visiting Professor at ICHEC Brussels
In November, Mathias joins ICHEC Brussels Management School as Visiting Professor in Strategic Foresight & Futures Thinking, working with students on the European Union: Business and Society course. The plan is to explore the futures of the EU through signals, megatrends and plausible European futures, and then translate those back into choices for business and strategy today. A sustained connection to a business school, rather than the occasional guest slot, has been on the wish list for years.
📍 Six Circles before the year is out
Six further Circles between October and December, on megatrends, AI and data as a strategic asset. We run these as workshops and immersions for individual leadership teams too, so if one of those topics is live in your organisation, there is a version we can bring to you.
📍 FLARE: a European network for futures literacy
Mathias is taking on the role of lead for Denmark in FLARE, Futures Literacy for Anticipatory Societies, a new four-year pan-European COST Action, plus vice lead on one of its work packages. The first management committee meeting is coming up.
FLARE exists to pull a scattered European landscape into something more coherent: shared concepts, methodological and ethical standards, and mainstreaming futures literacy across education, governance and innovation. The part that speaks to this issue is its work on shared indicators for assessment, which is the readiness question again, asked at the scale of a continent.
🛰 SIGNAL OF THE MONTH
The sin of harming nature
On 2 September the Vatican's International Theological Commission published a 29,000-word document arguing that "sin against creation and the Creator" is a more precise formulation than "ecological sin". The wording carries more weight than it first appears to. It shifts environmental harm out of ethics, where it sits as a matter of conscience and preference, and into doctrine, for a church of 1.4 billion people.
Photo by Haley Phelps on Unsplash
Why it matters: An institution that plans in centuries has changed its moral vocabulary, and that will shape how a sixth of the world's population understands environmental damage long before any regulator catches up. Most organisations track legislation and consumer sentiment quite carefully. Very few track where moral authority is moving.
Questions to consider:
Which institutions shape your licence to operate while appearing nowhere in your risk register?
If the language people use about your industry shifted this far, how long would it take you to notice?
💡 SPOTLIGHT
A Foresight Outlook is a structured, research-based view of how a specific field is changing. The drivers, the signals, the tensions, and what it plausibly means for the people operating there. We have built them on the back of our Megatrends work, for the UAE Presidential Court, and on the futures of impact investing, among others. It sits inside our wider Futures Research & Intelligence work.
There is an obvious objection now, which is that anybody can generate a trend report in an afternoon. Quite true, and it is exactly why these have become more useful. Synthesis has stopped being the scarce thing. What is still scarce is judgement about which of a hundred plausible shifts bear on your decisions, grounding in a field somebody has actually worked in, and a willingness to name tensions and uncertainties where they sit.
→ See how a Foresight Outlook works
✴️ WORTH YOUR TIME
Carlo Rovelli, The Order of Time
Quoted in passing last month, and it earns the full recommendation. Most of foresight rests on familiar furniture. Past, present and futures, change unfolding through time, the futures open and the past largely fixed. Rovelli takes a good deal of that apart with physics, philosophy and writing that occasionally tips into poetry.
The line that lands hardest for anyone in this work is that the world is not a collection of things but a collection of events. Organisations, markets, technologies and cultures look like stable objects when we describe them, and they are in fact ongoing relations, decisions, frictions and changes. The most beautiful part is the human one, where Rovelli argues that we are constituted by memory and anticipation, the present thick with traces of what came before while the brain runs constantly forward. Which suggests futures thinking is innate rather than exotic. People already do it, and foresight only makes it deliberate and shared.
Not a page-turner, and not all of it is followable without a physics background. Still worth every underlined page.
🌀 FROM US
A short post that kept nagging until it turned into a longer article, about the change-management side of foresight. The psychological and sociological responses that surface when you ask people to question assumptions, sit with uncertainty, or imagine futures that make their current plans look less solid.
Partly it is about reading those moments more accurately. Mostly it argues that resistance is useful information and worth working with. If nobody in the room is uncomfortable, the futures on the table are probably sitting too close to the present. More in our Insights.
📅 ON THE HORIZON
From our Futures & Foresight events calendar:
CrossDive 2026, Pune, 22-23 October. A global foresight and insight summit on how overlapping shifts are reshaping markets and institutions.
Calgary Futures Forum 2026, Calgary, 26-27 October. Two days on building a city's capacity for long-term thinking as it approaches two million residents.
Dubai Future Week 2026, Dubai, 18-21 November. Four days at the Museum of the Future under the theme "For the Human of the Future".
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
