Temporal Tensions (Back to the Futures #18)
Summer round-off: June, July and August 2026
Change takes time but is also constant.
Almost nothing we work on moves inside a quarter, which is awkward, because quarters are roughly what most organisations are built to see.
You notice it most around future generations. That tends to get framed as a philosophical question, something about whether we have the right to make decisions on behalf of people who aren't born yet, and it's a fair question, but it's not usually what's stopping anyone. What stops people is that priorities are set on a two-year cycle and measured on a shorter one than that, so nobody is being asked about 2055 and nobody is resourced to think about it either. It's less a failure of imagination than a failure of accounting.
There's plenty of appetite for the futures, but it tends to be an impatient sort of appetite. Everyone wants to know now what's coming, and far fewer are willing to sign up for the slower thing that would actually produce answers (and new questions), which is watching change continuously over years and doing the unglamorous work of asking what it means as it goes. So you get the back-and-forth we see in most organisations: a burst of futures work, then a return to the operating rhythm, then another burst eighteen months later when something goes wrong.
Carlo Rovelli makes the case in The Order of Time that the orderly flow we all experience, past into present into future, is an artefact of where we're standing, and that at a fundamental level time doesn't exist in anything like that form. Which is either completely unhelpful or quite freeing, depending on the day you're having.
We'd rather take it as freeing. If the tidy line from here to there is partly a story we tell ourselves, then the more useful thing to be doing isn't fixing a date and planning backwards from it, it's paying attention to what's emerging, how events connect to each other, and what any of it does to the system we're actually operating in.
Three months in one issue. Let's get into it.
LOOKING BACK
Setting a direction
📍 Foresight masterclass, German pharma innovation team
A pilot session on core concepts, mindsets and methods. What made it unusual was the ambition: not a one-off inspiration day, but a division-wide foresight framework with stronger bridges between signals, sensemaking, strategic options and action. We also changed the plan several times as the room moved, which is the job in miniature. Design carefully enough to know where you are going, stay present enough to change the route. First step in a longer collaboration.
📍 Foresight Foundations went live
A year ago Chloé de Ruffray suggested our Director Mathias Behn Bjørnhof to collaborate on focused learning experiences rather than one course covering everything. Four masterclasses later, they sit in one portal with workbooks, canvases, toolkits and recordings, plus a certificate. Each began as a live webinar, so the recordings carry participants' questions and examples alongside our instruction. Over 300 people have bought at least one. If that includes you, write to us and you will only pay for what you are missing.
Every 1 July we ask whether to continue for another year. It is a small ritual, borrowed from a friend who said anything running on default deserves a proactive yes or no. This year the answer came quickly, which does not make the path an easy one. The next phase is still about building, and also about structuring things more sensibly. Which is the same question this issue circles: not whether to keep going, but on what horizon.
Following what emerged
📍 The Foresight Facilitator, cohort two
Planned for autumn, moved to July because the first cohort was good enough that waiting made no sense. Eight countries, five continents, NGOs, public sector and private companies. The change we made was subtraction. Cohort one covered too much before anyone could apply anything, so we cut, not because the frameworks were weak but because the story got stronger with fewer of them. One participant wrote afterwards: "The resources in themselves are incredibly useful and I know will help me deepen my practice." With Darwin Sy Antipolo
📍 ACT Futures Mosaic travelled to Lisbon
After the first Mosaic in Copenhagen, several people asked for it in their city. On 30 July it went to Lisbon with Benedita Salinas of Salinas80, on the theme of Mobility: people, tourism, goods, ideas and belonging. Participants build a physical futures artefact and the tiles join a growing archive across cities. The artefacts are enjoyable to make, but the reflection afterwards is what does the work. We did not plan for the format to travel this fast, and that has turned out to be the best thing about it.
Out in the world
📍 Future Days, Copenhagen
Three appearances: a Breakfast Club with Amy Daroukakis and Kirsten van Dam, planned for 20 people and grown to 40-something; a City Scanning stop hosted by Mathias at Demokrati Garage; and ACT Futures Mosaic as an official side event, run by Søs Christine Hejselbæk, Bianca Muresan and Katrine Faerch Baelum. We caught only parts of the festival and missed the final day and our own side event entirely. Work has a bad habit of getting in the way of the few days each year with room to think bigger thoughts together.
City Scanning used Jonathan White's dichotomies as a starting point: futures far and near, shared and apart, rational and impulsive, calculated and imagined, open and closed. If we want to talk about systemic transition anywhere, we also have to ask what futures are to us, and what they are to other people.
📍 Keynote at Smart City Business and IC² 2026, São Paulo
Mathias gave a keynote on the futures of cities, joined a panel, and handed out awards on stage for the first time. The argument: cities face wicked problems that do not sit in separate boxes, which is why siloed solutions keep disappointing us. Cities can reinvent themselves. And every flourishing city starts as an act of imagination, because before the bike lanes, somebody had to picture the city organised differently and then argue for it.
📍 Two podcast conversations
Mathias joined Tracy Clark on Building Thinkers and Steven Fisher on Think Forward. The thread worth pulling out: why so many foresight projects stop the moment the scenarios are finished. A finished scenario feels like a deliverable, so everyone treats it as an ending. Most processes are still designed to hand over a document rather than change a decision.
LOOKING AHEAD
📍 Find Your Futures Voice: places opening
A small coaching programme for people in the liminal space between knowing futures thinking matters and finding their own way of using it. Some are building an independent practice, some embedding foresight inside an organisation, some still working out where futures fits at all. They could all research their way to the tools. What they needed was a way to connect futures to their own context and capabilities. Currently full at three. Room for a couple more in a month or so, so get in touch if that sounds like you.
📍 Foresight Thursdays
A new weekly series of brief visual overviews of reports, academic articles and concepts worth knowing about. A lot of good foresight research never reaches the people who would use it, because nobody has time for a 90-page PDF. Follow at #foresightthursdays.
📍 AI and the Futures of Foresight
Our paper on this very existential and critical projects is nearly done. It skips the question of whether AI replaces futurists and asks instead which parts of the work are genuinely changed, which are augmented, and which get quietly hollowed out if nobody is watching.
📍 The Future Report, and autumn Circles
Wrapping up The Future Report with Google and Livity, a proper team effort across the board. Autumn also brings ConsilioNexus Circles on AI, the ANTICIPATE Megatrends and data as a strategic asset, plus another Foresight Facilitator cohort and a new live learning experience we will say more about shortly.
🛰 SIGNAL OF THE MONTH
Everything we scan goes into an ever-expanding signals database in Notion, connected to our themes, Megatrends, horizons, sources and projects. Some signals become part of 12 Days of Signals. Others sit for months until they suddenly matter. More of them now become signal cards we bring into client workshops, which is where a database stops being an archive: a small development elsewhere can provoke a large conversation about what is changing underneath it.
This month: the long term is being written into law.
While most institutions get shorter-term, a counter-movement is building the opposite. The EU appointed its first Commissioner with responsibility for intergenerational fairness in 2024, and a Strategy on Intergenerational Fairness is now taking shape. Wales has had a Future Generations Commissioner since 2016, and following this year's Senedd election the Commissioner has published a discussion paper on embedding long-term thinking into the institution's daily work.
Why it matters: these are attempts to solve exactly the tension in this issue. How do you commit to a horizon longer than an electoral cycle without freezing the future in place?
Questions to consider:
What would it take for your organisation to be accountable to a decision ten years out, not only to this year's plan?
Who represents the people who will live with your decisions but were not in the room when you made them?
→ Network of Institutions and Leaders for Future Generations + The Welsh Commissioner on long-term thinking
💡 SPOTLIGHT
Almost every organisation we meet has one brilliant person holding the whole foresight effort together through personal conviction. Almost nobody has thought about what happens when that person changes role.
The question clients ask has shifted. A couple of years ago it was "can you run us through a foresight process?". Now it is "how do we build foresight into the way we work?". One is about a project, the other about a system, and they need different answers.
A foresight system is the set of relationships, routines, spaces, tools and mindsets that turn future insights into better decisions. Most organisations have some of the building blocks without ever having laid them out. The ones usually missing: moments where people rehearse different futures rather than being briefed on one, shared language so an insight survives the journey from the people who found it to the people who decide, and written rules for how signals get captured and used rather than living in one person's head.
Not every organisation needs a foresight team. But every organisation making long-term decisions is already running some kind of system, whether they designed it or not.
→ See how we work on this, and get in touch
✴️ WORTH YOUR TIME
Jonathan White, In the Long Run: The Future as a Political Idea
The book behind the dichotomies used at Demokrati Garage, and the sharpest thing we have read on the politics of time. White argues that the future is a political resource rather than a neutral space we plan into, and that who gets to define it is a question of power. He is particularly good on how permanent crisis compresses the horizon until only the short term feels real, and on how invoking the long term can itself shut down argument in the present. It complicates the usual foresight position more than it confirms it, which is why it is worth your time.
🌀 FROM US
Futures of Impact Investing: Making the Case for Systemic Approaches
OECD preliminary figures show official development assistance fell 23.1% in 2025, the largest annual decline on record. In conversations with foundations, NGOs and development organisations we keep meeting the same paradox: so much energy goes into securing the next round of funding that there is little capacity left to ask what the funding landscape itself might look like in ten years.
The article draws on our larger research project and argues for more systemic thinking and a more deliberate engagement with futures.
📅 ON THE HORIZON
From our Futures & Foresight events calendar:
Futures Studies Conference 2026, Naples, 24-26 September. This year's theme is long-term thinking as a response to short-termism and polycrisis.
Futures4Europe: Daring to Imagine Otherwise, Rome, 30 September to 1 October.
African Futures Conference: From Data to Decisions, Pretoria, 13-14 October.
Back to the Futures is your monthly glimpse into what we're doing at ANTICIPATE. This one covered a whole summer, so normal service resumes at the end of September.
If you are trying to make foresight stick inside your organisation rather than run it as a one-off, that is the conversation we like having. Start with Futures-Ready Organisations, or write to us at hi@anticipate.dk.
Until next time, stay curious.
— The ANTICIPATE Team
