Mathias Behn Bjørnhof
Futurist & Director
I started ANTICIPATE because I felt the foresight field needed a different kind of practice
Too often, foresight has been kept behind closed doors. Treated as a niche discipline, protected by jargon and with too little action behind a lot of big words. Framed as something only specialists, think tanks, or large institutions could access properly.
I saw too much gatekeeping around ideas and a way thinking and doing things that should be far more widely used.
Not just in who gets invited into the room, but in how the work is presented. Futures thinking can easily become abstract, overcomplicated, or detached from the real pressures leaders, teams, and organisations are facing. It can sound interesting without changing much. It can stay at the level of trends, scenarios, or reports without helping people make better decisions.
That never sat right with me.
I started ANTICIPATE to help make foresight more useful, more practical, and more open. A place where futures thinking is both about exploring what might happen, but just as much about helping organisations act earlier, think more clearly, and respond with more imagination and responsibility.
Today, I help organisations prepare for uncertain futures and turn foresight into action, creating meaningful change in the process.
Strategy, innovation, and change, connected through futures
I’m Mathias Behn Bjørnhof, a futurist, foresight strategist, keynote speaker, and the founder of ANTICIPATE.
My work sits at the intersection of strategy, innovation, and change. I help organisations make sense of long-term shifts, navigate uncertainty, and build the capability to work with the future more actively in the decisions they make today.
Since launching ANTICIPATE in 2023, I’ve built it into a growing platform for futures thinking. That includes advisory work, trainings, keynote speaking, original frameworks, and learning experiences designed to make foresight more actionable across sectors.
Framework like the ACT Foresight Framework, the ANTICIPATE Megatrends and PRISM approach, ANTICIPATE Academy, and a range of foresight processes, strategic sprints, masterclasses, and immersive formats.
Our clients and collaborators have included Fortune 500 companies, UN bodies, public institutions, universities, SMEs, foundations, and innovation ecosystems across Europe and beyond.
What I help organisations do
My work is ultimately about one thing:
Helping people and organisations become more futures-ready, democratising futures (thinking) in that process)
That can mean identifying weak signals and emerging shifts before they become urgent. It can mean building scenarios that challenge strategy and assumptions. It can mean helping leadership teams develop a shared language for uncertainty. Or it can mean designing workshops, learning journeys, and strategic processes that move foresight from insight to implementation.
Across all of that, I focus on making foresight tangible.
I often describe myself as working between the futures and the present, where anticipation really comes to its right:
Connecting signals to strategy, systems to people, and imagination to implementation
My approach
I believe futures work has to do more than inform. It has to travel.
It has to move from insight into decisions. From workshops into ownership. From reports into changed behaviour, new choices, and better preparedness. That is why my work often brings together several layers at once:
Sensemaking of change across social, technological, economic, environmental, and political developments
Strategic foresight to challenge assumptions and widen decision horizons
Participatory methods that bring people into the process and create buy-in
Innovation and prototyping to make futures tangible
Transformation thinking to help ideas land in organisations, not just inspire them for a moment
Before ANTICIPATE
Before founding ANTICIPATE, I spent five years at the Copenhagen Institute for Futures Studies (CIFS), where I worked across advisory, foresight research, partnerships, capability building, and organisational development.
Over time, I moved from research and project support into senior advisory and leadership roles. I worked on foresight projects across industries, supported executive teams and international organisations, helped shape new services and learning formats, and led the turnaround of partnership and membership models.
As Head of Partnerships & Memberships, I helped drive a 50% growth in partners, while strengthening engagement, revenue, and the long-term value of the ecosystem. I also helped shape institute direction, led seminars and partner dialogue, and supported senior futurists in their partner-facing roles.
As Advisor & Futurist, I worked with decision-makers across sectors on strategy, scenarios, innovation, and transformation. My work covered topics such as smart cities, mobility, retail, health, sustainability, media, climate adaptation, risk, and post-pandemic futures.
That combination of research, strategic client work, facilitation, and ecosystem-building still shapes how I work today.
Education
I hold degrees from Copenhagen Business School in:
MSc in Organizational Innovation & Entrepreneurship
BSc in Business, Language & Culture (Spanish)
I have also completed further learning in AI and prompt engineering, change management, and behavioral design.
Affiliations and networks
My work is also shaped by the communities and collaborations I’m part of.
I serve on the Advisory Board of Copenhagen Business Academy Incubator and Africapols. I am an Associate Consultant with Earthshine Group, where I support work at the intersection of foresight, circularity, and net-zero transition.
I am an Accredited Professional Futurist and part of networks including the Global Futures Society and the European Foresight Network.
I also partner with social impact organisations, ecological transition actors, universities, foresight platforms, and innovation ecosystems working to build stronger futures capacity.
If we can’t imagine alternative futures, we become trapped in present realities.
The biggest risk isn’t change. It’s failing to imagine futures differently.
Get in touch
Looking to do great work together, got questions, or a cool idea for a collaboration on the horizon?
Fill out the form, and let's explore the futures together!
Or send us an email via hi@anticipate.dk
Follow the futures here
@anticipatefutures