Anticipatory Leadership: Not Just a Set of Tools, But a Way of Being
With a background in leadership studies, I’ve always found myself drawn toward strategy and innovation work. Over the years, I’ve had the opportunity to contribute to foresight and future strategy projects with organisations like LEGO, Wonderful Copenhagen, the Danish Architecture Center, Ramboll, BNPP and others.
More recently, I’ve helped design and facilitate courses on Strategic Foresight and Futures Thinking for decision-makers, strategists, and innovators. These programs—developed in collaboration with Hyper Island and the Copenhagen Institute for Futures Studies, one of the world’s leading foresight think tanks—treat futures thinking not just as a method, but as a cognitive skill.
In and around these programs, we often talk about leadership in the context of anticipating and preparing for the future. Sometimes it’s referred to as anticipatory leadership—or something along those lines. But here’s the thing: whenever I hear people talk about it, especially within the foresight field, something feels off. Not entirely wrong, just… reduced. Like the idea has been filtered through a management lens—focused on tools, frameworks, and outputs.
But anticipatory leadership isn’t about knowing what’s next. It’s about creating the conditions for others to imagine, explore, and move through what’s possible.
Why the confusion?
We often conflate management and leadership, even though they serve very different purposes—especially when it comes to working with the future.
Management is about maintaining order, predictability, and performance. It focuses on setting goals, organizing resources, executing plans, and measuring results. Its job is to optimize the current system.
Leadership, by contrast, is about vision, direction, and change. It’s about navigating uncertainty, inspiring people, challenging assumptions, and creating space for transformation. Where management asks how and when, leadership asks what and why.
In the context of foresight, this difference matters deeply.
Classic foresight practice often focuses on three core activities:
Scanning – Looking outward for signals of change.
Sense-making – Interpreting those signals and understanding their implications.
Mobilising strategy – Turning insights into direction and action.
These are important. They bring clarity and structure to the uncertainty of what’s ahead. But they’re also largely managerial in nature. They help organisations align, systematise, and move forward—they’re about doing things right.
But leadership is about doing the right things. And in foresight, that distinction can make or break our ability to meaningfully engage with the future.
Enter transformational leadership.
Transactional leadership maintains the status quo; transformational leadership awakens possibility. Transformational leaders don’t just guide people through change—they inspire them to engage with it creatively. They don’t create more followers; they create more leaders.
In the same way, anticipatory leadership isn’t about safeguarding the future. It’s about cultivating more future thinkers—people willing to lean into uncertainty, question assumptions, and see complexity not as a problem to solve, but as a pattern to explore.
True anticipatory leaders:
Encourage long-term thinking even when short-term demands are loud.
Make curiosity and complexity feel meaningful—and safe.
Help others find value in questions without easy answers.
Create space for sharing half-formed ideas and building on each other’s thinking.
Inspire people to look ahead not with fear, but with a sense of possibility.
Because leading with foresight isn’t just about scanning better or planning more efficiently. It’s about something deeper: making people want to look to the future in the first place. It’s about helping them believe that exploring what could be is worth their time—and that they have a role in shaping it.
Here’s the shift we need:
Anticipatory leadership isn’t about knowing what’s next.
It’s about creating the conditions for others to imagine, explore, and move through what’s possible.
Less focus on frameworks. More on feelings.
Less about processes. More about postures.
Less about managing foresight—and more about leading with it.