Decoding and Shaping Futures
You are planning an event and are looking for a suitable keynote speaker for your program. But what does that actually mean?
I often observe a misunderstanding: many people think of a “keynote speaker” as a celebrity who somehow adds glamor, puts on an impressive show, and entertains the audience. That can work. But it wastes potential.
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The request came via my contact form at the end of April 2025: BE-terna, one of Europe’s leading providers of business software solutions, is planning its first Digital Summit. Two days in Munich, 150 to 200 participants from various industries: manufacturing, process industry, financial services. The motto: “Redefine Tomorrow.” Could I imagine giving the opening keynote on the second day?
I could.
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I just came back from Lisbon, where last week the second edition of the Future Days Conference took place. It’s a gathering that brings together the more progressive thinkers and activists in the wide field of futures and intersecting disciplines. This event took place in one of the most impressive conference venues I’ve ever seen, which you can see here.
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“How are you feeling this morning?” This simple question, asked by an AI language model called Claude, forms the starting point of a daily ritual that has fundamentally changed my working day. While the discussion about language models usually revolves around their ability to generate texts and answer questions, I have discovered another added value: their role as questioners and active listeners. The morning dialogue with Claude – not as a source of information, but as a partner for reflection – creates a moment of clarity in the midst of the everyday chaos of emails, meetings, and projects. This article describes how this unusual use of language models helps me to shift from reactive mode to conscious action and why this format can be particularly enriching for strategic thinking processes.
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How concrete experience creates the basis for productive debates
“How do we protect ourselves from the existential threat posed by AI?” asks an expert at a specialist conference. Meanwhile, millions of people talk to ChatGPT and Claude every day about their mental health (therapy is the top use case for generative AI in 2025) and have lessons created for them to learn. This juxtaposition of philosophical debates on fundamental principles and pragmatic everyday use characterizes the current approach to artificial intelligence and creates a remarkable divide.
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Ah, that feeling. We’ve all been there, haven’t we? We’ve all found ourselves overwhelmed by the flood of trend reports, sifting through countless slide decks that predict the next “big disruption,” emerging from strategic offsites filled with buzzwords but surprisingly lacking in actual breakthroughs. As someone tasked with trying to make sense of and navigate the future, I know the pressure is immense. You often feel caught in a fundamentally reactive cycle: constantly playing catch-up, struggling to tease out the truly meaningful signals from the deafening background noise. The sense of overwhelm is palpable.
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This week, I kicked off a three-day Berlin learning expedition for a leadership group from a French finance company. As with any opening keynote, I faced that familiar challenge: How to transform a typical “trend presentation” into something that genuinely empowers participants throughout their entire learning journey?
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