A futurist who talks about flying cars? Not Tessa Cramer. As a researcher and professor, she shows how to engage with the future in your daily practice, starting today. At Future Foundry 2026, she challenges you to broaden your perspective. We spoke with her ahead of the event for a glimpse of what’s to come.
I wrote my dissertation on this very question. A futurist is someone who systematically analyzes the future, and that word "systematically" matters, because it reflects a scientific approach. But the goal is never analysis for its own sake. The point is to translate that research into practice, so it can inform the real decisions people and organizations face.
I genuinely see a world on fire, on many levels. And one of the most common questions I get is: how do I cope with the helplessness I feel when I think about the future? That's driven by how accessible everything has become. You wake up, open your phone, and half a city is burning somewhere.
It affects me too, and I see I'm not the only one. Relating to that much tension is a real challenge. And that's exactly where I see a large part of my work: helping people deal with what's uncertain, with the things we can't predict. Most of us were trained to work with what we know: models, systems, certainty. What I try to help people see is that working with uncertainty is a skill, not something you eliminate, but something you learn to navigate..
AI is a form of intelligence we need to take seriously. But my job as a futurist is to open up the conversation, and right now it's getting narrower. When we treat AI as an oracle, something that knows more than we do, we become too dependent on it. And if we keep taking shortcuts through AI, we gradually lose our capacity for imagination, creativity, and critical thinking. The healthier approach is to treat AI as a partner in thought, a sparring partner, rather than something that does the work for you.
What I find equally important is that the conversation will move on. Ten years ago, every presentation was about big data. Now it's all about AI. Within a year or two that curve will flatten, and quantum will take its place, a technology that is almost incomprehensible and already attracting serious investment across Europe. So my advice is to train yourself in AI and understand its benefits and limits, but keep the conversation wider than whatever technology happens to be in front of you. Otherwise you build your thinking around something temporary.
What I find genuinely encouraging is the institutionalization happening right now. Fifteen years ago, sustainability was seen as an add-on. Now it's core business, and that's a real step forward.
But reaching the goals we've set for 2030 takes more than reporting and checking boxes. That's exactly why the Inner Development Goals were developed, as a complement to the UN's Sustainable Development Goals. The SDGs are scientifically solid and well-formulated, but a framework alone doesn't change behavior. We know things need to change, yet knowing isn't enough to actually do it. Without an inner shift, at the level of individual people and organizations, the big transitions simply don't happen.
Here's the paradox. We tend to look for grip in what we already know, but conditions now change faster than our systems can keep up. So grip comes from something else: the ability to stay standing even when things are unclear.
Someone said something to me recently that stuck. They called these "shifting skills," distinct from hard skills and soft skills. Shifting skills are what keep you functional when the ground moves. And some of them are surprisingly simple: actually listening in a meeting rather than waiting to respond, breaking your own routines, talking to someone outside your usual circle.
There's something counterintuitive here too. Most organizations want to accelerate, constantly. But all my research points the same way: you need both acceleration and deceleration. You speed up when you have to, but you slow down to reflect on what that speed actually did to your organization. Questions like "are we still on the right path" cannot be answered at speed. They ask you to slow down and look up.
Plenty, but let me give just two examples. Start small: on Monday morning, take a few minutes to ask what deserves your attention this week instead of what's in your inbox or what's loudest. We've built systems optimized for distraction, so sometimes the most useful thing is to let an email wait, or to stop filling every hour of your week with meetings.
The second example is organizing a different kind of meeting. I pioneer within a university of around 4,000 employees, where we sit together for one hour every week with a few simple rules. Everyone starts by saying why they're there, we don't interrupt each other and most importantly; we're not going to solve anything. That causes a real shock, because we're so used to always having something to fix. But slowing down like that is where real listening starts.
Because I'm going to open some windows. People often expect a futurist to predict what's coming, but what I do is show how to engage with the future in your daily work.
A lot of my work is about awe-futuring, futurism through wonder, because if you keep doing the same things in the same environment, it gets hard to think differently. Opening a window is what makes a new perspective possible. That's also why an event like Future Foundry matters: it's a deliberate moment to step out of the routine, share something, and see something new.