Meet Anna Grabtchak, the new Client Executive helping foresight teams turn insights into action

Every foresight team knows the moment when strategy and uncertainty collide. Signals accelerate. Assumptions lose their footing. Leaders feel the pressure to anticipate what comes next, yet struggle to turn scanning and scenarios into decisions that truly shape their organization’s preferable future.

This is the space where effective foresight becomes a competitive advantage.

And it is exactly where Anna Grabtchak excels.

We are excited to introduce Anna as the new Client Executive at FIBRES, supporting organizations that want to develop their foresight capabilities and make future thinking part of everyday strategic work.

Anna brings a rare combination of hands-on consulting experience, futures thinking expertise, and ongoing academic research in foresight system maturity. But more importantly, she brings a clear belief: foresight is not about predicting the future, it is about creating one. Or as Anna puts it, "Future does not exist; we only have this moment. Your daily decisions and actions create the reality of tomorrow."

Seeing foresight as a system that shapes decisions

Anna’s approach is grounded in a simple, powerful idea: the future is not a fixed destination to forecast but a set of possibilities that teams can influence through taking wider perspectives (sense changes), futures collaboration (sense-making), and structural approach to activities aiming for a long term success (seizing opportunities).

One misconception she often encounters is the urge to focus only on the most probable or the most preferred future. For her, both are narrow starting points.

“Believing that only the most probable future will come along is risky, but trusting solely the most preferable one is equally harmful. You need to map, prepare and work on the multiple futures until one becomes a reality.”

This mindset aligns closely with how FIBRES supports customers: helping teams explore multiple possibilities, challenge assumptions, engage colleagues, and build a continuous foresight practice that informs actual decisions.

Why Anna joined FIBRES

When we asked Anna why she chose FIBRES, she first pointed to the people.

“It is rare to find such open-minded people who work with high-quality standards while still having fun and being mindful colleagues. The great culture was evident from the very first meeting.”

She also emphasized something our customers tell us often. Many organizations want a flexible way to conduct horizon scanning, collaborate across teams, and connect foresight to strategy. FIBRES delivers that combination.

“There is no other, such a thorough option (automated signal collection, horizon scanning, collaborative analysis, reporting features, AI & human cooperation level options, platform tailoring options according to your foresight taxonomy and embedding to tools you already use), in the market that would support an established foresight team as well as FIBRES does today.”

Anna brings a particularly nuanced view on AI and its evolving role in foresight work. She sees AI not as a replacement for experts, but as a partner.

“AI forces us to rethink the existing solutions and processes. The real change is not about AI itself, but the human work. Which work do we want to do? And how can AI help us expand our capabilities instead of substitute them?”

Teams that learn to co-work with AI, she believes, will be the ones who turn complexity into opportunity.

How Anna will support customers

As Client Executive, Anna will work closely with organizations that want to strengthen their foresight maturity, embed futures thinking into strategy, and move from one-off foresight projects to continuous foresight systems.

She is particularly emphasizing the urgency of foresight teams to close the gap between insight and action. In her experience, this is where many organizations struggle. They scan, they analyze, they produce scenarios, yet decision making remains unchanged.

“A marvelous scenario report does not change anything if it is not affecting decisions or activities. You need continuity, and find your own way to actually use foresight results.”

Her approach emphasizes three success factors.

1. Integration: ensuring foresight connects to strategy, innovation, risk and market intelligence.
2. Participation: involving people, building trust, and creating credibility for foresight work.
3. Structure: establishing processes that make foresight repeatable, scalable and usable.

When these elements come together, foresight becomes a shared practice instead of a one-time deliverable.

A researcher at heart, focused on foresight maturity

Alongside her work at FIBRES, Anna is pursuing doctoral research at the Turku School of Economics (Finland Futures Research Center). Her topic addresses a challenge many foresight teams face: How can organizations build foresight systems that lead to tangible, measurable, performance-enhancing outcomes?

Her research explores foresight system maturity and its influence on strategic decision making. The goal is to identify the essential elements of a foresight system that genuinely helps organizations navigate uncertainty and make better long-term choices.

“The topic requires a profound understanding of strategic decision making and the role of foresight in it. The result is a foresight system with the vital elements every organization needs.”

Her academic work fuels her practical work at FIBRES, and vice versa, creating a valuable bridge between theory and real-world application.

What signals Anna is watching now

When asked about the forces shaping the future, Anna highlighted several themes that foresight teams should monitor closely:

• the evolution of AI and human co-work (focusing on creating a way to augment human skills, not minimize human efforts or replace human work),
• increasing tension between democracies and authoritarian regimes,
  - environmental constraints pushing long-term thinking on what is really changing,
• a shift from quarterly metrics to broader time horizons,
• the need to explore preferable futures, not just probable ones (responsibility for creating options for yourself, not waiting someone else to do it for you).

But there is one perspective she hopes more teams will adopt.

“Imagining preferable and best possible futures should be a serious hobby: fun and repeating.”

This curiosity and energy is what she brings to her work with clients and to the broader foresight community.

Welcome, Anna!

We are delighted to welcome Anna to FIBRES. Her experience strengthens our mission, her perspective enriches our community, and her approach reflects exactly where foresight is heading: more human, more collaborative, and more actionable.

You will see more of her in future articles, events, and client engagements, as she works with organizations to build stronger foresight practices.

If your team is developing its foresight maturity or looking for ways to turn insights into action, Anna would be glad to connect.

Let us build the future together.