Abstract
Across public institutions, private organizations, and civil society alike, calls to become “fit for the future” have become ubiquitous. Digital transformation, sustainability transitions, resilience building, and innovation agendas are invoked as strategic imperatives in response to accelerating technological change, ecological degradation, geopolitical instability, and social fragmentation. Yet despite the proliferation of strategies, roadmaps, and policy frameworks, many initiatives stall after early phases of enthusiasm, producing tensions between ambition and implementation, innovation and inertia, and vision and practice. What is often missing is not intent or expertise but the capacity to meaningfully navigate complexity, uncertainty, and conflicting values while translating abstract goals into situated, workable futures.