Lia Meissner

Therapeutic Work

How do we build inner resilience in times of constant transformation?I support individuals through resilience coaching — helping them restore balance, clarity, and connection in times of change.

1:1 Resilience Coaching

Personalized 1:1 sessions supporting you in rebuilding safety, energy, and inner stability during times of transition. This work combines systemic counselling, embodied practices, and nervous system regulation.

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Life
Repair Kit

A self-paced resilience framework for rebuilding foundations and redesigning life after disruption. Grounded in psychology, embodiment, and systems thinking (launching in spring 2026).

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Resilience Trainings

I also work with teams and organizations in resilience workshops, strengthening collective stability, adaptability, and collaboration in times of uncertainty.

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Strategic Foresight Consulting

How do we find clarity when everything around us keeps shifting?

I help organizations develop future literacy and resilience — supporting teams and leaders to anticipate trends, explore emerging possibilities, and turn uncertainty into strategy.

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• My Foresight Project Portfolio
• My Foresight Publications

Strategic Foresight Training

I teach foresight and future literacy to executive programs, companies, and universities , building the capacity to navigate complexity and act with clarity in times of change.

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Speaking, Research, Advisory

Through keynotes, applied research, and advisory work, I help organizations make sense of change, design future-ready strategies, and translate foresight into meaningful action.

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Strategic Foresight Training

I teach strategic foresight and offer the following workshop formats for organizations across the private sector, public institutions, NGOs, and universities.

Inventing the Future: Introduction to Strategic Foresight

This introductory workshop offers a structured overview of strategic foresight as a practice for navigating complexity, uncertainty, and long-term change. Participants learn how foresight supports strategic thinking beyond forecasting and short-term planning.The workshop introduces core concepts, the intellectual roots of futures thinking, and key foresight methods such as horizon scanning, trend analysis, environmental scanning, and scenario techniques. It provides a solid foundation for applying foresight in organizational contexts.Duration: 0.5–1 day
Format: Online or in person
Group size: 5–20 participants (adaptable)

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Exploring Alternative Futures: Advanced Workshop on Scenario Planning

This advanced workshop focuses on scenario development as a central method of strategic foresight. Building on prior foresight knowledge, participants learn how to identify and assess key drivers of change, construct coherent and contrasting future scenarios, and work with different future logics.Through guided, hands-on group work, participants experience the main steps of an exploratory scenario process and reflect on how scenarios can be used for strategic orientation and decision-making in their own contexts.Duration: 1-2 days
Format: online or in person
Group size: 5-20 participants (adaptable)

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Tailor-Made Trainings

Beyond these formats, I design custom foresight trainings and learning journeys tailored to the specific needs, questions, and strategic challenges of your organization. Content, duration, and methods are adapted to your context — from short introductions to multi-day in-depth formats.

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• Read more about foresight methods here

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Speaking, Research & Advisory

Do you need support in preparing for the future? I offer inspiring keynotes, applied research, and advisory work to help you make sense of change, design future-ready strategies, and translate foresight into meaningful action.

Speaking

Are you noticing uncertainty turning into future anxiety within your organization?
My keynotes create orientation and momentum by helping audiences move from fear of the future to a sense of agency and possibility. I translate complexity into clarity and open spaces for collective reflection and courage.

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Applied Futures Studies

Do you have a strategic question about the future that needs solid grounding rather than speculation?
With over eight years of experience in applied futures studies, I design and conduct research projects tailored to your context — using methods such as surveys, expert interviews, expert workshops, trend analysis, and scenario analysis to turn uncertainty into insight.

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Advisory

Do you need a sparring partner to think through complex plans and decisions?
I support leaders and teams as a strategic counterpart — helping them clarify intentions, challenge assumptions, and explore future-ready options with depth and perspective.

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Project Portfolio

This portfolio showcases selected projects from the past decade, reflecting my work at the intersection of futures thinking, embodiment, and transformation.If you’d like to explore how this work could support your context, feel free to get in touch.

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Anticipatory
Strategy

Strategic Foresight as a practice to help organizations move from reactive decision-making to anticipatory, resilient strategy

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Life
Repair Kit

An integrative framework for rebuilding life after crisis, disruption, or profound change

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Teaching Strategic Foresight

Building Futures Literacy and strategic capacity through applied foresight education

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Embodied
Leadership

Reclaiming the body as a source of intelligence, regulation, and wise action in complex times

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Ocean
Futures

Exploring carbon-neutral shipping by returning to wind, muscle power, and sea(wo)manship

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Attachment in Transition

Mapping the inner landscape of loss

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Food as
Medicine

Using food as a foundation for health — informed by microbiome science, bioindividuality, and functional nutrition

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Choreographies of Presence

Dance as a practice of presence, embodied research, and collective attunement.

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Regenerating Forest Futures

Climate-resilient forest transformation through biodiversity, dialogue, and coordinated action

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Anticipatory Strategy

How can organizations take sound strategic decisions today for tomorrow, without knowing what the future will bring?

In this body of work, I advised organizations on strategic decision-making through applied research at the edge of existing knowledge. Working in commissioned research contexts, I supported leadership teams and decision-makers in addressing complex, forward-looking questions where evidence was incomplete and uncertainty high. This included extensive advisory and research work at the Fraunhofer Institute for Systems and Innovation Research ISI (2018–2019) and later at VDI/VDE Innovation + Technik (2021–2025), primarily in collaboration with public sector organizations.

Operating at this knowledge frontier, I combined scientifically grounded analysis with methods of strategic foresight, including horizon scanning, scenario planning, trend analysis, surveys, expert interviews, expert workshops, and structured stakeholder engagement. The goal was not prediction, but sensemaking and futures literacy: to explore emerging developments, surface and challenge dominant assumptions, and translate anticipatory insights into tailored strategic options that strengthen an organization’s capacity for learning, adaptation, and future-ready decision-making.The selected publications listed below provide further insight into the scope, methods, and thematic focus of my work:

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Life Repair Kit

How can we rebuild a life that feels coherent, alive, and sustainable after crisis, loss, or profound disruption?

Life Repair Kit is an integrative framework for people navigating major life transitions such as burnout, illness, separation, identity shifts, or the collapse of long-held plans. It starts from the recognition that after crisis, returning to “how things were” is often neither possible nor desirable. What is needed instead is a careful, grounded process of rebuilding.The work brings together insights from psychology, systemic thinking, embodiment, nervous system regulation, and resilience research. Rather than offering quick fixes or optimization strategies, Life Repair Kit focuses on stabilizing foundations: restoring safety in the body, clarifying inner needs and values, rebuilding daily rhythms, and reconnecting with meaning, agency, and belonging.

Life Repair Kit treats crisis not as personal failure, but as a threshold. By working across multiple dimensions of life — body, mind, nervous system, relationships, and purpose — it supports people in integrating what has been broken and shaping a life that feels more truthful, resilient, and aligned than before.

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Teaching Strategic Foresight

How can foresight become a shared strategic capability?

Teaching Strategic Foresight focuses on capacity building: Enabling people to engage with uncertainty, complexity, and transformation in a structured and reflective way. As a lecturer at the Freie Universität Berlin (Center for Continuing Education), I design and teach practice-oriented foresight courses for professionals in higher education, research, and leadership contexts.My teaching combines conceptual foundations with hands-on application. Participants learn core foresight concepts, distinguish foresight from forecasting, and work with methods such as horizon scanning, trend analysis, and scenario planning. Particular emphasis is placed on developing futures literacy — the ability to question assumptions, hold multiple possible futures, and use foresight as a tool for strategic orientation and resilience.

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Embodied Leadership

What becomes possible when we overcome the body–mind split and reclaim embodied intelligence as a legitimate form of knowing, sensing, and leading?

Embodied Leadership starts from the understanding that many of today’s global challenges — like climate collaps, loss of biodiversity, social fragmentation and collective disorientation — cannot be addressed through cognitive intelligence alone. They require embodied knowledge, emotional wisdom, and the capacity to regulate the nervous system under pressure. This work responds to a deeply ingrained body–mind split by restoring the body as a legitimate source of perception, insight, and agency in leadership and decision-making.

Embodied Leadership integrates somatic awareness, nervous system regulation, and trauma-informed practice to support leaders in navigating complexity from a grounded and responsive place. One key method within this work is Fascial Maneuvers, which engage the body’s connective tissue network — fascia — as a sensory system that continuously communicates with the brain and shapes posture, movement, and our sense of inner coherence.Through subtle, compressive movements and body-based practices, leaders learn to regulate stress, release stored tension, and expand their capacity to respond rather than react. This approach is particularly relevant in a German context, where many bodies still carry transgenerational imprints of war, displacement, and collective trauma. By working bottom-up rather than purely cognitively, change can emerge gradually, sustainably, and with greater integrity.From this foundation, leadership shifts. Leaders who are attuned to their bodies, capable of regulating pressure, and willing to trust embodied signals act with greater clarity, resilience, and responsiveness in complex and uncertain environments.

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Ocean Futures

How can global trade and maritime transport be reimagined beyond fossil fuels, efficiency myths, and extractive speed?

My wish to cross the Atlantic under sail was rooted in a simple but radical question: If global trade is the backbone of globalization, how can it function without fossil fuels? With Ocean Futures, I explored alternatives by returning to one of the oldest transport technologies humanity has ever known: Sailing.

As a trainee on traditional wooden tall ship, we sailed cocoa, coffee, and rum from the Caribbean to Europe — almost entirely CO₂-neutral. Life on board was deliberately low-tech: No engine, no refrigerator, no hot water, no shower, no internet, no smartphone - only the sound of the wind, muscle power, careful planning and provisioning, good old bucket showers, shared presence, and sea(wo)manship.Working at sea followed a radically different logic from modern efficiency-driven systems. Without motors, every maneuver required collective coordination, embodied skill, and close attention to weather, wind, and the vessel. Resources were finite and visible; energy and water had to be conserved, systems maintained by hand, and decisions continuously adapted to changing conditions.This experience has many parallels to my work as a futures scientist: Sailing cargo across the Atlantic meant navigating uncertainty, anticipating change, and continuously observing the environment for weak signals and emerging risks. The ship became a living laboratory for anticipatory thinking, collaboration under uncertainty, and embodied leadership.

The journey was physically demanding and often challenging — marked by exhaustion and discomfort. Yet it was richly rewarding. The ocean revealed itself anew each day: moments of calm, sudden storms, flying fish, breathtaking sunrises and sunsets, rainbows, vast night skies filled with stars, plankton glowing in the dark, and encounters with whales and dolphins. From high up in the mast, the view stretched endlessly in all directions, offering a rare sense of scale, perspective, and presence.These experiences deepened my love for the ocean as a foundation of life on this planet.

• Explore my paper on alternative ship propulsion systems

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Attachment in Transition: Mapping the Inner Landscape of Loss

How does our inner attachment system reorganize in times of loss and transition?

Attachment in Transition explores what happens within us when we lose someone we love — through separation, illness, or death. Such experiences do not only change our external circumstances; they fundamentally reorganize our inner bonding system. Emotions like grief, anger, longing, relief, shame, tenderness, confusion, or unexpected vitality may arise simultaneously, often in waves that feel difficult to grasp or integrate.Using a systemic parts approach, this work views inner experience as an ecosystem of relationships rather than a single emotional state. It explores how different inner parts respond to loss: which emotions move to the foreground, which withdraw, and what new needs emerge — for protection, expression, rest, or connection. It also makes space to notice where relief, gratitude, or new aliveness may quietly coexist with grief.Through tactile and visual methods such as working with modelling clay, participants externalize their inner attachment landscape and make invisible dynamics visible. This allows for intuitive expression beyond language, creates compassionate distance from overwhelming feelings, and supports meaning-making during times of transition. Held with care and respect for individual boundaries, the work invites people to meet inner change with curiosity, gentleness, and self-compassion.

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Food as Medicine

What role does nutrition play in regulating inflammation, energy, and overall health?

Food as Medicine is grounded in the understanding that nutrition plays a central role in physical health, mental clarity, immune function, and long-term resilience. At the core of this work lies the microbiome — a complex ecosystem that influences digestion, inflammation, metabolism, mood, and overall vitality. Supporting this inner ecosystem is not about following trends, but about learning how food interacts with the body on an individual level.This work is guided by the principle of bioindividuality: there is no one-size-fits-all diet. What nourishes one person may burden another. Through approaches such as elimination protocols and healing diets like the Autoimmune Protocol (AIP), individuals can systematically identify which foods support balance and which contribute to inflammation, fatigue, or dysregulation.Water fasting and ketogenic nutrition are used as intentional tools to reduce inflammation, support metabolic flexibility, and promote cellular repair — when applied thoughtfully and adapted to individual needs.

Drawing on functional nutrition, this work focuses on lowering chronic inflammation and restoring energy by understanding macronutrients, metabolic needs, and the role of nutrient density. Particular attention is given to feeding the microbiome through fiber-rich foods, fermented foods, and diverse plant sources, while also addressing factors such as antinutrients, food quality, and preparation methods.

Food as Medicine also emphasizes eating locally and seasonally, reconnecting with food preparation, and using traditional practices such as fermentation to improve digestibility and nutrient availability. Rather than prescribing rigid rules, this work supports people in developing an informed, embodied relationship with food — one that strengthens health, supports healing, and creates the conditions for thriving over time.

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Choreographies of Presence

How can movement create spaces of presence, connection, and shared vitality?

This project focuses on climate-resilient forest transformation at the intersection of ecology, governance, and communication. It builds on applied research examining how different levels of ungulate populations affect herbaceous and woody ground vegetation — and thus floristic biodiversity — across diverse forest sites.From 2015 to 2021, the BioWild Project investigated how wildlife pressure influences forest regeneration and long-term ecosystem stability. Beyond ecological analysis, my role in this context extended into communication and stakeholder-oriented process design for sustainable infrastructure and land-use projects.A key part of the work involved conducting comprehensive stakeholder analyses and facilitating dialogue between actors with conflicting interests — in particular between foresters and hunters. These conflicts, often intensified by climate stress and changing management goals, require more than technical solutions. They demand spaces for translation, mediation, and shared understanding.By working at the interface between science, practice, and communication, this project supported the development of pragmatic pathways toward stable, biodiverse mixed forests. It highlights that climate-resilient forest transformation is not only an ecological challenge, but also a social and governance task — one that depends on coordination, trust, and long-term collaboration.

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Regenerating Forest Futures

How can forests be regenerated as resilient ecosystems under climate change — and how can conflicting interests be aligned to make this transformation possible?

This project focuses on climate-resilient forest transformation at the intersection of ecology, governance, and communication. It builds on applied research examining how different levels of ungulate populations affect herbaceous and woody ground vegetation — and thus floristic biodiversity — across diverse forest sites.From 2015 to 2021, the BioWild Project investigated how wildlife pressure influences forest regeneration and long-term ecosystem stability. Beyond ecological analysis, my role in this context extended into communication and stakeholder-oriented process design for sustainable infrastructure and land-use projects.A key part of the work involved conducting comprehensive stakeholder analyses and facilitating dialogue between actors with conflicting interests — in particular between foresters and hunters. These conflicts, often intensified by climate stress and changing management goals, require more than technical solutions. They demand spaces for translation, mediation, and shared understanding.By working at the interface between science, practice, and communication, this project supported the development of pragmatic pathways toward stable, biodiverse mixed forests. It highlights that climate-resilient forest transformation is not only an ecological challenge, but also a social and governance task — one that depends on coordination, trust, and long-term collaboration.

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Cycle Synced-Living & Business

What becomes possible when we align life and work with the cyclical nature of time instead of linear, constant performance?

Cycle-Synced Living & Business is grounded in the understanding that time in nature is cyclical — and that humans, as part of nature, are shaped by rhythms rather than constant availability. Our bodies and nervous systems follow daily circadian rhythms, shorter ultradian cycles of focus and recovery, seasonal patterns, and — for many women — infradian rhythms (monthly hormonal cycles). Yet modern work and productivity models largely ignore these rhythms, favoring linear output and uninterrupted performance.This work explores how recognizing and working with biological and natural cycles can support sustainable energy, clearer decision-making, and long-term effectiveness. Instead of pushing against natural fluctuations, cycle-synced approaches help people sense when to initiate, focus, reflect, consolidate, or rest — both in personal life and in professional contexts.Applied to living and business, cycle awareness supports healthier pacing, more realistic planning, and a deeper sense of self-trust. By aligning with rhythms rather than overriding them, individuals and organizations can reduce burnout, increase resilience, and cultivate forms of productivity that are regenerative rather than extractive.

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