Six Important Ideas about Foresight for Association Decision-Makers
AUTHOR’S ATTESTATION: This article was written entirely by Jeff De Cagna AIMP FRSA FASAE, a human author, without using generative AI.
As of this article’s publication date (9/24/24), there are 1924 days remaining in The Turbulent Twenties, and 99 days until this decade’s midpoint on January 1, 2025.
Throughout 2024, I have been marking the ten-year milestone of the board’s duty of foresight, a still–radical idea that got its start with my Associations Now article in the summer of 2014. This month is also the two-year anniversary of the column in which I offered an updated “next definition” of the duty of foresight that calls on association boards to “stand up for their successors’ futures.”
From the outset, my intention in marking this milestone year has not been to “celebrate” the duty of foresight or myself. Instead, with the arrival of the second 60 months of The Turbulent Twenties drawing closer every day, I see a crucial inflection point and an opportunity to deliver a renewed and urgent invitation to association boards to choose the duty of foresight, and for all association decision-makers to serve as foresight champions inside their organizations and for our community. It is my fervent hope that this column can contribute to advancing that conversation.
Six Important Ideas about Foresight
While there are more detailed and complicated definitions of foresight in use today, I prefer a simpler and more focused framing: foresight is an intentional process of learning with the future. In the work of foresight, we combine data, information, and imagination to spark and propel divergent thinking forward into defined time horizons to anticipate and explore one or more future worlds. Through a process of deep and active questioning, we develop compelling ideas and insights that can be applied today to make better decisions and facilitate our ongoing learning with the future as it unfolds.
Building on this foundational explanation of foresight, I want to share six additional important ideas for all association community voluntary decision-makers, staff partners, and other contributors to consider as they approach the work of foresight in the months and years ahead.
- Foresight is a direct challenge to orthodox beliefs—Orthodox beliefs are the deep-seated yet largely invisible assumptions we make about how the world works. More often than not, it is decision-makers’ orthodox beliefs that are the primary source of resistance to prioritizing foresight. Orthodoxy keeps both people and organizations tethered to worlds that no longer exists, and can overwhelm their attention with the untrue and unhelpful noise of the past. A commitment to foresight demands a fearless reckoning with orthodox beliefs to lower their volume while amplifying critical emerging signals of the future.
- Foresight is not about making predictions or forecasts—Even with an increased interest in foresight, there remains a disquieting orthodox belief circulating in the association community. This belief views foresight as a futile effort to predict or forecast a future that is unknowable by definition. While some foresight practitioners and futurists do make predictions or create forecasts, these outputs do not capture the deeper purpose of foresight. As expressed through the definition I offer above, the most beneficial impact of foresight is on ongoing intentional learning with the future rather than quantifying the probabilities of specific future outcomes.
- Foresight must consider a full range of plausible futures—While we use the singular word “future” in our daily discourse, the work of foresight operates on the understanding that there are an infinite number of different futures that could unfold. For this reason, association decision-makers must consider the implications of multiple plausible futures at all times. Instead of using organizational energy, time, and other limited resources to describe and perfect a single “preferred” future, association decision-makers can build more adaptive and resilient organizations by examining and preparing for various favorable, unfavorable, and unthinkable futures for their organizations, fields, and stakeholders and successors.
- Foresight and strategy are different—Another detrimental association community orthodox belief is the choice to regard foresight mostly as an input to strategy-making. While foresight and strategy clearly are connected endeavors, they are not the same conversation. In a turbulent world, the central purpose of strategy is the pursuit of short-term learning with current stakeholders to enable more meaningful value creation today. In contrast, foresight is about long-term intentional learning that prioritizes the challenges and expectations of our successors and animates the collective stewardship responsibility to leave our organizations and fields better than how we found them for the benefit of successors we will never know personally.
- Foresight must be a consistent practice—As I wrote in a recent LinkedIn essay, “[i]f you think the first half of The Turbulent Twenties has been fraught, just wait.” Our community is overdue to recognize that the accelerating pace and intensifying strength of the myriad social, technological, economic, environmental, and political [STEEP] factors and forces are relentlessly reshaping our plausible futures, and we must act now to prepare for whatever happens over the next 1900+ days. With this reality in mind, voluntary association decision-makers need to collaborate with staff partners and other contributors to situate their work in the context of a consistent practice of foresight. To be clear, foresight is not an ancillary activity, an intellectual exercise, or a cultural intervention. It is a core and real-world human and organizational capability for anticipation that we must develop and deploy right away.
- Foresight is about reclaiming agency—Orthodox beliefs endure in part because they function as coping mechanisms for boards and other decision-making groups operating under conditions of high anxiety and discontinuity. Over time, however, the commitment to orthodoxy undermines agency in decision-making by reducing the shared sense of confidence in the ability to make, act upon, and demonstrate clear progress toward fulfilling collective choices. By shifting their thinking away from the severe limitations created by orthodox beliefs and toward a more robust orientation toward the future, association decision-makers can reclaim their agency and reassert full responsibility for stewarding their organizations and fields into the future.
Next Column
In October, I will share three critical concerns toward which association boards and CEOs must direct their attention in the second half of The Turbulent Twenties. Until then, please stay well and thank you for reading.
Jeff can be reached at [email protected], on LinkedIn at jeffonlinkedin.com, or on Twitter/X @dutyofforesight.
DISCLAIMER: The views expressed in this column belong solely to the author.
