02/05/2018

Encourage Your Board to Talk About the Future

We do not have time to catch up with the future that is here

There are a lot of quotes in business literature about the challenge of dealing with future trends. My favorite, though, comes not from a captain of industry or Harvard Business School guru, but from a film critic, Pauline Kael: “We don’t have time to catch up with the future that is here,” she wrote in 1968.

The quip neatly summarizes both the scope of the problem and why it’s so hard to deal with. People are already starting to face the challenges of automation, shifting demographics, new learning methods, and more. But many associations are so consumed with dealing with today’s urgent problems—which are a function of yesterday’s trends—that keeping up can feel impossible.

ASAE ForesightWorks, created by the ASAE Foundation and which my colleague Tim Ebner and I wrote about in the latest issue of Associations Now, isn’t a set of simple fixes for whatever challenge may be affecting your organization. But it is a tool to help you catch up. Laying out 41 “change drivers” that are currently affecting industries (and hence the associations that serve them), it includes recent research on each trend, with relevant prompts for points to discuss them.

Please select this link to read the complete article from Associations Now.