Copyright American Society of Association Executives Aug 2001| [Headnote] |
| The results of the ASAE Foundation Future Scan are in. Here's a preview of the issues your association may soon face. |
IMAGINE THAT YOU HAVE THE OPPORTUNITY TO BRING TOGETHER dozens of the most imaginative leaders in your association's community to identify critical emerging issues. Perhaps you also can involve a score of futurists and experts in the conversation. And suppose you can keep this conversation going for months, not just for a few hours in a face-to-face meeting.
The ASAE Foundation recently conducted this experiment in an effort to identify the issues that association leaders must understand to survive and thrive in the future. The results appear in Exploring the Future: Seven Strategic Conversations That Could Transform Your Association.
Exploring the Future is the ASAE Foundation's second major environmental scan. The first, titled Facing the Future: Preparing Your Association to Thrive, identified 14 trends that represent the best-understood and most-certain trends affecting the future of associations. Exploring the Future pushes beyond these near-certainties to investigate emerging issues that are less certain but potentially even more important.
The ASAE Foundation worked with the Institute for Alternative Futures, Alexandria, Virginia, to look further into the future than the association community has before: to 2010 and beyond. The scan's cornerstone was a virtual community; the participants used Internetbased conferencing software to conduct an online dialogue about issues that aren't yet on many people's radar screens.
This giant cyberdialogue covered dozens of topics. Significant new insights that emerged were refined during focus groups with association leaders and representatives from other parts of the association community. Seven major issues emerged from this process and were developed further through interviews and literature reviews.
The challenge of change
In one of the first conversations in the Futures Scan online dialogue, futurist James Dator asked participants to distribute 100 percent among three major factors that will likely shape life during the next 20 to 50 years. The factors were continuities, cycles, and novelties.
On average, the association participants who filled out Dator's questionnaire believed that more than one third of the future will be driven by novelties -developments that are truly new. In contrast, the futurists who responded thought that nearly two thirds of the future will be unprecedented. Dator himself voted 80 percent for novelties.
The idea that one third or more of the future could be radically different from today is novel in itself What makes people believe that such an extraordinary rate of change is plausible? The dialogue suggested three factors.
Converging technologies. The essence of the digital revolution is that information is being reduced to the same basic form: bits that can travel from one technology to another. Because the technologies are increasingly able to interact, progress in one area stimulates developments in the others.
Information technology, for instance is fomenting technical revolutions in biotechnology, materials design, and manufacturing. The result? An unprecedented technological acceleration.
A new economy. The explosion of knowledge and technological change is creating a new economy that is much bigger than dot-coms and e-commerce. The whole economy is increasingly knowledge-based, global, networked, transparent, and fast.
Consumption is giving way to experiences; distance is vanishing; and time is collapsing. Static rules are being replaced by faster, more flexible modes of learning and coordinating. Value chains are becoming value webs, hierarchies are flattening and linking outward, and relationships are becoming central to success.
Societal challenges. Some challenges are primarily technological. For example, improvements in energy efficiency and alternative sources of energy are needed to head off global warming and to support the world economy when global oil supplies decline. Other challenges, such as providing affordable health care to an aging population, are primarily social.
Challenges this big could cause tremendous disruptions if they are not dealt with well, and dealing with them will require major changes.
Associating effectively
One theme that emerged in the online dialogue is that operating successfully in a world of continuous change requires the ability to associate effectively. That means bringing people into cooperative relationships and forming new groups and subgroups as needed to learn, plan, and coordinate responses to emerging developments.
Henry Ernstthal, CAE, one of the participants in the online dialogue, put this insight bluntly. "If even a fraction of the potential changes we're discussing actually happen, many things about today's associations will become obsolete. But the process of associating will become increasingly important," noted Ernstthal, president of Ernstthal & Associates, Washington, D.C.
Fortunately, association executives are well versed in the skills necessary to associate effectively. Their skills give association leaders a head start in dealing with rapid change and helping their members meet the challenges ahead.
Seven emerging issues
Aside from technology, a number of emerging issues could dramatically improve the ability to associate. The seven issues, which are highlighted in Exploring The Future, are as follows:
1. Meaning matters. During the past decade, associations have been increasingly challenged to help their members be successful on the bottom line. In the decade ahead, aging baby boomers will also become preoccupied with success on the top line-the sense of meaning they derive from their association involvement.
William Strauss, co-author of generational history books like Generations and Millennials Rising, argued in the Futures Scan online dialog that throughout American history the generations that were most idealistic in their youth have always made their greatest contributions late in their lives through principled and inspirational "elder stewardship." If Strauss is right, during the 2000s and 2010s the boomer generation will be increasingly concerned with guiding their organizations toward meaningful purposes, fostering meaningful relationships, and making meaningful contributions. 2. Global + local = glocal. Glocalization is a term that describes how many aspects of life are becoming more global and more local at the same time. Think of how corporations that operate internationally, such as car manufacturers, often customize their products or services to meet the needs of local populations.
Associations, as forums for representing members, will need to change as many national-level decisions move upward to international organizations and simultaneously devolve downward to state and local governments.
3. Inclusivity. Association staff members tend to voluntarily abandon most of their differences in cultural background and personal viewpoints when they enter the office. But a rich variety of backgrounds and viewpoints improves creativity, decision making, and programming within associations. P
To tap these potentials, associations need to shift from assimilating differences to raising awareness of differences, valuing them more, and making use of them.
4. Generational synergy. A good deal of attention has been given to resolving generational conflicts, especially between the generation X-ers and the boomers. Now the challenge is to go beyond conflict resolution to fostering better understanding and cooperation among generations. Each generation has contributions to make and special roles it is best equipped to play.
5. Learning culture. The ability to learn is the single most important skill that individuals and organizations need to thrive amid rapid change. Associations need to focus less on teaching and more on true learning.
Active learning approaches, new ways of dealing with uncertainty and error, and new technologies will allow associations to act as central hubs within the learner-centered networks of an emerging learning culture.
6.Transparency. Demands for greater openness and accountability are growing rapidly, driven by the spread of democracy, economic globalization, the digital revolution, and Internetenhanced social activism. Association leaders need to understand the organizational and social advantages of greater transparency and then balance those benefits with their members' legitimate concerns about transparency's problems and limits. (See the sidebar, "Greater Openness, More Accountability," for a more detailed discussion of this emerging issue.)
7. Living organizations. Instead of trying to control everything in an environment of continuous change, association leaders need to view their organizations as living systems able to adapt through selforganization. To promote self-organization, leaders need to clarify their purpose and values, scale back bureaucracy, and understand the critical importance of knowledge sharing and trust.
Conversation starters
Any of these issues can be ignored or viewed as a threat-or approached as an opportunity to improve your association. These seven emerging opportunities will not be all your association will face between now and 2010. However, they are profound places to begin exploring what your association is becoming.
"How associations respond to the seven issues identified in Exploring the Future may well determine how successful they will be in the future," says Brent Mulgrew, executive director of the Ohio State Medical Association, Hilliard, and chair of the 2000-2001 Environmental Scan Task Force.
Because these issues are just emerging, no one is certain how they will unfold. Cautions Mulgrew, "There is no cookbook recipe for dealing with these issues." Instead, he notes, the report aims to give association leaders a framework for starting strategic conversations.
"Asking the right questions and having the right conversations are critical leadership skills in this time of continuous change," Mulgrew continues. "By initiating conversations about these issues in your own association, and sharing what you learn with other association leaders, we can learn together how to make the future work."
As economist Kenneth Boulding observed, "All our experience is with the past, but all our decisions are about the future." Continuous rapid change makes our past experience less relevant, forcing everyone to engage in an ongoing process of learning and adaptation.
Learning more about the seven issues set out in Exploring The Future can help you associate more effectively to adapt to change. It only takes one really important idea to launch a transformation. You have seven. AM
| [Sidebar] |
| GREATER OPENNESS, MORE ACCOUNTABILITY |
| [Sidebar] |
| You don't have to look far to see evidence of one emerging issue. Here are a few examples of how organizations, governments, and institutions are being pressured to operate in a more open and accountable manner. |
| [Sidebar] |
| * Activists among mutual fund shareholders are using e-mail and the Internet to coordinate their efforts. The shareholders are urging the Securities and Exchange Commission to require mutual fund managers to disclose their proxy voting guidelines and their votes on particular issues. |
| * Global Forest Watch, a network of local forest protection groups linked by the Internet, monitors the world's oldgrowth forests. Participants record on digital maps any illegal cutting or burning and post this information on the Web. |
| * Since Inc. magazine coined the term in 1990, open book management has spread rapidly. It's part of a movement calling for greater openness within organizations. |
| [Sidebar] |
| A new kind of Internet-empowered activism is emerging as a major driving force for greater transparency. Allen Hammond, chief information officer and senior scientist at the World Resources Institute, Washington, D.C., described this emerging force in the online discussion. "When activists can send multiple messages with the click of a mouse, when hundreds of Internet news groups can form overnight, and [when] thousands of Web sites instantly proffer information and opinion ...then the traditional power of the media to focus public attention can be ... outstripped by an actively engaged public." |
| Not everyone in the Futures Scan's online dialogue and focus group discussions was thrilled at the prospect of moving toward a more transparent society. But almost everyone eventually concluded that demands for greater openness and accountability will inevitably grow, driven by the spread of democracy, economic globalization, and the digital revolution. |
| For instance, the proportion of the world's population that lives in a full or a limited form of electoral democracy grew from 12 percent to 60 percent during the last century. Democratic societies develop attitudes about transparency in the public sector that then shape expectations about behavior in the private and nonprofit sectors. |
| As a truly global economy emerges, investors want better information about the national economies and the companies in which they are investing. As trade, capital, pollution, crime, drugs, people, and ideas increasingly move on a global scale, those who are affected want better information about what is happening. |
| [Sidebar] |
| Thanks to the digital revolution, gaining information about corporations, governments, and other organizations is easier. People-tan share that information widely and coordinate social activism globally. |
| As pressures for greater transparency grow, members will look to their associations for guidance. Governments and activist groups will press associations to provide the forum for negotiating agreements on the "new bottom lines" of environmental and social performance. And association members will want greater process transparency so that they can see how decisions get made and how they can participate. |
| To develop a coherent transparency strategy, association leaders need to consider the organizational and social advantages of greater transparency, then weigh concerns about transparency's problems and limits. |
| On the positive side, greater transparency in an organization creates a reputation for honesty and integrity and increases trust among all the parties who deal with it. Operating in a transparent environment tends to foster accountability and better performance. It avoids spending a lot of energy covering up mistakes and focuses instead on solving problems. |
| Transparency draws in people who want to be a part of an open and honest organization and is especially appealing to younger people. It changes an organization's internal culture in positive ways by encouraging more knowledge sharing. |
| Despite these benefits, there are potential risks involved in moving toward greater transparency. Organizations must be able to protect information critical to maintaining their competitive advantage. Greater transparency can make an association or member a bigger target for unreasonable critics determined to distort information. And taking transparency too far could violate due process and infringe on reasonable protections of personal privacy. |
| Although carrying any principle to the extreme can cause problems, we are nowhere near the limits of useful openness in most areas of economic, environmental, social, and political concern. Future generations may look back at our era as the "dark ages" of unaccountable institutions and see the growth of transparency as a historic force for progress. |
| Many Community of Practice participants came to agree with Mark Anderson, executive director of the American Society for Surgery of the Hand, Rosemont, Illinois. "For me," Anderson said in the online dialogue, "transparency feels positive. While it might make my job more difficult, I think in the long run it will benefit my association and most organizations. Eventually, the truth will set us free." |
| [Author Affiliation] |
| Robert Olson is research director for the Institute for Alternative Futures, Alexandria, Virginia. E-mail: BOlson @altfutures.com. |
My Research
