The Board and Chief Staff Officer Disagree

The Board and Chief Staff Officer disagree on what the next big driver of change they should prepare for in creating their culture of Foresight – What to do?

 Most Boards can only focus on three to four drivers of change at one time, and this is only if they already have a foundation of foresight or preparing for the future.  

The first step is for the Chief Staff Officer (CSO) to reflect on their biases. Is your bias in deciding on which driver of change to focus based on date, personal experience, current headlines, or industry chatter? Challenge your own assumptions before challenging the Boards.  At the same time, you need to be honest with your Board and share your input before considering acquiescing.

It is easy for both the CSO and Board to jump to the new shiny topic (think AI). While it may be a thoughtful or even fun intellectual exercise, is it really where you should be spending your collective time?

When looking at drivers of change you should consider the time frame in which the data suggests it might occur.  Using narrow AI (single tasks) as an example: this is not a future driver of change, it is here now.  It should be part of your strategic operational planning discussions today if it is important to your organization or industry. Future disruptors will be General AI (mimics human behavior or intelligence with the ability to learn) or Super AI (the muse of dystopian science fiction). General AI might be here in the next 3 to 20 years and Super AI is likely much further out than 20 years, however we do not know for sure other than either of these types of AI are here today.  So a Board preparing for general AI as a future disruptor could be part of the strategic planning process that the board uses.

Trends – are here now

Loud Signals – very likely will occur in the next three – five years.

Weak Signals – only being discussed and investigated by a few. More than 7 years away.

Acknowledging the time frame will allow an organization to insert the discussion into the proper place within your governance discussions. Trends are part of operational planning and generally items that the Board should not be heavily involved in.  Loud Signals should be part of your current strategic plan, and weak signals should be part of a board’s foresight discussions and something they keep an eye on.

After thinking through the time frame if the CSO still disagrees with the direction the Board will likely take it is time to open up your favorite survey tool.  Develop a list of likely drivers of change that are researched based (ASAE’s ForesightWorks* program is one of many places to start where the research has been done for you) and ask each Board and Staff member to rank their top three choices of what future disruptors are likely to impact your association or organization.  You may even ask them to include the time frame in which they think the disruptor will impact the organization.

The Solution:

Once the CSO has the results of the survey, the details including the overview of the research on each change driver should be shared with the Board and staff. A work session should be held where the leadership team is divided into 3 groups and each group assigned one of the change drivers selected int he survey. The sub-group she discuss the change driver might have on the association and its membership using the lenses of your expected future, alternative futures (from the expected), and your preferred future and develop stories of what these futures mean to the organization.

These stories should be reviewed for what do we need to do today to prepare and shape the preferred future the organization wants. And those items used for the staff and committees to develop the strategic operational plans that support this strategic direction.  

*If utilizing ASAE’s ForesightWorks the CSO should remove the Change Drivers that are not relevant to their association before surveying the board and staff.  This usually makes for approximately 20 Change Drivers for people to select their top three choices.