Futuring: Not Just a Game

"The difficulty in times of turbulence is not the turbulence, but to respond with yesterday's logic." -- Peter Drucker

The American Association of Museums’ Center for the Future of Museums is asking the field to help it “build a picture of museums in 2019 and explore how the field can help society respond to the challenges we face” using Superstruct, the world’s first Massively Multiplayer Forecasting Game.

To receive e-mail alerts from the Center for the Future of Museums about the museum-specific storyline in Superstruct and to keep it up to date on your game activities, contact AAM at futureofmuseums@aam-us.org

To read more about the game visit www.iftf.org/node/2098. To receive e-mail alerts from IFTF when Superstruct launches on September 22, e-mail superstruct@iftf.org.

Futuring underpins anticipatory leadership and management – skills that are increasingly critical to organizational survival and success. Futuring needn’t been far, far in the future, it can focus on the next 3-5 years and, thus, inform current planning efforts.

Shortly after 9/11, I had the privilege of facilitating a series of focus groups for NYS Arts that brought arts leaders from across NYS together to discuss the impacts of the attack on their organizations. For many months after 9/11, arts and cultural organizations were experiencing increases in their audiences as people sought solace and respite in galleries, concert halls and theaters. While no arts organizations could have forecast a terrorist attack, those that had recently gone through strategic planning said they were better prepared to meet the needs of audiences post-9/11 than their counterparts, who hadn’t been thinking in any structured way about the future.

James L. Morrison and William C. Ashley in Anticipatory Management (1995) advise that organizations "must become more forward looking to deal effectively and systematically with an increasingly turbulent environment. . . . This turbulence has the potential to either destroy or offer new opportunities." They caution leaders to "constantly check for gaps in the way management thinks things are and the way stakeholders perceive them to be."

Here’s a step-by-step guide to getting your organization into futuring: Journal of Extension: http://www.joe.org/joe/2004june/comm2.shtml

Futuring: it’s not just a game; it’s a way of life.

Photo: Crystal Ball Gazing by shubhrajit_c, flickr

Comments

Three Most Important Nonprofit Executive Director Soft Skills

If you were asked to narrow down the list of executive director qualifications to the three most important, which ones would you identify? Would the list consist of soft skills, hard skills, or some combination? Would your list be based on the great ED you are or one you've worked for, or would it be your wish list for the ED you haven't been fortunate yet to work for? This was an assignment in my recent online class in leadership and administration for the American Association for State and Local History . I asked the class to review three-five advertisements for museum directors and analyze what these listings intimated about the organization’s past experience, current focus and goals, and future aspirations. Then, I asked the class to identify what they consider to be the three most important qualifications they would look for in a director. (Okay, so there's more than three if you dissect my three big groups.) Soft skills outnumbered hard skills, although

Back in the Saddle

MY LAST POST WAS NOVEMBER 2012, A LIGHT YEAR AWAY it seems, that marked the beginning of a long push toward completing a manuscript on history museum leadership with my co-author, Joan Baldwin. We finally submitted 350+ pages to our editor at Rowman & Littlefield this week. If all goes well, we expect the book to be available in early 2014. It's taken us two years to get to this point, so six more months or so of revision and production don't seem too long to wait until we can hold the final product in our hands (and you can, too!). The project put a lot of things on hold, including this blog. I'm glad to be back writing about intentional leadership -- leading by design -- for nonprofit boards and staffs. Certainly, my thoughts are now informed by the forthcoming book, in which Joan and I posit that nonprofits need to focus resources on leadership, not just management. Most cultural nonprofits are at a crossroad, as is the sector in general, where nothing is qu

What Would Make You Turn Down an Invitation to Join a Board?

THERE'S SO MUCH WRITTEN ABOUT RECRUITING BOARD TALENT, I thought I'd spend a little time thinking about it from the prospect's point of view. Clearly, there are boards where the line is long to get on them. But what would make you turn down an invitation? Here's a short list to get the conversation started: 1. You've had no prior exposure to the organization. Your immediate reaction is "did you pull my name out of a hat?" (Is that lady in the picture the head of the Nominating Committee?) Seems as though there must be a hidden agenda at work (like you're rich and once you become a board member you'll pour all your resources into the organization) or the organization is simply looking for any warm body to fill a seat. 2. The organization doesn't have a good reputation. There's something to be said for street cred. An organization that's floundering may be strengthened by your participation or you may find yourself sucked into

Leading by Design

Search This Blog