We merged our love of anticipatory learning with design thinking to craft a new approach we call Forward Design. We took the best of what has always worked with our clients and piloted some new elements with the permission of others who wanted a fresh approach.  Two national associations have now adopted Forward Design and we are now learning, evaluating and revising this new approach in the real world with association executives and volunteer leaders.

Forward Design is a systematic and creative process for exploring an organization’s current and future context, analyzing strategic issues and opportunities and inviting aspirations for design, and then using this learning to inspire innovative design solutions and prototypes for an organization’s future.   

The Forward Design cycle has four phases: exploration of current and future context; analysis and sensemaking; innovation and design; and direction setting.  The sequencing of the tasks can shift around to accommodate the culture, governance structure and schedules inherent in different associations. 

Exploration of Current and Future Context

• Leadership framing—dialogue processes to discover aspirations and assumptions for the profession and association and maybe even challenge those assumptions
• Alternative perspectives—probes for different thinking through dialogue with diverse, external or divergent stakeholders
• Futures research—systematic search for patterns of significant change to forecast future conditions

Analysis & Sense making

• Strategic issues and opportunities—assessment of strategic leadership opportunities for the organization
• Design principles—expression of aspirations and desired outcomes that set the parameters for  what the profession or association should be designed to do
• Change constraints & barriers—pragmatic recognition and acceptance of any limitations that must be addressed through design
• Problem/Opportunity Statement—clarification and agreement on the focus for innovation and planning

Innovation & Design

• Ideation of design solutions—processes to discover and brainstorm  innovative approaches to solve the problem or pursue the opportunity
• Design prototypes—creative images that convey the future direction, structure and capabilities of an organization, program, product or service

Direction Setting

• Desired outcomes—agreement on what an organization, program, product or service must  achieve
• Strategic framework—statement of vision, mission and goals for an organization
• Implementation decisions—next steps to execute the new direction and develop and pilot the prototype

Forward Design may not be right for the association that just needs an efficient way to update a strategic plan and already has volunteers deeply invested in traditional approaches. For those associations that need a way to renew their strategic planning and are completely open to big changes and innovative approaches, Forward Design may be the right mashup of proven practices and innovative thinking you need in 2012.

The leaders of NAEA and Signature i, LLC were studying design thinking and eager to apply its principles to strategic planning.  As advocates and teachers for visual arts education, NAEA members have a natural affinity for design thinking.  Design thinking encourages visual observation, critical thinking to see challenges and solutions clearly, and prototyping ideas and new approaches in creatively concrete ways.

From the beginning the NAEA strategic planning process was a visual experience.  At the annual conference in spring 2010, hundreds of members expressed their ideas and hopes for NAEA in a collaborative art studio.  Working with a team of volunteers and the board, Signature i interpreted this outpouring of opinions and images to discover the association’s strategic issues and opportunities.

We continued this creative expression of NAEA Next when the board convened in its planning retreat several months later.  Every board member did an artistic expression of what NAEA would need to become.  They did this before engaging in more typical processes to draft a vision, mission and goals.

Yes the vision and strategic framework ultimately uses words to convey its intent and message, but the plan’s simple and clear structure can be traced to its visual beginnings.  The words are packed with shared meaning  from exploring and experimenting with the best design for NAEA through visual images.

Design thinking is also evident in how NAEA is communicating its strategic planning process and vision and strategic framework. At the annual conference NAEA distributed a “First Impression” mini-brochure not much bigger than a business card that powerfully unfolds the new plan and shares the journey to create it.

Not every organization is fortunate enough to have artists willing to see the possibilities for a clear and creative design for its future. Still the NAEA experience offers three great practices for others. 

• Invite new ways of expressing ideas and hopes for your organization.
• Think like a designer and see the bold outlines that are essential to your organization’s future.
• Design your communications to deliver both the message of the plan and the experience of creating it.

In the first horizon, leaders identify the strategic issue and work to create collective awareness of the need to change.  They challenge the assumptions defining the system now, point out the shortcomings, and invoke a vision for a preferred future. They may encourage and sponsor pilot initiatives to probe the potential for this new direction.

In the second horizon, leaders have created some momentum for change and they have the results from their pilot initiatives to guide significant investments in new capabilities and systems infrastructure. For individuals and organizations, this is an intense time of unlearning and relearning to move in this new direction.  This is a time for identifying and inculcating best practices.  

In the third horizon, leaders have achieved the transformation. They are now engaging in continued learning either to improve the new system or to address the unintended consequences that inevitably emerge when a different reality replaces the status quo. They are working to align the culture to sustain this change.

If we can understand systemic change as a slow and sustained process, it can give us the patience and reassurance to keep working for the really big and important changes.  Rather than asking, why are we still talking about this change a decade later, we can instead ask, where are we now in this change?  

For example, in healthcare we have been talking for several decades about the importance of prevention and the need to replace an acute care and chronic disease medical model with a health promotion and prevention model. We have navigated the first horizon and have collective awareness that this is where we need to go. We even have proof of many concepts from a multitude of pilot initiatives. The healthcare reform law is a second horizon move to instill this priority into the system.  Major employers and insurers and public health organizations are doing their part to move more resources into prevention. Prevention is a good example to illustrate the challenges of the third horizon. Without a cultural shift of profound significance and breadth, this will be a difficult transformation.

In the long arc of significant systemic change, leaders have to understand and accept where they are in the horizons of systemic change. This can be part of the story they tell to inspire individuals and organizations not to give up even when the change is decades in the making. 

These scans rarely shock leaders, because they work hard to stay informed and have many opportunities to hear what the best thinkers in their field believe about the future. My best scans amplify the significance of key change drivers, mute the less important trends and issues, and give people a better way of understanding and talking about what is at stake. 

The power of these future scans comes from transforming trends and issues into the story of their future.  Stories move us, even when they are disguised as well researched and cited reports.  Change leaders know how to move these stories into their organizations. They use them to inspire strategic plans. They retell the best parts of the story to counter resistance to change.

I no longer take exception when leaders thank me for a great scan and then in the same breath say but,  “We’ve been talking about these strategic issues.” I simply point out the value of having a powerful new tool to help make the case for change.  It is fun to watch them take these scans and run hard straight into candid strategic conversations, overdue decisions and new directions.

A good futures scan is simply a shock of insight that can get the entire system humming with the possibilities for a preferred future.

When associations and nonprofits create the blur, they are usually striving to adopt more corporate approaches. As they become multimillion enterprises, this is simply good stewardship as well as good business.

When philanthropic organizations create the blur, it is often through social entrepreneurism—generating a profit to underwrite mission-driven work.  These hybrid enterprises meet social needs in very creative and self-funding ways.

Now strategists Michael Porter and Mark Kramer in the January/February Harvard Business Review are urging businesses to blur the line to fix capitalism.  This is a big idea that goes beyond corporate social responsibility and proposes a business model based on creating shared value.

Shared value is defined as the policies and operating practices that enhance the competitiveness of a company while simultaneously advancing the economic and social conditions in the communities in which it operates.  Shared value creation focuses on identifying and expanding the connections between societal and economic progress.--Porter and Kramer

This is my idea of a preferred future for business where major players in the sector unleash talent and resources to meet societal needs—and makes money at it!  Porter and Kramer offer three routes to creating shared value:

• Reconceiving products and markets. They advise businesses to ask if their products are good for customers and they open up a wider view of who those customers might be. They cite the growing number of business successes found in meeting the needs of the poor and often overlooked around the world.   
• Redefining productivity in the value chain. This is a strategy that values the environment, uses fewer resources, and respects and cares for employees.
• Building supportive industry clusters in the company’s locations. Forget the rush to outsourcing to the cheapest solution wherever it might be. This strategy builds up local communities by strengthening local suppliers and partners. Associations are seen as an important part of a supportive cluster that can help companies grow. Companies help create value by supporting a strong community infrastructure in education, transportation, transparent markets and other public assets.

Porter and Kramer acknowledge that not all societal problems can be solved through shared value solutions.  But theirs is a welcome wake-up call to the for-profit sector that invites companies to rethink their basic assumptions.  And for associations and philanthropic organizations, this is also a welcome blurring of the lines. We’ve all got a stake in building a better world and we are more likely to succeed if both nonprofit and for-profit organizations work together to create shared value.

The next decade will be a period of intense disruption, evolution and extinction for philanthropic organizations as empowered donors use an amazing array of collaboration technologies to target social problems and scale up solutions that blur boundaries, business models and organizational identities to get results.--Marsha Rhea, Signature i

Philanthropic members of the American Society of Association Executives wrestling with this future forecast concluded that a digital strategy is essential to rise above the din and engage volunteers and donors to maintain their credibility.  

Marsha Rhea, Signature i President, crafted this forecast to spur a strategic conversation January 13 within the Key Philanthropic Organizations Committee. To write this forecast, she scanned and summarized several future studies on how demographic changes, technological advances and other changes are disrupting business as usual for philanthropic organizations. The ASAE philanthropic leaders found the forecast probable with some reservations about:

• How much extinction will occur among large, established organizations, except through consolidation; and
• Whether empowered donors will drive these changes or the organizations themselves will lead them. 

They concurred that the more dynamic, ad hoc entrepreneurial networks are perceived as less bureaucratic and more exciting ways to get things done.  However, legacy philanthropic organizations have the advantage of history and scale to sustain their efforts. Their successes have created the context in which these new organizations can emerge.

Legacy organizations can also adopt networking power to organize their work with volunteers and collaborate with other organizations. They can use this greater capacity to redefine volunteerism and engage with many people through strategies like crowdsourcing and microvolunteering. 

But the eternal challenge for philanthropic organizations remains how to tell their story to secure volunteers and donors.  In this more crowded and dynamic marketplace, organizations need a digital strategy to rise above the din.  The best stories are told visually in a YouTube era.

Donors are using Guidestar and other third party evaluators as well as social networking to find organizations that match their own philanthropic objectives. The ASAE members said single funders are less influential than they once were because the better functioning agencies have more diversified funding sources. But they do see large donors using their contributions more to influence outcomes. While donors have more choices about where to give, these ASAE leaders did not have significant examples of individual donors driving their agenda.  

Blurring the for-profit, nonprofit and government sectors continues.  As social responsibility and the promise of emerging markets become a priority for more businesses, philanthropic organizations will be challenged to demonstrate that their way is the best way to lead significant social change.  The best way to get big results will be through hybrid approaches that blend and leverage the influence, capabilities and resources of all sectors.

In 2010 I championed the power of collaborative learning through an article in Associations Now and three related blog posts:

• Doing the hard work to adopt collaborative learning
• Preparing content experts
• Promoting learning in committees and task forces

I also thought deeply about what’s most important in successful strategic planning. That thinking has now evolved into a board primer article for the Volunteer Leadership issue of Associations Now this month, not yet available online.

I’ve continued to explore design thinking and innovation.  And after conducting two future scans this past fall, I gained greater clarity on my secrets for futures scanning.

Moments of wisdom broke into my awareness in such powerful ways they simply had to be shared.  I recognized and named the downside of too much of two deeply held personal values:  collaboration and commitment. I gained a new perspective on duty as a source of resistance to change.  I named the phenomenon of chronically unresolved issues in associations after watching it play out twice.  I read a prize-winning collection of stories and saw clearly the human side of board members.  And I had a strong reminder about how easy it is for all of us to reach the point of no return and lose the core competencies we count on.  Most of all, I discovered the power of authenticity to change hearts when I took the risk to share my story as a community organizer.

Signature i, LLC strives to be a learning organization and will continue to bring you these reflections and lessons learned, and with grace, any wisdom that breaks into this work and life in 2011.

Time out for Togetherness.   We make time to celebrate with friends and co-workers and re-connect with old friends and acquaintances at holiday parties. We travel great distances to be with family. What a gift to the spirit to rediscover that our relationships define and nurture us and they will do so throughout the year if we just find ways to take these time outs throughout the year.

Year-end Deadlines. Every year we rush to tie up loose ends and wrap up projects before the holidays and the advent of the New Year.  This compulsive behavior does add a large dose of stress into the season but it also yields a sense of accomplishment and closure in our work.  We can look back over a year of learning, practicing our art, and giving our best to whatever we have chosen to do.   

Tests of Willpower.  The holiday season is a sugar-coated minefield for our health. It is a test of our willpower to walk through the holiday parties, gift cookies and candies, and special meals without gaining weight. It is an even greater challenge to navigate all the expectations of the season and keep our perspective and mental health in good shape.  The survival strategies we deploy to stay on course remind us that it does take great resolve to keep ourselves in healthy balance and wellbeing.

Appeals for Generosity.  Every day our mailboxes are crammed with advertisements and charitable appeals. These are challenges to our sense of stewardship.  Do the gifts we choose express our love and awareness of others or simply demonstrate our insecurity about our relationship with others and our status in the world? When we sort through the charitable appeals to decide who to support, we too can have a philanthropist’s opportunity to make a difference in the world. We can choose to ease or end poverty for people nearby or in other countries. We can make a down payment on a cleaner environment. We can choose to invest in the peace and harmony we seek and celebrate in this season.

Resolutions for Renewal. There’s a forgiveness and grace in turning the calendar page to the New Year.  We get to set goals and make plans with a sense of possibility and hope.  This will be the year we take charge of our behaviors and attitudes and live up to our human potential.  

Signature i wishes you these and many more gifts to the spirit in this holiday season.

Career counselors advise young people to become broadly educated and versatile to keep their career options open in a fast-changing world. Workforce projections are unreliable; tomorrow’s high-demand occupations can quickly become over-supplied or out of date. The most useful skill is to know how to learn for the multiple careers people are likely to have in a lifetime. The more broadly educated people are the more options they will have when it comes to choosing and changing careers. The best career strategy is to choose employers who offer substantial education benefits and professional development.

When employers are surveyed, they report they want a variety of basic skills such as reading and writing, critical thinking, problem solving, teamwork, professionalism and leadership. Employers are adding to their wish list emerging priorities such as innovation and creativity, cultural competency and digital literacy.

Employers of all types want to hire potential leaders who can innovate, solve problems and organize diverse individuals into results-oriented teams.   People with a career portfolio of different work experiences and project knowledge are more intriguing to prospective employers than those who have followed a defined career pathway. With old roles and boundary lines blurring in every field, organizations need people who have proven they can learn deep and fast and become specialists and change agents for the moment in the latest opportunity.

Professions will find it increasingly difficult to draw hard lines around their work scope and competencies to exclude others.  Instead they will be asked to accept a more fluid and collaborative environment that relies on and rewards successful teaming.  The innovators in healthcare, science, business and government programs are using interdisciplinary teams to manage complexity and solve tough challenges.

Corporations are trading their cross-functional teams for teams that can swarm to problems and connect inside and outside their enterprise to the expertise they need. Gartner says by 2020, this new form of teaming called swarming will help organizations adapt to work that is less routine and characterized by increased volatility and hyper-connectedness.  Gartner says “swarms form quickly, attacking a problem or opportunity and then quickly dissipating. Swarming is an agile response to an observed increase in ad hoc action requirements, as ad hoc activities continue to displace structured, bureaucratic situations.” Individuals in a swarm may only know one another through weak links. People will navigate their personal, professional and social networks to survive and exploit swarms for business benefit. Hyper-connectedness will lead to a push for more work to occur in both formal and informal relationships across enterprise boundaries.  

This oversight became obvious to me through two recent projects, one a strategic planning effort and the other a governance improvement initiative. 

The organization doing strategic planning had a very complex structure for organizing members into geographic regions, professional sector divisions, professional interest groups, local affiliates, and a host of committees, task forces and commissions.  A typical association in every way.  

The board members kept coming back to how they would get this job done with a small board and a lean staff. I held up a diagram of their organizational structure and asked a better question, “How will you get all these moving parts in alignment with your vision and goals?”  Because if they could, they would have many times the people they need to accomplish their plan. If they didn’t, they would be no more effective than a flea on the back of an elephant. They now have a new understanding of their role as liaisons to these various structures.

The association involved in the governance review is reworking the structure and processes of its board-appointed groups.  Again, this is a complex organization that can easily evolve out of control over time. This association seemed to have it together until we looked closely at the experiences of volunteers in that system now.  While the work group tasked with finding a better approach is just getting underway, the broad outlines of a solution are already evident.     

1. The board needs to define the scope and priorities for each appointed group consistent with its strategic plan and current priorities.
2. The work of the committees has to be structured to achieve and be held accountable for specific outcomes. (Any group without a meaningful contribution to the association or profession should be disbanded.)
3. The process for reporting findings and recommending actions to the board must be clear.
4. And as the survey and focus group results indicated, the volunteers want feedback and evaluation of their value to the board and their contribution to the association/profession.

Experiencing these two projects within the same week, I was reminded how easy it is to overlook and mismanage volunteers.  Volunteers can give you incredible capacity to get the right job done if you align their work with your vision and plan and have a system that respects and values their contribution.