Suburbia—currently the predominant form of American life—will probably remain the focal point of innovations in development….The suburbs of the 21^st century will increasingly incorporate aspects of preindustrial villages. They will be more compact and self-sufficient, providing office space as well as a surging home-based workforce….Despite the coming population growth, most Americans will probably continue to resist being forced into density….  Joel Kotkin, The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050

Favorable demographics and an ethos as a “country of aspiration” give the United States the cultural adaptability and economic resilience to thrive well into the 21^st century, according to futurist Joel Kotkin.

Kotkin places great weight on demographics as destiny in his account of what the next 100 million Americans will mean to America between now and 2050.  While other developed nations face an aging and declining population, America will manage fabulously because Americans are more likely to have children and more open to immigrants who also want children. 

But it is his vision of what our future cities will be like and where all those families with children will want to live that is most compelling. Kotkin sees continued growth in the suburbs because Americans of all ages prefer this style of living.  As more people are able to base their work in their homes, he anticipates more cohesive families and a lower environmental impact. Plus he sees suburbia developing the civic amenities and sense of place that Americans value.

He challenges the urbanist vision of people moving back into cities that excel as cultural and economic powerhouses. He argues that living at this density is just not appealing or economically feasible. Cities like New York, Chicago and San Francisco will become “luxury” cities where the rich can work and play, while cities with a more dynamic and sprawling approach like Atlanta, Houston and Los Angeles will thrive. And smaller towns that have an economic engine to draw people will become more desirable.

He forecasts suburbia will consist of multigenerational and diverse households where many more people can engage in productive work in their “electronic cottages”. Not that he dismisses the need to invest in sustaining an industrial base and updating the country’s infrastructure. Energy, environment, and educating a vast population for upward mobility all remain challenges that can make or break the country.

Often in my own work I admonish people to challenge their assumptions about the future. Whether Kotkin’s optimistic vision of America’s advantages bears out, he certainly offers great data and arguments for his case that Americans will continue to favor a suburban lifestyle. However, there is just as much that can go right or wrong in building out the US for the next 100 million people on Kotkin’s sprawling, low density model as can go wrong if we chose smart growth in a more humane version of megacities. Neither vision is a livable or sustainable future unless we work at making it so.

We adopted this cat seven years ago from a shelter. Who knows what happened to her in her first seven or eight years but she was smart enough to cozy up to us and secure a home. Quickly we discovered how very neurotic, destructive and unaffectionate she was. We never seriously considered returning her to the shelter because a mature cat might not get a third chance.  She became a responsibility and duty.

How often does our sense of duty prevent us from acting in ways that would clearly improve our situation? What belief or ideals form that sense of duty? When people put up with a bad situation, the reasons are seldom as simple as a love of the status quo or a fear of the unknown. They may well be making rational choices based on different values than the change advocates hold.  

You see decisions like this play out all the time:

• People stay in jobs where the work is worthwhile, but the boss is crazy and the resources are inadequate to do the job right.
• Families don’t abandon dysfunctional family members even when they are destroying the quality of life for everyone.
• Patriotism and citizenship require honor and respect for the country and our leaders, yet governments should be opposed when they act in unjust and unwise ways.

No amount of inspiration, coaching and action planning is going to move people off values and beliefs that run this deep.   If duty is the source of resistance, these values have to be surfaced and examined.  Until new values or a different sense of duty comes into play, change will be difficult.

I could afford the patience to outlast my cat because she was not that essential to my wellbeing.  I paid a relatively low price for accepting this duty. In many cases people pay too dear a price for their sense of duty.  They cannot and should not wait for the cat to die.

I facilitated this CAE exploration of the next 50 years for associations during a June 22 CAE celebration with more than 130 association executives in Alexandria, VA. For more insights from this experience, also read Forecasting 50 Years Ahead for Associations and CAE Leaders. Now that I’m back from a great summer vacation, I’ve analyzed what these CAE teams reported out for 2020, 2040 and 2060. Several teams said CAEs need to monitor trends and issues and understand how their associations will rise and fall with significant changes in the environment.

The 2020 teams saw the current trajectories of change continuing to play out for associations, such as:

• A steady embrace of multimedia technologies.
• More virtual working environments and meetings.
• Globalization drawing associations into global operations.
• Diversity requiring leaders to be more culturally savvy and sensitive.
• Greater encouragement or pressure to act responsibly for the environment.

These CAEs validated the need for continuous learning and strong leadership in every future window of time we explored.  They also recognized the need to be proficient with new technologies and practices.

Several 2020 teams felt the future calls into question the decision to be nonprofit or for profit.  One 2040 team asked a far more important and generative question for CAEs to consider: will we have vastly different ways of affiliating?

The 2040 teams anticipate bigger changes like a wealth transfer to poorer countries, a retirement age that will be 10 to 20 years older, and work environments that have shifted away from traditional office space. They forecast that international cultures will become more mainstream and global standards will prevail. More work will be delegated to robotics while people will make life-work balance supreme. Human inter-connectiveness will be valued more than information transfer, and privacy will not exist. Education will be less structured and more focused on direct application, perhaps with CAEs even collaborating to get degrees.

The 2060 teams anticipated the greatest changes in our world. China will be the world’s largest economy, India will be an intellectual world power, and the European Union will elect a central government.  Yet neighborhoods with small-scale enterprises and commerce may become more essential to the economy than governments. We can look forward to collaboration without barriers, including language, because we have a universal language and virtual emotional intelligence.  CAEs will use judgment to use the instant knowledge so readily available. Associations will become a blend of virtual and real worlds. And what will be the 2020 membership challenge: how will we retain the 120 year old?

It is difficult to imagine how different our world can become.  When we engage in forecasting exercises like this one, we will get some things right, wait forever for some changes, and be taken unaware and unprepared by something really important.  We just have to accept this with humility and jump into this uncertainty if we want to call ourselves leaders willing to challenge our organizations to matter to the future.

In an educational event June 22 to celebrate the 50^th anniversary of the certified association executive (CAE) designation, I introduced about 130 association executives to the idea that anticipating and leading the future is an essential competency for effective leaders. I’ve been an association executive, I am a CAE, and I became a professional futurist 10 years ago. I passionately believe associations can choose to be a powerful force for shaping a preferred future. This belief shapes my practice and the work of Signature i, LLC.

The CAE planners for this event recognized that this time of celebrating past achievements is a perfect time to turn everyone’s attention to the future. Their bold idea was to look ahead 50 years—something even professional futurists are rarely asked to do. It’s often hard for us to convince leaders they need to care about what could happen in 10 years.

On the advice of my colleagues in the Association for Professional Futurists, I organized this learning experience as a timeline exercise. I looked retrospectively at changes from 1960 to 2010 and then forecast changes we might see in our external environment at 2020, 2040 and 2060.  With such a large span of time to consider, it proved easy to demonstrate a few key concepts that can make leaders better strategic thinkers and leaders of change, such as:

• Probing the future using big questions to frame the possibilities.
• Using exploratory forecasts to hypothesize what might happen and provocative forecasts to challenge our assumptions.
• Looking systematically across the external environment to identify different kinds of changes and their implications.
• Leading effectively across three horizons of time to keep organizations aligned with their best strategic fit for changing conditions and on track to achieve a preferred future.
• Puzzling over what the rate of change will be since some problems prove more challenging than their advocates believe and major transformations in areas like infrastructure can take decades.

When I reviewed what the teams posted as their forecasts and implications on the timeline, I was struck that many groups offered as many forecasts for what might happen in the world as what might happen to associations. At first I questioned whether my instructions had been clear then realized, no, their insights were exactly right.  Associations are intimately involved in their external world and there really should be little distinction between the big issues of the day and what associations are doing.

A number of teams forecast a future that is highly distributed and networked and some challenged the future of centralized association headquarters.  I joked that a lot of people would be leaving the session to put their buildings up for sale.

I recognized and applauded one team’s forecast: We will have vastly different ways of affiliating. This exploratory forecast gets right to the heart of what associations are about and we all need to continue to explore and anticipate how affiliating will change in 2020, 2040 and 2060.  

Formal learning takes place through leadership development programs, board orientation and officer training. Informal learning can happen through the new ideas and information flowing through our work and as brief “teaching moments” about our culture and practices routinely built into meeting agendas.    

When our committees or task forces are charged with analyzing and deciding a critical issue, we can be intentional about using critical thinking processes and tools to be more effective. We could be disciplined about answering certain strategic questions or checking particular perspectives.

When we falter in our ability to communicate or get a project done, we can use action learning practices to reflect on and improve our group interaction and effectiveness.

At the end of each significant meeting, we can evaluate how well we accomplished our objectives and agree on how to be more effective next time.

When we set our goals and plan of work, we can explicitly declare what we want to learn individually and collectively. This should be as important to us as what we want our committees and task forces to achieve. The higher the level of accountability a group has the more open and willing its members should be to coaching and holding each other accountable for the success of the organization.   

Instead of seeking volunteers who already have relevant experience and knowledge, we might be wiser to seek volunteers who are excited about learning how to do something bold together.  Know-how is not hard to find when we start with leaning to work collaboratively.    

To overcome this weakness, many associations offer content experts basic training in good education design for live, virtual or blended learning experiences. Some associations also rely on their education staffers or consultants to coach selected content experts, especially for technical or professional courses that will be repeated or available in an online curriculum.

If you want to help your content experts become more comfortable with facilitating collaborative learning, here are some simple tactics you might consider:

• Explain different learning designs in a basic how-to guide. Recommend innovative formats that have worked for your members.
• Make it easy to set up conference calls for co-presenters to plan a session together.  Encourage talking in advance about how to achieve learning outcomes.
• Give participants an upfront voice in defining their learning needs.  Use online registration and social media to make it easy for participants to give this guidance to content experts in advance. 
• Designate one or two people as learning advocates in every experience.  Empowering someone to actively represent the learning needs of the group reminds everyone they are in control of what happens in collaborative learning.
• Celebrate and recognize content experts for amazing learning experiences. Set them up as role models for others to emulate.
• Work with selected content experts who can help create a tipping point toward collaborative learning. Start with a few people who will innovate and influence others to change.
• Check out these practical tips on how to turn experts into great teachers.

Your content experts know they stand on the shoulders of other experts. By helping them become facilitators of collaborative learning, you also help them stand shoulder-to-shoulder with others to grow and revise the knowledge in their field

And those experts—well—they just barely have time to spew forth some of what they know before racing to their next great achievement.

And too many association executives are forced to crank out educational opportunities, because they are programming too many sessions, meetings and workshops to have enough time to inspect their products for learning outcomes and quality experiences.

Is this assessment too harsh? It takes time and effort on everyone’s part to create a culture for collaborative learning. This post expands on my article, The Power of Collaborative Learning, appearing in the June issue of Associations Now and is cross-posted to the ASAE blog, Acronym.

For this culture to happen, association members will have to stop acting like consumers and accept their responsibility as co-creators of the knowledge and competencies in their field.

Content experts will have to learn new skills as learning facilitators and give up some control and ego gratification to put learners first.

Professional development leaders will have to take more risks and work harder than ever to create the formats and practices to support collaborative learning.

But that’s a big chunk of change for any association. What are some first steps any association can take to lead a change toward collaborative learning? Let me nominate two simple steps here and then share two additional resources from our own community of shared learning. I’ll offer more tips for your content experts in my next post.

1. At the outset of a learning experience, presenters/facilitators can set expectations by planning for and explaining the role learning participants will have in creating new understanding, ideas or tools. 
2. At the conclusion, instead of only evaluating how the presenter/facilitators did, associations can ask learning participants to evaluate how well the group collaborated in achieving learning outcomes.
3. Use these tips to overcome resistance to active participation.
4. Experiment with new meeting formats that increase participation.

If you’ve got a success story to share or resources you have used, please share. We’re in this transition together.

Collaborative learning does require much more from everyone at the outset. What we gain is a capacity to learn together that should prove immeasurable in creating knowledge, overcoming challenges and innovating for the future.     

This forecast from the 2020 Forecast: Creating the Future of Learning by KnowledgeWorks and the Institute for the Future evokes a powerful metaphor for learning across a lifelong continuum. If you have a learning ecology, you have more than order and continuity. You have the potential for a personalized and interconnected system of changing relationships and experiences that sustain and nourish your life.

Does your approach to learning have the qualities of an ecosystem or do you close yourself off to all but a few routine and reliable sources? No ecosystem sustains itself without renewal and evolution. Where do you encounter new ideas and challenges to learn?

Education institutions may not be as essential in these personal learning ecologies. Other organizations and networks like professional and trade associations may be more adept at creating collaborative platforms that connect us with our collective intelligence.

We may choose to have personal education advisors or learning journey mentors who can help us create, nurture and maintain our personal learning ecologies. When we select these advisors and mentors, we will look for people whose personal learning ecologies are healthy enough to sustain their aspirations and offer enough stimulation and nourishment for our own. 

Instead of relying on degrees held and certifications to demonstrate to the world what we have learned, we could let our personal data trails reveal even more about where and what we have learned along our own personalized learning journey. We could construct personal portfolios documenting our journey to establish our reputation and mastery of critical knowledge and skills.

By 2020, we could be well on our way to having personalized systems of learning that better match the complexity and vitality of the world in which we now live and work.

In the innovation prize competition for the American Industrial Hygiene Association, members participated in teams to come up with breakthrough solutions to two significant challenges in the industry.  They didn’t win any major prize….just the chance to have the AIHA board hear their ideas and possibly act on them. See Create Breakthrough Innovation the X Prize Way for more information on how this prize competition worked.  For ideas on other approaches, see Ignite Industry Competition with an Innovation Competition featured in Associations Now.

Likewise, members of the National Art Education Association were invited at their annual conference to help design the next generation of the association in a strategic planning studio. This was an inclusive and immersive experience to discover what members really want. We were blown away.  We collected more than 800 “comment” cards eliciting ideas about the future of the association and a couple hundred or more people also filled the walls of the studio with their ideas and images. Now these are art educators who love an opportunity and an environment to express themselves; still the outpouring of input was surprising. Until you stop to think--they were genuinely thrilled to have this direct and creative line of input into the board’s strategic planning process.

Both the innovation prize competition and the design studio took the mystery out of how to get new ideas and aspirations for the profession and association heard.  The processes were open, transparent, collaborative and fun.

They are just two examples of creative group processes that ask members what they think in ways that get answers no survey with its true, false or Likert scale can quantify.  Answers that have more spontaneity than even the best structured focus group can elicit. And let’s not even compare these results to town halls or delegate assemblies where people jockey for power and position.

So yes, ask your members what they think. Just think first about how you ask them. If what you want are  fresh perspectives and members helping you create the outcomes, try something engagingly different.

Governance as Leadership: Reframing the Work of Nonprofit Boards (R. Chait, W. Ryan and B. Taylor) identifies an even more serious shortcoming in boards—a failure to engage in generative thinking. These authors say boards have ceded the leadership role to their executives and staff and retreated into an oversight role under the increased threat of failing in their fiduciary responsibilities.

These nonprofit governance experts say boards need to engage in generative governance when there is:

• Ambiguity—there are multiple interpretations of a situation.
• Saliency—the issue means a great deal to a great many influential people.
• High stakes—because the issue invokes questions of core values and organizational identity.
• Strife—the prospects for confusion and conflict are high.
• Irreversibility—the decision is important and cannot easily be reversed.

These experts aren’t as interested as I am in foresight as a board responsibility, but I buy their argument that boards need to embrace generative governance. Dialogue and inquiry,  which they consider core practices of governance, are critical factors for success in either insight or foresight.

In generative discussions, board members generate different insights and discern different patterns by reflecting collectively on shared experiences. Discussions enable the interplay of different impressions, frames and perspectives; this then moves trustees from shared experience to shared meaning and ultimately to a commitment to act on the shared meaning.” (Chait, Ryan and Taylor)

Chait, Ryan and Taylor make a number of intriguing observations in Leadership as Governance that have drawn me into generative thinking about the work I do with boards.

Boards must create and commit the organization to a “dominant narrative”. I feel validated in my instincts and insistence that boards must take the leadership in defining their organization’s identity.

Actions inform goals; goals frequently emerge from action. Rarely does a board make something a major goal without some evidence that the issue or activities matter to the organization and its stakeholders. Goals do not manifest in strategic planning sessions. They emerge in the work of the organization and I will make this more explicit in the future.

People actually make sense by thinking about the past, not the future.  I’ve always found it a little odd that many futurists spend as much time talking about and interpreting the past as they do studying and projecting the future. Perhaps they have always known that people need to make sense of their past, which they have experienced, before they can begin to engage with the ambiguity of their future. I’ve often said futurists are like historians; only the timeframe is different. Now I understand the futurists who spend time with the past are wiser than I am about the way we humans make sense of our world.