As association boards come to embrace the duty of foresight and begin to develop a consistent practice of looking toward the future, they will benefit from organizing a toolkit of go-to methods and resources that they can call upon to infuse their learning and thinking, as well as their discussions and decision making, with the power of foresight. Here are five categories of valuable tools boards can use to approach the future with a fresh perspective.

Future-Focused Publications

There are numerous future-focused publications to which boards and staff can subscribe for free online or follow on various social media channels. Some of my favorites include BBC Future, Futurist Hub, KurzweilAI, and Next Big Future. (The Association Contrarian Report, a free email newsletter that I curate twice a month, is also a useful digital and association-focused foresight resource.) For those interested in a print publication, I recommend the excellent Scenario Magazine from the Copenhagen Institute for Future Studies.

These and similar resources will be most beneficial if boards and staff bring forward interesting items for discussion to tease out their implications for their stakeholders, their organizations, and the fields they serve.

The duty of foresight is a unique opportunity for decision makers to take their stewardship to an even higher level of meaning and impact.

Environmental Scanning

Many associations already undertake environmental scanning activities as part of strategic planning, using either formal or informal approaches or a blend of both. As part of a consistent practice of foresight, however, environmental scanning should be an ongoing activity, and it should reach for information beyond the boundaries of the 36- to 60-month time horizons of traditional planning processes. Once again, if boards and staff can collaborate to identify key areas of interest and concern, they can continuously scan the environment and look beyond the short term for indicators of emerging futures with long-term implications.

Scenario Learning

In their simplest form, scenarios are stories of plausible futures an organization could face in the years ahead. Association decision makers must be willing to consider not only scenarios that present attractive or preferred futures but also potential futures that are unfavorable and even unthinkable, to ensure the integrity of the practice of foresight. The value of scenarios is less in their specific details and more in the challenges they make to organizational assumptions and the opportunities they create for learning that can drive more intelligent and confident decision making.

Stakeholder Personas

Defining audience personas is a common step in the process of website development to help marketing and communications teams better understand user needs and behaviors. In a similar way, developing future-oriented personas will immeasurably benefit the board's practice of foresight because they will help decision makers build a more empathic understanding of stakeholders' problems, needs, and outcomes over the next 60 months and beyond. Personas can be a useful extension of scenarios through which boards and staff can drill down to the individual level and develop richer insights into the thoughts and feelings that move their stakeholders both personally and professionally, with the ultimate intention of co-creating more distinctive value with them.

"Artifacts From the Future"

The Institute for the Future, based in Palo Alto, California, is an unparalleled resource for all things related to foresight, including the idea of "artifacts from the future," which imagines the different objects, products, or tools that might exist years or decades from now. IFTF has created various artifacts, including an aging-in-place toolkit, a reputation statement, and a health-signaling ring. Association boards and staff can create their own simple artifacts from the future by doing a deeper dive into ideas and insights developed from other resources in their foresight toolkit.

In a time of relentless societal transformation, the duty of foresight is much more than a serious responsibility for association boards and their staff partners. It is a unique opportunity for decision makers to take their stewardship to an even higher level of meaning and impact. By using this toolkit, boards can build their capacity for foresight and leave their organizations stronger than how they found them.