The Futurist Board
Written by Carla Silver and Greg Bamford
The hockey great Wayne Gretzky infamously reflected upon his uncanny and intuitive ability to imagine where the puck would go, even before it had been hit, and to skate in that direction. Most schools, except some very rare examples, tend to skate to where the puck has been going – over and over and over again – and this has mostly worked for a very long time. We call this “status quo bias.” “Of course it is going to work,” we think – it always has.
Part of the calcification in our industry is our inability to imagine the future and to design towards it. It’s hard to think about the future. For that reason, most school strategic plans are really about today and not for tomorrow.
Imagining and designing for the future needs to start with leadership. There is one body in a school whose primary role is long-term and strategic: the board of trustees. Yet, too often, trustees are just as likely to focus on the here and now. That’s a shame.
In our lives outside of L+D, we are both independent school trustees, and in this article, we’d like to focus on helping the board adopt the role of futurist thinkers.
Futurist Thinking and the Generative Role of Boards
Boards often spend some time explaining that their primary role is strategic, not operational. This may come during new member orientation, and it may be repeated during in an admonition from the board chair. When they do so, we often draw from Governance as Leadership ,by Taylor, Chait, and Ryan. It’s a signature text in the field.
This book outlines three modes for governance: fiduciary, strategic, and generative. Of these, they note, generative is the “most neglected mode of board work.”
Yet we find that boards are interested in moving into the generate mode of governance – they just don’t know how. When they do, Heads of School sometimes find themselves frustrated by their newfound interest in, say, imagining the nuts and bolts of the school’s future. It seems like they don’t know how to imagine the future at an appropriate altitude.
We believe that futurist thinking offers a productive entry point into generative governance for boards. After all, generative governance provides a sense of problems and opportunities, framing the choices ahead. It does not seek to replace the subject matter expertise of the professional educator the board has hired as Head, or the team that the Head as hired – rather, it harnesses the (hopefully) diverse perspectives of the board to say, here are some things we notice happening in the world – and here are some questions we should be asking. As Taylor, Chait, and Ryan write, “the goal of generative governance is to frame decisions and choices, not make them.”
And one generative role for the board is to imagine, “if we were to confront x or y or z, would we be able to react? How are we getting ready for these potentials now?”
Shift the Purpose of Board Meetings
Board meetings in most schools are the embodiment of status quo bias. Both of us have been to a lot of board meetings – as trustees and as consultants. While there are some boards that use their monthly meetings to do creative work together, the vast majority of board meetings are spent hearing standing committee reports and then also reports about other topics such as Admissions and College Counseling updates (neither of which, we would argue, should require the active management of boards.) Regular reports can inform boards of what the school is currently doing but they can also produce confirmatory thinking over exploratory thinking. Often there is no time built in to surface questions or offer suggestions. Rarely do reports propel the board to think strategically (how a school will evolve and stay relevant) or generatively (identifying opportunities and challenges and frame choices and decisions ahead).
It’s time to really look at the purpose of board meetings and ask how your time is best spent as a board together in one room. Are oral board reports necessary? Who should the board hear from this year? Why? Does it always need to be the same each year? What reports can be submitted in written form? Or submitted as short videos to be watched at home? And if you are to free up time in board meetings, what are the conversations the board could have that could be more exploratory and less confirmatory? Might one or two be focused on the future?
Futurist Thinking Before Strategic Planning
If the school is nearing a time to do strategic planning, spending a year in a posture of futurist thinking could lead to a strategic plan that is grounded in future trends and thus more likely to be strategic and not operational. Strategic planning is contextual, meaning that schools need to be planning in relation to what is going on beyond the campus and considering political, technological, social, environmental, economic and greater industry trends. If a board is paying attention to signals – small signs of emerging phenomenons that could become significant in the future – and is really identifying the trends that are most likely to impact the school, families and faculty and staff, they will be in a greater position to take advantage of opportunities and address the challenges that those signals and trends could offer
Bring Futurist Work Into Your Annual Cycle
One way to bring futurist thinking into the boardroom is to reject the binary of futurist thinking vs. current year thinking. After all, every current year decision steers you toward a potential future. Are you being intentional about ensuring that it is steering you toward the one you prefer?
When having conversations about the near-term, it is worth dedicating a certain amount of time to imagining the implications for a longer-term future.
Approving a budget, setting tuition, evaluating the Head, setting Head and board goals, developing potential new trustees, and approving new trustees are all examples of annual decisions that have potentially huge long-term consequences. Are you evaluating them through the lens of a 10-year time horizon?
Setting tuition: Where do we want to be priced ten years from now? Will that decision make sense if new competition emerges with a lower price point, if public schools generate more options, if a recession hits (or our dominant local industry collapses)?
Approving a budget: Where does our current rate of spending growth lead us 10 years from now? What assumptions are we making about the rate of spending growth over the next 10 years that might be inaccurate? What are we investing in now that may be irrelevant a decade from now? What aren’t we investing in that could be crucial? What scenarios might significantly increase or decrease our need to spend in certain ways?
Trustee recruitment and onboarding: What does our board need to look like in 10 years to reflect the needs we may face? What do we need to do to build that board now — are we recruiting those people into our community as parents? Are we preparing them for board membership through volunteer and committee service? Are we recruiting them to the board? Are their perspectives on our Committee on Trustees or governance committee? Who does our board need to help us think generatively about the future over the next 10 years? What do we need to do to build that board now — are we recruiting those people into our community as parents?
Head of School Goals and Evaluation: What do we need our Head to be working on next year to aid us in reaching a preferred future in 2032? How can we build that into their goals – and protect some of their time to work on those priorities? What would it look like for the Head to be an effective partner with the Board in thinking about the future?
Board Goals and Board Self-Evaluation: What do we need to be working on next year to aid us in reaching a preferred future in 2032? How can we build that into our goals for the year? Into our cadence of meetings? What would it look like for the Board to be an effective partner with the Head in thinking about the future?
Anchor Futurist Thinking In Your Annual Retreat
Every fall, we find Board Chairs asking us to facilitate a board retreat. They know they need to do some sort of retreat – after all, they do it every year – but often, they aren’t sure what it should be about.
While futurist thinking should not be confined to a fall board retreat, the retreat can be a good opportunity to go deep into these habits, skills, and mindsets. This is in keeping with the sixth Principle of Good Practice articulated by NAIS: “the board recognizes that its primary work and focus are long range and strategic.”
By periodically returning to principles of futurist thinking in your annual retreat – not once, as the board is constantly gaining and losing new board members – you can develop common language that you can return to in the context of current agenda items.
Some More Ways to Embed Futurist Thinking with Your Board:
In addition to the above, you might consider ways to build time into your board agendas that allow board members to build their futurist thinking muscles. Here are a few regular activities for boards that you could intersperse throughout the year:
Create adventures outside of the school: Consider sending your board out on field trips to adjacent industries or emerging parts of your community together
Engage in signals work: Replace at least one regularly schedule report with 30 minutes of unearthing signals or bring a signal of the month and ask board members to imagine
Explore scenario work: Share a specific scenario with your board and ask board members to problem solve in small groups.
Experience new technology together as a board: Have board members take out the computers and explore new technologies together. Play with platforms like Chat GPT together and without judgment and with a sense of curiosity. Have a conversation about how the technology might change teaching, learning or the value proposition of the school. Avoid labeling changes as “bad” or “good”. Try to be specific about exactly what change looks like.
When doing long-range planning - financial or otherwise - engage in second order thinking: “If xxx happens, then what might ensue because of that?” Think of several possibilities and play with assumptions. It’s easy to just use the current conditions to plan ahead, but the future will be different so come up with a few different outcomes based on different assumptions.
It is easy to see futurist thinking as a luxury – an extra you might get to if you have time. But the schools that build in ways to proactively identify signals and impactful trends and frame potential challenges and opportunities will be prepared to handle a myriad of futures because you have already imagined them. When the hockey puck goes in a direction that most others can't anticipate, you'll be ready for it.
Leadership+Design now offers a year-long program for boards, “Futureproofing Your Board,” wanting to do a deep dive into these topics. Click here for more info.
Greg Bamford
Greg Bamford (@gregbamford) is a Co-Founder and Senior Partner. Prior to this, Greg was Associate Head of School for Strategy and Innovation at Charles Wright Academy in Tacoma, Washington, and Head of School at the innovative Watershed School in Boulder, Colorado. During his tenure at Watershed, enrollment grew by 82% and the school achieved accreditation for the first time. He is currently on the Board of Trustees for his alma mater, The Overlake School in Redmond, Washington, and the Advisory Board for The Hatch School, a new, independent girls' high school opening in Seattle, Washington next fall. With his experience in school leadership, Greg brings a strategic lens to leadership development, innovation, and change management for Leadership+Design clients. He is particularly passionate about building leadership capacity and the cultural muscle to enact needed change. Greg has been a featured speaker at dozens of education conferences, has consulted with a wide range of schools nationally, and has written for publications like Independent School, Net Assets, and The Yield. Greg lives in Tacoma, Washington with his wife and two children.
