Learning How to
Create the Future
BY ALLEN LIFF
“Companies that create the future do more than
satisfy customers, they constantly amaze them.”
Gary Hamel and C.K. Prahalad
Competing for the Future
Originally published in the August 1997 edition of Association Management.
Equipped with
five lessons from
corporate visionaries,
an ASAE staff team
developed a
compelling vision.
What will it take to constantly amaze our members into the next century?
That's a question every association executive needs to ask in this era of
rising member expectations and increasing competition.
The first part of this article outlines key lessons, learned from some of the
most highly successful and imaginative corporations, that you can apply to
your association's strategy-creation process. The second part shows how
an ASAE team of department directors adapted these concepts to create
their vision of the future.
PART 1: FIVE LESSONS FOR CREATING THE FUTURE
Why is it that some organizations are capable of imagining and creating the future while others are
forever playing catch up? The future-focused organizations have learned the following lessons.
Lesson 1:
Imagination is the master of great strategy, implementation its servant.
If an organization wishes to create the future, it must begin by imagining compelling ways to amaze its
customers. Then, and only then, should it ask, How will we do this? What are the details of
implementation?
At first glance, this may seem a risky or unscientific approach. After all, doesn't an organization need to
assess its current resources and capabilities before determining what it can do in the future? The history
of strategy and marketing offers many excellent illustrations of why this isn't the case. Consider Henry,
Ford. Ask yourself, Which did Ford imagine first - the assembly line or the Model T, the means or the
end?
Most people mistakenly believe that Ford first
invented the former, which enabled him to create
the latter. Actually, it was the other way around.
Ford's invention of the assembly line was the direct
result of his imaginative desire to produce an
affordable automobile. In short, Ford knew what
needed to be done before he knew how the deed
would be accomplished.
In his 1923 book entitled My Life and Work, Ford
discussed a "broad scientific approach" that forces
people to dig for unimagined solutions. He said,
"Our policy is to reduce the price, extend the
operations, and improve the article. You will notice
that the reduction of price comes first. . . .
Therefore we first reduce the price to a point where
we believe more sales will result. Then we go
ahead and try to make the prices. . . . The more
usual way is to take the costs and then determine
the price, and although that method may be
scientific in the narrow sense, it is not scientific in
the broad sense, because what earthly use is it to
know the cost if it tells you yon cannot manufacture
at a price at which the article can be sold? . . . One
of the ways of discovering [emphasis added] . . . is
to name a price so low as to force everybody in the
place to the highest point of efficiency. . . . We
make more discoveries concerning manufacturing
and selling under this forced method than by any
method of leisurely investigation."
Great strategy, therefore, is about discovering that
which is possible but previously unseen, and then
searching for the means to turn it into a real-life,
value-producing product or service.
Lesson 2:
When it comes to creating value, imagination
wins out over forecasting and prediction.
The art of creating the future is more about
uncovering evolving customer needs than about
forecasting trends or building scenarios. This is not
a particularly mysterious process, but it does
require the right kind of information and the proper
use of that information.
The right information is derived from a relentless
search for cues about how the future will unfold.
This search involves analyzing trends and
competition, tracking emerging technologies and
management techniques, and gathering insights
from market research and customer contacts.
While gathering this information, it is important to
remember that forecasting and scenario building
are tools and not the end points of activities. For
example, 15 years ago all the major automobile
companies had access to data about the trends
facing families and could have crafted reasonably
accurate future scenarios or predictions about the
hectic pace of life that was emerging. But it was
Chrysler that went beyond mere forecasting to
asking, If that's what life will be like for many
families, what future options do we have for
creating value? Their imaginative answer: the
minivan.
Lesson 3:
Ambitious goals act as catalysts.
Creating the future is an enormous task and is only
worth doing if you have a goal that makes a
meaningful difference in the lives members, staff,
and volunteers. In this way, strategy becomes
more than a blueprint, it becomes a source of
ambition and a catalyst for action. Henry Ford's
ambition to make a meaningful difference was
captured in the phrase, "Put a car in every garage."
Sam Walton, founder of Wal-Mart, motivated his
employees to provide "rock-bottom prices to rural
Americans."
Lesson 4:
Don't listen to the naysayers.
Inventing the future can be scary work. No matter
how brilliant and sound your ideas, there will
always be naysayers. The following quotes remind
us that many of the great ideas of the past were
initially discounted or scorned:
"I think there is a world market for maybe five
computers." – Thomas Watson, Chairman of IBM, 1943
"The concept is interesting and well-formed, but in order
to earn better than a 'C,' the idea must be feasible." - A
Yale University management professor in response to
Fred Smith's paper proposing reliable overnight delivery
service; Smith went on to found Federal Express
"If I had thought about it, I wouldn't have done the
experiment. The literature was full of examples that said
you can't do this." - Spencer Silver on the work that led
to the unique adhesives for 3-M "Post-It" notepads
2
Lesson 5:
Create an agenda, not a detailed plan.
A detailed plan will not work when your planning
horizon stretches out for 10, 15, or 20 years. The
future is too unpredictable to allow for that degree
of accuracy. What does seem to work is a broadbased but succinct "agenda" that establishes a
clear and compelling direction that is sustainable
over long periods of time. Gary Hamel and C. K.
Prahalad, authors of Competing for the Future:
Breakthrough Strategies for Seizing Control of
Your Industry and Creating the Markets of
Tomorrow, refer to this as having a "point of view"
about the future. Thus, an agenda or high-level
blueprint for the future
• captures the dream or ambition of the
organization;
• defines the benefits it will deliver to customers;
• identifies necessary core competencies; and
• defines how the organization will interface with
the customer.
WHAT IS YOUR DREAM?
Can you, your staff and your volunteers
complete the following paragraph?
We dream of a world where our members
can___________.
For this world to become reality, our association will
have to strengthen its competencies in ________
and forge partnerships with ______________.
To attract and retain members, our associations will
have to interact with and serve them in the following
manner __________________.
PART 2: A VISION OF ASAE'S FUTURE
Last summer I worked with ASAE's team of
department directors as they asked themselves the
question with which I began this article: What will it
take to constantly amaze our members into the
next century? The team's aim was to apply the five
corporate lessons in developing a compelling
vision for serving members.
Fueling the imagination - new technologies and
possibilities. The team began its efforts with a
search for cues that would inform us about the
future and kindle our imagination about powerful
new ways to serve ASAE members. This required
us to review a wealth of information about changes
in demographics, society, and regulations. We also
had to search for emerging technologies and
management techniques that might be applied to
the association sector. To make the process
manageable, each team member was given a
"discovery assignment" and then asked to report
back to the entire group.
While the scope of our efforts are too broad to
present in this article, it is worth highlighting two
sets of "enabling technology" that caught the
team's attention.
The first set of technologies includes those associated with the advent of one-to-one marketing and
mass-customization, which are revolutionizing how
companies interact with individual customers to
deliver information, products, and services. These
emerging capabilities, discussed by Don Peppers
and Martha Rogers in The One-to-One Future and
by Rogers in her November 1996 interview with
ASSOCIATION MANAGEMENT, mean that
associations can establish a lifelong-learning
relationship with each member, an ongoing
connection that becomes smarter as the two
interact. Already we are seeing the manifestations
of this in the form of individualized news retrieval
services such as Pointcast and Individual Inc.
Personalized, interactive publications include the
electronic version of The Wall Street Journal.
The second set of enabling technologies involves
the emerging use of artificial intelligence to create
powerful online communities and "knowledge
networks" - a development that is revolutionizing
how people come together to carry out peer-topeer networking, share information, and create
knowledge. For example, our investigation of the
Internet led to the discovery of Firefly, an online
community devoted to music and movies that uses
artificial intelligence to become smarter over time.
To quote, "Firefly is your own free personal
software agent. . . . [It] is about two simple things:
you and the community. Your agent belongs to you
and whenever you use it, it intelligently navigates
through the entire Firefly community space to
discover the information and people who would be
of most interest to you. In fact every member of the
Firefly community has his or her own personal
agent, so interacting with Firefly is like automating
the word-of-mouth process.
3
"When you tell your agent what interests you, it
goes out and locates those tastes, opinions,
preferences, and idiosyncrasies most similar to you
so it can suggest new music and movies that you
might like or even people who you might like to
meet. The more you train your agent, the more
useful and accurate it gets. The more other people
train their agents, the smarter the Firefly
community becomes - so we're all in it together."
Another important discovery was the existence of
knowledge networks that can be used to help
individuals tap into the collective intelligence of a
greater community. Such networks are already in
use at Coopers & Lybrand, Arthur Andersen, and
Buckman Laboratories. These corporate knowledge networks have been defined as "your employees and teams probing, generating, and sharing
knowledge and experience via technology, for
increasing value."
Knowledge networks have also been described as
"cyber-ecosystems" that provide a context and
infrastructure for continuous learning by
• accelerating the knowledge flow, the spread of
best practices and best known methods
throughout the organization;
• easing access to the combined experience and
know-how in your communities of practice; and
• increasing the size of the web of expertise
available to solve specific problems, plan, or
make decisions.
Revolutionary ways to create value. Our discussion about these marvelous new technologies
sparked the team's imagination. A bright and
powerful future emerged as we began to conceive
of revolutionary ways to create value for members.
One revolution would arise from the application of
one-to-one marketing, which would change how
ASAE interacts with each of its members to deliver
information and knowledge. Another revolution
would harness the power of knowledge networks to
transform how members interact with each other to
exchange information and create knowledge.
The team then began to ask, What would the world
look like if these two revolutions took place? What
kind of future are we imagining for our members?
Through reflection the following team dream was
born.
"We dream of a world where ASAE members
can:
• obtain the right information to keep current.
This is a world where: 1) members can more
easily, and in significantly less time,
continuously scan the environment through the
use of customized news retrieval, information
searches, and intelligent agents; 2) each
member receives his or her own personalized
and/or interactive version of ASSOCIATION
MANAGEMENT or section newsletters; and
3) extraneous information or correspondence
(e.g., unwanted mail or faxes) is filtered out.
• obtain the right knowledge to do their jobs
better. This is a world where: 1) members can
be part of a knowledge network, where a
dynamic and living web of technology-linked
people with their experience, ideas, and
expertise, can interact, feed, and grow upon
each other; 2) members are engaged in
perpetual learning via customized education or
training, in a variety of formats (e.g.,
multimedia, interactive, Internet, classroom,
etc.) or locations (e.g., localized delivery); and
3)ASAE can literally deliver 'education on
demand' in response to rapidly emerging
issues.
• participate in the right community or
activities. This is a world where: 1) members
have the ability [via the Internet, as with the
Firefly example] to easily locate and interact
with other members who face similar problems
or who have similar tastes, opinions, preferences, and idiosyncrasies; and 2) the above
information can be use-do create customized
networking opportunities at ASAE meetings
and opportunities for volunteer involvement."
Making the dream a reality - building
competencies. Ambitious dreams are a wonderful
thing. But turning them into reality is a difficult task
requiring discipline and perseverance. Thus, an
important part of the process is to carefully identify
those core competencies that enable an
organization, over time, to become more and more
capable of fulfilling its dream. In a sense, these
competencies serve as the foundation for creating
the future.
With this in mind, the team asked these questions:
• What set of organizational competencies will
ASAE need to realize this dream?
4
•
•
•
What types of knowledge, skills, and
organizational culture will enable us to create
this particular future?
Which ones are most essential to creating
value for the member?
In what areas must ASAE excel and be the
acknowledged leader?
As a result of this discussion, the team identified
four broad competency areas in which ASAE
should continually strive to excel and to act as
leader.
1. Developing in-depth insights about the lives and
work of association executives. This will be
reflected in terms of both quantitative knowledge
(e.g., from ASAE's database and survey research)
and qualitative knowledge (e.g., from focus group
research, personal visits with members, and
ongoing personal interaction between staff,
volunteers, and members).
2. Building community or connections among
association executives. ASAE will need to use
technology and people skills to link association
executives in meaningful ways.
3. Achieving the kind of collaboration necessary to
ensure that information and knowledge are freely
available to all members, volunteers, and staff.
ASAE will need to assemble and integrate the
efforts of talented staff who can:
• analyze and synthesize information from many
sources;
• share that information;
• cultivate collaborative and customer-intimate
relationships with members; and
• stay at the forefront of new paradigms and
techniques that affect the lives of members.
4. Acting as a sophisticated "learning broker"
for association executives. ASAE will need to
function as:
• an unbundler and repackager - taking
information and education from a variety of
outside providers and reassembling it for use
by members;
• a "knowledge navigator" - finding the right
information or knowledge for members; and
• a "knowledge-shaper" - shaping or creating
new types of curricula or learning experiences
in response to emerging needs of association
executives.
Creating partnerships. Finally, the team realized
that to achieve this dream, ASAE would need to
look outside its staff and membership for certain
expertise. For example, some of the technical
aspects of one-to-one marketing are already being
mastered by Individual Inc., the Boston-based
company that specializes in customized news
retrieval and delivery. A partnership between this
company - or one making quick strides in one-toone marketing - and ASAE would be strategically
savvy. In addition, ASAE could enhance its ability
to create the future by partnering with
• companies like Firefly that have developed the
supporting technology for creating sophisticated, online communities;
• companies with expertise in technology assisted learning (e.g., multimedia, interactive,) to
create a variety of delivery mechanisms for
ASAE education programs; and
• schools of business and management at
institutions such as Harvard, Northwestern, or
Stanford and organizations such as the Peter
Drucker Foundation. This serves two
purposes: to maintain contact with those
outside the association community, and to
have contact with faculty who can help create
curriculum content in response to emerging
issues.
WHAT'S YOUR DREAM?
For an association to create the future, it must be
able to envision it, articulate it as a dream, and
define the competencies and partnerships
necessary to transform ambition into reality. It is an
extremely challenging process and not for the faint
of heart. But the rewards for associations, and their
members, will be enormous.
Reading List
"Building Your Company's Vision," by James C. Collins and Jerry
I. Porras, Harvard Business Review, September - October 1996
Competing for the Future: Breakthrough Strategies for Seizing
Control of Your Industry and Creating the Markets of Tomorrow,
by Gary Hamel and C. K. Prahalad (Boston: Harvard Business
School Press, 1994)
"Competing on Capabilities: The New Rules of Corporate
Strategy," by George Stalk, Philip Evans, and Lawrence E.
Shulman, Harvard Business Review, March-April 1992
"The Fall and Rise of Strategic Planning," by Henry Mintzberg,
Harvard Business Review, January-February 1994
"Getting Back to Strategy," by Kenichi Ohmae, Harvard Business
Review, November-December 1988
"Marketing Myopia," by Theodore Levitt, Harvard Business
Review, September-October 1975
5
"Strategic Intent," by Gary Hamel and C.K. Prahalad, Harvard
Business Review, May-June 1989