This post accompanies “Pitfalls in Governance”
Foresight needs to become instinctual and habitual for boards. Jeff De Cagna of Foresight First LLC, is doing seminal work on this. He coined the phrase “duty of foresight” to accompany the other duties of trustees: duty of care, duty of loyalty, and duty of obedience.
Foresight is an ongoing process—a culture to foster in a leadership group. Organizations should recruit board members with skill at working in understanding change. It’s common for too many trustees and too many discussions to be about compliance and about confirming actions already taken. Boards need to also be at play in generative discussions about new things, and not merely immersed in old or existing things.
Trustees should frame their own discussions in multi-year terms. They should require organizational leaders to given them tools such as financial statements that focus beyond the current budget year. Ask the organization to build long-term tools for leadership, e.g. a 5- or 10-year budget. Creating it will raise questions of long-term strategy, growth, and assumptions about sustainability. And it will identify of themes and forces of change that impact the organization.
Boards and their organizations should build scenarios looking 10 years out and check the mission and strategic plans against those. This thinking is not exclusive to the board. But it is a best fit with boards who can stand outside the day-to-day work and crisis-to-crisis action inside the organization.
To fail to do these things is, in fact, a derelection of duty, the duty of foresight.
Image: Alexis Lewis, via Flickr, Creative Commons attribution license
