What is in your checklist?
What will you need to construct your institute?  Here’s a checklist of items that will help you along the way.

Assessing your external and internal environments

·          Target Area (s)?

What or where are the target areas that you plan to influence or on which you plan to impact?  You can’t be all things to all people, so determining your impact targets is critical.

Determining where  you place your focus is both geographic and digital. You may decide to focus on a local town, city or county geographically, but an altogether different digital audience.  One of the fundamental goals of IF @ AACC, for example, has been to make operational the futurist’s goal to  “act locally”  while thinking globally.  These are both geographic and digital “spaces.”  Hence, the target communities are “glocal:” global and local… or  C ommunity  (the global community)  and c ommunity. (the local community)

Structuring your organization this way allows interaction and growth across multiple levels of social organization. One of the major impacts of the web’s influence has been the ability to connect and contribute at multiple levels.

After you’ve identified your targets,  you can turn to internal items.
Internal

·          A culture that supports innovation.

Even if the futuring isn’t part of your collge’s mission, innovation may be part of the organization’s purpose.   Willingness to create and take risks to innovate is critical.  Futuring demands unconventional thinking.

·        Local clients that need your services.

This is challenging.  Futuring at this time in history is often difficult to grasp. Businesses and other local clients need to look at the future, but this is one of those “deer in the headlights” moments. Your clients may view you as everything from the Wizard of Oz to an escapee from Fantasyland. Even those tolerant with or interested in futuring may not clearly see way you can offer. There are direct and indirect  uses of futuring. Here are some examples:

Direct- Businesses serving a local market that gain value from foresight and futures thinking. Likely demographic and market shifts in the short-term and long term are critical. Entrepreneurs can directly benefit from innovative futures tools. Government agencies  need foresight and futures tools to adequately envision services and citizen need.

Indirect clients-

Leadership and futuring go hand-in-hand but the essential tools of futuring are integrated into the leadership process. Similarly, creativity is an intrinsic part of futuring. 

Rationally employing foresight is not clear to everyone.  While “we all think about the future anyway,”  we may no do it in a very rigorous ways.  So…

Be prepared to market yourself! What you have to offer – perspectives and tools – are empowering, but remember, “if you build it” there is no reason to believe that “they will come!”  This is clearly an area in which you’ll need to “socialize” or “educate” your clients on what and how futuring is.

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