How to Bring the Future Home

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Here are resources to help you conduct on your campus the exercise discussed in the November Business Officer article on the future.

By Karla Hignite

How do you break 1,000 people into small groups for a focused discussion about the future of higher education? Not without a lot of planning. Attendees of the joint Campus of the Future conference in Hawaii this past July—hosted by NACUBO, APPA, and SCUP—joined colleagues from their respective institution types (research, comprehensive and doctoral, small, and community colleges) to identify driving forces likely to shape the future of U.S. colleges and universities. The exercise also asked participants to develop scenarios based on the intersections of what they considered prominent drivers of change and to describe the future they believed most likely to occur during the next five to seven years. (For an overview of the outcomes of this mega focus group, see “What’s Ahead? You Decide” in the November 2006 issue of Business Officer.)

Now you can try something similar on your campus. Materials used for the Campus of the Future scenario-building exercise include worksheets to facilitate the brainstorming of key drivers of change and the developing of group scenarios. Access these at www.nacubo.org/documents/Futures_handouts.pdf.

Focus on Process

From the outset, planning for the Campus of the Future scenario-building exercise was based on the premise that process is as important as product. “Because of the unique makeup of this joint conference,” says Phyllis Grummon, SCUP director of planning and education, “we wanted an experiential learning activity that would encourage colleagues with different institution roles to interact and share perspectives.”

One decision made upfront to streamline the process was to provide participants with a list of driving forces so that they would not have to brainstorm them from scratch, though participants were encouraged to add to the list. Logistical decisions ranged from the ideal number of participants per group to the number of tables per room. A more weighty decision centered on how to categorize participants. “We decided to organize by type of institution,” says Susan Jurow, NACUBO senior vice president of professional development and communications. “Dividing participants by geographic region or by size of institution might have produced different outcomes that would have been equally interesting, but we were curious to see how responses would vary by institution type.”

Early on, the conference program advisory committee met with representatives from the National Consortium for Continuous Improvement in Higher Education to design and fine-tune the scenario-building plans and to rightsize the exercise in a way that would be workable. NCCI also provided many of the numerous small-group facilitators to keep participants on pace throughout the 90-minute process. Prior to the conference, Jurow and Grummon tested the exercise with various groups from NACUBO and SCUP. “The benefit for institutions is that they can go far beyond the initial discussion we could accommodate at the conference,” says Jurow. Adds Grummon: “Even if you don’t do anything beyond creating scenarios, getting people to think about the future in other than reactive terms allows them to start developing a positive mindset about the future.”

More Methods and Techniques

In addition to the conference materials, here are a handful of other futures-focused resources to guide your campus activities.

• The Art of the Long View: Planning for the Future in an Uncertain World, by Peter Schwartz, is considered by many as the ultimate resource for futures thinking and scenario building (Doubleday, 1991). Another good book is Learning From the Future: Competitive Foresight Scenarios, edited by Liam Fahey and Robert M. Randall (John Wiley & Sons, 1998).
• In addition to the scenario-building approach, many other methods exist for gathering ideas and data to think strategically about the future and to position institutions to succeed in their planning efforts. One great resource is the World Future Society, which provides an overview of methods on its Web site at www.wfs.org/futuringmethods.htm.
• Descriptions of a scenario-building process at the University of Michigan are available at www.si.umich.edu/V2010/scenproc.html.
• Descriptions of techniques from a University of Arizona course are available at www.ag.arizona.edu/futures/tou/sem2-techniques.html.
• The Institute for the Future at Anne Arundel Community College provides resources, courses, and services. Go to www.aacc.edu/future.