The Board’s Duty of Foresight in The Age of Polycrisis
By Jeff De Cagna, writing for The Center for Association Leadership…
It is time for association boards to become fit for purpose and meet their successors’ expectations.
In an article in the 2024 Associations Now Board Brief, I wrote: “Less than a year before the midway point of The Turbulent Twenties arrives, association boards must make a crucial decision: Will they reject complacency and bring a renewed sense of purpose to standing up for their successors’ futures?”
As of this article’s publication date (7/16/24), there are 1,994 days remaining in The Turbulent Twenties, and 169 days until this decade’s midpoint on January 1, 2025. What specific actions has your association’s board taken to prepare for the serious challenges that will alter the trajectory of both our community and our world in fundamental ways throughout the second half of this decade and beyond?
For association boards, CEOs, staff partners, and other stakeholders, these questions are not rhetorical. They are fervent demands for urgent action on the part our community’s most senior decision-makers to recognize and confront the threats facing their organizations today and in the years ahead.
BANI and The Age of Polycrisis
Rejecting complacency and recognizing the need for immediate action requires association boards to make a clear-eyed assessment of the unforgiving conditions now encircling their organizations and stakeholders. As I wrote for Associations Now in June 2023: “The polycrisis is not simply the convergence of multiple simultaneous crises, such as the climate emergency, economic inequality and fragility, geopolitical instability, global health concerns, ideological extremism, and technological harm, but also the increasing entanglement among them that further deepens and exacerbates their collective negative impact on humanity.”
To better understand the underlying global dynamics driving the polycrisis, we can apply the BANI framework developed by futurist Jamais Cascio. First proposed in 2018 as an alternative to the widely adopted yet less useful VUCA framework, Cascio’s BANI construct identifies brittleness, anxiety, nonlinearity, and incomprehensibility as the foundational forces creating systemic turbulence and upheaval in the 21st-century world. A closer look at each element of the framework can help clarify its impact on our thinking about the polycrisis.
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