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.

• A world of brittle systems. Since this decade began, we have observed just how many of the critical systems on which our society relies every day have been put under extreme stress and demonstrated a severe lack of resilience. These systems include education, energy, the environment, food security, public health, the supply chain, and even our systems of democracy. As Cascio argues, “Because our core systems are so frequently interconnected, it’s entirely possible that the failure of one important component can lead to a cascade of failures.” We cannot ignore how the interconnectedness and instability of brittle systems operate as aggravating factors of the polycrisis.
• A world of high anxiety. The sheer depth, breadth, and intensity of the problems that require our attention can provoke high anxiety. We know the global pandemic left many association decision-makers burned out and exhausted, and the painful after-effects still linger. In Cascio’s words, “Anxiety can drive passivity, because we can’t make the wrong choice if we don’t choose…or it can manifest as despair, that horrified realization that we missed the chance to make a critical decision, and we won’t get another opportunity.” Notwithstanding its accuracy and significance, the very term “polycrisis” is arguably anxiety-inducing, which may make wrestling with its profound questions more difficult.
• A world of nonlinear outcomes. Human brains are hardwired for linear thinking. But as Cascio points out, “In a nonlinear world, results of actions taken, or not taken, can end up being wildly out of balance. Small decisions end up with massive consequences, good or bad. Or we put forward enormous amounts of effort, pushing and pushing yet with little to see for it.” The COVID-19 pandemic was an acute and tragic nonlinear crisis for the world, and we see and feel the effects of nonlinear impact with each report of new damage wrought by the climate crisis. The polycrisis ensures that we will need to prepare ourselves for increased systemic upheaval unleashed by more nonlinearity in the years and decades to come.
• A world of incomprehensible challenges. Closely related to the dynamic of a more nonlinear world is the far greater incomprehensibility of the issues that must be addressed. From Cascio’s perspective, overcoming incomprehensibility is hard because “additional information is no guarantee of improved understanding. More data…can be counter-productive, overwhelming our ability to understand the world, making it hard to distinguish noise from signal. Incomprehensibility is, in effect, the end state of ‘information overload.’” While the complicated conditions of the polycrisis will stretch our ability to make sense, make meaning, and make wise decisions, it is critical that we do not surrender our agency.

The implications of a BANI world, and their connection to The Age of Polycrisis, make clear that association boards must situate the duty of foresight at the core of their endeavor to set a higher standard of stewardship, governing, and foresight [SGF]. The duty of foresight requires association boards to stand up for their successors’ futures through intentional learning, short-term sacrifice, and long-term action. It is the ethical and moral choice to prioritize the future well-being of successors who will never be known personally to today’s directors/officers—and whose futures today’s boards are working to create—that truly distinguishes the fit-for-purpose association board.

Three Stewardship Imperatives and The Board’s Duty of Foresight

I have recently written about the three core stewardship imperatives for fit-for-purpose association boards. Each of these imperatives is grounded in the necessity of the board’s duty of foresight in The Age of Polycrisis:

1. Attention as responsibility. The first stewardship imperative is for fit-for-purpose boards to regard their attention as the highest form of responsibility to the association. Our community’s orthodox belief that board service is a volunteer role is a continuing disservice to all association stakeholders—including both current directors/officers, and successors—since it sanctions continuous board inattention, excuses lack of preparation, and undermines board agency. Fit-for-purpose boards must reject this detrimental belief by choosing to focus their maximum available attention on intentional learning with the future. i.e., disciplined and focused sense-making, meaning-making, and decision-making, that is crucial to fulfilling the board’s duty of foresight.
2. Adaptation as renewal. The second stewardship imperative is for fit-for-purpose boards to pursue adaptation as a continuous process of individual, collective, and organizational renewal. Any sense of anxiety that current association directors/officers may experience regarding the consequences of the polycrisis need not result in a debilitating sense of individual vulnerability. By choosing the duty of foresight and prioritizing sustained adaptation as an approach for renewing their associations for the future, fit-for-purpose boards can discard our community’s harmful orthodox beliefs around relevance, nurture their collective sense of responsibility, and mitigate anxiety and vulnerability.
3. Anticipation as resilience. The third and final stewardship imperative is for fit-for-purpose boards to develop a consistent and robust capacity for anticipation to build more resilient organizations for the long term. To create resilience through anticipation, however, requires thinking and acting beyond the association community’s orthodox belief that foresight is only an occasional exercise with the sole purpose of informing strategy. Fit-for-purpose boards recognize that a consistent practice of foresight, underpinned by the commitment established in the board’s duty of foresight, will help shape every consequential decision they will confront for the rest of this decade and beyond.

It Is Time

With fewer than 2,000 days remaining in this decade, it is now time for association boards to rise to the occasion and meet the most vital expectations of their unknown successors, something they can begin to do by making the choice to care more about the future well-being of those successors than the impact of today’s decisions on those presently in board service. For every association, The Age of Polycrisis demands reinvigorated unity of purpose, strong solidarity in action, and an unswerving commitment to the future as personified by a fit-for-purpose board that brings intention to its duty of foresight.

AUTHOR’S ATTESTATION: This article was written entirely by Jeff De Cagna, a human author, without using generative AI.