The Future of Professional Associations

I’m looking forward to talking with the American Association of Law Librarians next week at their Future Summit. They are doing what most associations should probably doing about now — looking at the forces impacting the profession and members they support, and the forces impacting professional associations in general. It is hard to imagine a situation where professional associations will escape “unscathed” in the next decade or so. As is typical of exploring the future, the situation provides both threat and opportunity. Our mantra as futurists is that the sooner you explore, the better the odds that you successfully deal with the threats and take advantage of the opportunities. The longer you wait, the less leverage you have.

The approach I’m taking with the talk is to look first at some large scale social and technological changes (especially communications). Fortunately, my work on changing values in ConsumerShift gives me a model for looking at change in the social landscape. And I’ve worked on lots of projects exploring changes in communications technologies, a popular topic among clients over the last decade. Along the way, we’ll identify implications for their professional association.

Next we’ll look at changes in the profession and how this will impact the professional association. As noted earlier, in most cases there will be threats and opportunities. It will typically involved professions that are looking to reduce costs (under pressure from their clients) and looking to off-load “non-essential” functions. This, I think, is where the opportunities may arise for professional associations. Can they find a way to take on some or all of the non-essential functions and deliver in a cost effective-way by leveraging across the profession? For example, one of my surprises in the “Dozen Surprises about the Future of Work” piece involves who will do training in the future. Employers are increasingly looking to off-load this burden. Can professional associations take on more of this (they already typically do some)? And so on.

Finally, we’ll look at key issues of the association itself, in particular, attracting, retaining, and developing leadership. Many associations are facing a familiar challenge: the “young” people aren’t as interested or interested at all. So, the association membership is aging. They recognize the challenge but need help in strategizing — there are no easy answers, but that is what strategy is all about–dealing with the challenging questions.

So, I applaud AALL for recognizing the challenges in front of them and asking me to kick off their strategy session. Perhaps other associations will follow their example? Andy Hines