Using Scenario-Planning to Chart the Future
Over my last seven years at NAMAC I've observed how easy it is for individuals to get stuck in ground level, reactive behavior as they work heroically to keep their organizations afloat. Watching new generations of staff members grapple with the same challenges that stymied their forebears, I've become deeply interested in how to develop our field-wide mission to support and illuminate vital, yet noncommercial films while keeping our organizations financially strong, visible and connected to the revitalizing media reform efforts that are now cropping up.
To jump our field out of this repetitive groove, Jack Walsh, NAMAC's director of special projects, and I wanted to stretch our thinking about future opportunities and challenges. We felt the need for a project that could create a set of future "scenarios" which would embrace unpredictability as a fact-of-life. It also seemed the right time to explore how trends in the external environment - those parts of the social fabric that appear to touch us only indirectly, but in fact can have major, unforeseen consequences down the road - would impact the ecology of independent media over the next ten years.
We gathered our local colleagues from Bay Area Video Coalition (BAVC), Film Arts Foundation, Independent Television Service (ITVS), KQED-TV, and National Asian American Telecommunications Association (NAATA) to join NAMAC as the "Independent Initiative Project" consortium, a microcosmic lab of organizations, from producing facilities to local and national broadcasters, concentrated in the Bay Area but representative of the field at large.
Our project partner is Global Business Networks (GBN), a Bay Area-based firm that pioneered the development of scenario-creating tools which are intended to lead to strategic action. Our project team leader is Andrew Blau, a twenty-year veteran of independent media, who joined GBN as a staff facilitator in 2003.
Drawing from its worldwide network, GBN brings skilled business thinkers together with visionaries in the arts, sciences, industry, and academia to look at the issues emerging across a given field. They act as guides to articulate how knowledge in various areas -- social, cultural, technological, environmental, economic, and political -- from the "outside" can reveal a rich web of implications that we can act on to change and deepen the direction of our work within our field.
With this project, we are accelerating out of our low-pressure holding pattern and soaring to the "35,000-foot view." The aim is to tap into new insights, new stories, and new language in order to think about the forces that will impact the independent media field in the next ten years. As project consultant Lawrence Wilkinson told our consortium at the first planning workshop, "You are storytellers, and scenario-planning will create some ways to see better stories. The point will not be the stories themselves. The stories help us to see better futures, and plan better for these futures." It will be incredibly interesting to watch how these scenarios play out, and, even better, to discover how we can use this information to make changes in our day-to-day work.
How we get there will also be of interest to NAMAC members. As this report is being written, GBN is interviewing an ambitious range of thought-leaders and creative thinkers from outside our field and around the world, drawing out insights that may escape those of us on the inside.
The primary questions which serve to focus our inquiry are:
- Where will we find the next set of opportunities to energize and strengthen the independent media environment in the coming years?
- What are the cultural, social, and technical practices that will define independent media in the future?
- How will independent media practitioners be able to sustain a livelihood in this field given economic realities?
By early 2004 we will have developed a "scenario framework," which is a general matrix of "what if's." Onto this grid we will create four "plausible futures" within which independent media professionals will have to work. In a marathon two-day meeting that GBN facilitates, we will examine the implications of these plausible futures and try to understand how they might produce a significant impact on the work we will be doing.
Based on this work and their interviews, GBN will produce a report which analyzes the strategic issues facing the field, describes the scenarios we've created, and interprets their implications. Although the San Francisco organizations that make up our consortium serve as concentrated focusing agents, representing the goals and missions of the field in general, we expect at every phase of this process to articulate and reveal issues faced by the whole field, not just those specific to our region.
As the project nears completion in April 2004, each consortium organization will receive training in how to use GBN's scenario-planning tools in their own organizations, with the goal of figuring out how the implications we have developed will change our future work. At that point, NAMAC will be poised and ready to disseminate all our findings in the 2004 edition of A Closer Look, our annual case study publication. The report and related documents will also be posted on the NAMAC website and be available for members to customize for their own internal and presentational purposes.
In addition, we will be working with colleague organizations, such as Grantmakers in Film and Electronic Media (GFEM), AIVF, ITVS, and others to create a broader public launch of our findings and the implications they point towards.
How we can better participate in civil society? How we can better articulate our work and worth to the public? And how we can redefine the meaning of "independent media"? One of NAMAC's main strategic goals for 2004 is to create a well-documented, field-wide dialogue on these questions. This project is a pitch-perfect vehicle to get that long-term effort underway.
Helen De Michiel is the national co-director of NAMAC.
© 2003 National Alliance for Media Arts and Culture. All Rights Reserved.
