future99

Planning and Designing Legislatures of the Future

By:
Max K. Arinder
Executive Director
Jt. Legislative Cmte. on Performance Evaluation and Expenditure Review
Mississippi

Volume 5, Number 1 Summer 1999

ASLCS Home Page

Benjamin Franklin once said, "When you're finished changing, you're finished." This adage is as true for us today as it was in Franklin's day. Living on the brink of the twenty-first century, we are reminded of the power and uncertainty of change as we read the latest Y2K prognostications. But change does not just accompany the coming of a new millennium. As implied in Franklin's quote, change is a constant; and, the uncertainty of change is as real for our governmental institutions as it is for us as individuals. The approach of the year 2000 merely brings these facts into focus. As we reflect on the changes of the last thousand years, we can see the dramatic strides that have been made during that time. Even more dramatic is the rate at which change has occurred over the last hundred years. Proceeding at the current rate, the changes we may be facing in the next twenty-five years are truly mind-boggling.

Seizing this time when our focus is already on the future, Tom Tedcastle, the Staff Chair of the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL) and John Phelps, the Staff Vice Chair, used the 1998 annual meeting of NCSL to appoint a two-year task force to study the future of state legislatures and to report on what can be done to ensure that both legislative staff and the legislative institution itself will be prepared for the dramatic changes they are likely to face in the early decades of the twenty-first century.

An important concept underlying the task force's mandate is that the legislature, as an institution, must be proactive in approaching its future. As the world changes, individuals and institutions must be able to recognize quickly the driving forces behind change and to adapt to those pressures in reasoned, appropriate ways. Neither individuals nor legislatures should willingly be swept along by the course of human events, reacting to, but not planning for, the changes that are certain to come.

A second important concept driving the mandate is that a reasoned response to change can be made only in light of our core values. To do less is to risk losing ourselves and our institutions in the process of change. As Stephen R. Covey, author of The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, writes "People can't live with change if there's not a changeless core inside them. The key to the ability to change is a changeless sense of who you are, what you are about, and what you value." Regardless of political leaning or party affiliation, the institution of the legislature can only exist as an effective component of representative democracy if its members share a "changeless core" that tells what it is, what it is about, and what it values. Within this framework the legislature can flourish, effectively responding to the forces that require us to adapt our old ideas to the demands posed by change. Therefore, one of the important goals of the task force is to identify the core values of an effective legislature so that we can factor discussion of those values into any discussion of change.

As the task force quickly discovered, the idea of taking a proactive approach to the future poses an interesting problem. It requires us to "future gaze," and "future gazing" is inherently marked by uncertainty. How can a legislature be proactive regarding its future when it can never really know what the future will hold? In following the admonition to "Be Prepared" the Boy Scout who is packing for next week's camping trip can generally rely on knowledge gleaned from his and others' past experience. This is short term "future gazing." The preparation needs for camping are not likely to change in a week. However, if the scout is asked to prepare for a trip that will take place in the year 2025, his problems compound dramatically. He must use not only past experience, he must also learn as much as he can about future possibilities from knowledge on the horizon of experience and extrapolate that knowledge into his best guesses about future demands. Stated another way, his hope for a successful camping trip in 2025 lies in his ability to recognize the possibility and promise that accompany uncertain knowledge and to prepare actively for the range of possibility he is most likely to confront. This is the same problem faced by the NCSL task force on the future.

The solution is not really a new one. For as long as humankind has been sentient, we have dreamed of the future. Our place in history and our view of the world are possible because we stand on the shoulders of dreamers, those who saw the possibilities of the future and had the dedication and talent to turn those possibilities into reality. The great dreamers see possibility while it is over the horizon of reality or is a tiny glimmer that sparks a leap forward in thinking. Following this model of seeking horizon events or knowledge can allow us to react more quickly as the future reveals itself in the present. By anticipating the range of possible change, we can test our time-honored systems, traditions, and values against likely "futures," giving ourselves an opportunity for constructive change. Given the impossibility of knowing precisely how the future will play out, an acceptable strategy for change will be the one that plays out well across several possible futures suggested by horizon events.

With such thoughts in mind, the task force is looking for ways to make future analysis an ongoing part of legislative thinking, helping to ensure the strength and relevance of the legislative institution as the future unfolds. Later efforts may explore the potential of futures analysis in policy making, but finding ways to help legislatures to prepare themselves to cope in a rapidly changing world is a first step.

How, in practical terms, is the task force approaching this admittedly abstract task? Since appointment in July of 1998, the task force has met four times. None of the task force members is a "futurist" by training, but all are long term professional legislative staff, representing a broad spectrum of service to their legislatures. I serve as task force Chair and am Director of the Joint Legislative Committee on Performance Evaluation and Expenditure Review in Mississippi; the First Vice Chair is Steve Watson, Chief Deputy Director of the Legislative Counsel Bureau in Nevada; and the Second Vice Chair is Clare Cholik, Legislative Librarian of the Legislative Research Council in South Dakota. Task force members are Robert Erickson, Research Director of the Legislative Counsel Bureau in Nevada; Marcia Goodman, Director of Legislative Legal Services, Legislative Commissioner's Office in Connecticut; Bob McCurley, Director of the Alabama Law Institute in Alabama; Gary Olson, Director of the Senate Fiscal Agency in Michigan; Sandy Scharf, Director of the Legislative Computer Support Bureau in Iowa; Susan Schaar, Clerk of the Senate in Virginia; Robert Shapiro, Director of the Legislative Service Commission in Ohio; and serving as advisor to the group is Patrick Flahaven, Secretary of the Senate in Minnesota. Taking its diversity and years of experience with legislatures as a strong point, the task force's first undertaking was to identify its other strengths and weaknesses relative to the assignment. Through a structured analysis of its strengths and weaknesses, and a similar analysis of the opportunities and threats facing it, the task force mapped a strategy to prepare itself for the two-year study period.

Another early decision was to conduct a comprehensive review of significant events in the history of state legislatures over the last thirty years. The task force reasoned that a careful study of legislative history could provide insight into the forces that have influenced the face of the legislature in the past and will likely provide such impetus for change in the future. This effort was capably led by Steve Watson, assisted by Rich Jones and Brian Weberg of NCSL's Denver office. While Steve and his team were engaged in mapping our history, the task force was learning as much as possible about how to conduct futures research and was refining our strategies for the effort. This task included attending presentations by Dr. Clem Bezold of the Institute for Alternative Futures on the possible uses of futures research in government.

Steve presented his report to the task force at our January 1999 meeting. The results of that report will be refined for distribution and presented as a companion deliverable to our final report. Using the information compiled about our history, the task force identified those components of the legislature that have been most subject to change over time (e.g. process, facilities, technical and professional capacity, ethics, professionalism). This information will be of benefit when we suggest models for coping with change by suggesting the areas the model must address. From the study of history the task force also selected critical forecasting areas that need to be included in our search for horizon events. Perhaps not surprisingly, the areas we chose to monitor were the ones so often referred to in the futures literature: social, technological, economic, environmental, and political. Any future scenarios pertinent to the legislature will contain these components and will be sufficiently descriptive to allow for model building and developing ideas for enhancing the institution.

With the scanning/monitoring taxonomy decided, each task force member volunteered to take one of the five areas to scan for horizon events. These will eventually serve as the "fodder" for scenario development. By scanning the social, technological, economic, environmental and political environments, the task force felt it could systematically collect and organize the information in ways that could provide early warnings of change.

Bob McCurley and Marcia Goodman chose to concentrate their efforts on social factors such as demographic change, intergenerational change, job growth, and changes in education. Sandy Scharf and Steve Watson are bringing together the technological factors such as communication technology and equipment and software changes. Gary Olson chose to focus on economic factors, domestic and global, and the area of taxation. Bob Erickson is surveying environmental factors such as air, water, energy, and global change. Clare Cholik and Robert Shapiro are concentrating on political factors such as party politics and direct democracy. The forecasts that result from these explorations will become the task force's interpretation of how the future will likely present itself in these critical areas and will provide suggestions for writing scenarios about the future. Through scenarios we can imagine future possibilities on the basis of what we know, or at least on the basis of what we can forecast given our analysis of horizon events in the critical areas being monitored.

The scanning/monitoring phase will be an ongoing, evolving process, but our first reports were delivered at the April 1999 task force meeting. At that time we wanted to be able to take a step forward in our knowledge of key change factors and to begin forecasting the changes that are likely to have a direct effect on the service and staffing needs of legislatures. Most of the task force would agree that we accomplished that goal and that the futures abstracts presented at the April meeting provided an excellent foundation for beginning the forecasting process. We can now begin to crystallize our thoughts in various areas of concern and to begin communicating with each other about what we have learned from patterns and trends we have observed.

The next major hurdles of the task force are to expand our knowledge base and to begin developing scenarios. To be of greatest value, scenario development depends on the identification of a focal issue or decision. As stated by Lawrence Wilkinson, co-founder and managing director of Global Business Network, a think tank and strategic consultancy that has pioneered the use of scenario planning, "There are obviously an infinite number of stories about the future; our purpose is to tell those that matter." The proper way to do this is to agree on the central issue we want to address or the core decision we want to make. Sometimes the question is broad (What is the future of the legislature as a representative, democratic institution?); sometimes, it is specific (Should we introduce new staff operating procedures or skills into the legislative support environment?). These focal issues or decisions will be used to test the relevance of our stories as we go through the scenario-building process. The task force has decided to work with the following focal question: "What actions will be required to keep state legislatures relevant to the democratic process in the year 2025?" Keeping this question central to its work, the task force is exploring stories that contain implications for how legislative staffs and NCSL may evolve to best serve the legislature of 2025.

Using the methods and ideas suggested by Lawrence Wilkinson in his internet article "How to Build Scenarios," the task force is now beginning to use its newly acquired knowledge to understand the dynamics most likely to shape the future of legislatures and to identify the primary forces at work in the process. Our goal is to examine the forces that ordinarily work far beyond our daily concerns. It is these forces that will usually catch us unaware. From our study of driving forces we will begin singling out what Wilkinson calls the "predetermined" forces and the "critical" uncertainties most relevant to the future of the legislature. "Predetermined" forces are completely outside our control and will be a factor in any story we tell about the future (e.g. the number of U.S. high school students in the year 2010). A "critical" uncertainty is an uncertainty that is key to our focal issue. For instance, will direct democracy efforts continue to increase in popularity? Will improvements in technology make additional experiments in direct democracy inevitable? From this effort we want to better understand as many of the uncertain forces as we can and to clarify their relationships with each other. The most important ones will emerge in our stories of the future.

In order to tell stories that will be important to our focal question, the task force has decided to structure its first attempt at scenario building around three critical dimensions or axes that we have already identified. First is the status of direct democracy. The public's desire for direct versus representative democracy cuts to the most fundamental issues facing future legislatures: Will the press for direct democracy made possible by technology and the ascendance of the desire for the ultimate in democratic expression continue to prevail? Or will there be a resurgence of the socially rooted need for the restraining influence of representative government to protect the interests of a diverse society? The desire for promoting self interests versus the need to protect the interests of the society as a whole will never disappear, but which will be the prevailing influence in our culture?

A second axis of uncertainty is the increasing complexity of the legislative environment and the continually shifting balance between political self-interest and respect for the legislative institution. Expressed in its simplest form, the level of confidence of both the public and the legislative membership in the ability of the institution to effectively respond to the needs of a state will be critical to the future of the institution. This second axis reflects the importance of the uncertain character of the political arena: Will the diversity that marks the legislature doom it to an ancillary role in a fast paced political environment or will that diversity provide an anchor point for constructive, progressive change?

A third axis that the task force will factor into our thinking is potential changes in the demand for services. Will the trend of getting government out of the lives of its citizens prevail or will demand for government services increase as needs emerge?

These three axes of uncertainty provide a promising framework for exploring how changes in our social, technological, economic, environmental, and political environments will affect the legislature of the future. The task force will develop its stories of the future within this framework and those stories will provide the basis for discussions of possible responses to change.

Once the task force has decided what stories need to be told, what will be the next step? Borrowing heavily from Lawrence Wilkinson's ideas again, we will then look to those stories to give us the best insights into how the legislature and its staff will need to change to be prepared for the futures we have envisioned. Some of the suggested changes will make sense across many or all of the futures. Others will make sense only in one or two. Once we have identified those that work across many of the scenarios, we can focus on them as the basis for making viable plans for change. The power of scenario planning is that it helps us understand the uncertainties that lie before us and what they might mean to us. We hope that future reality will be somewhere within the realm of plausibility that we have identified. The promise of the exercise is that we will have looked at the possibilities and explored a range of implications for change. We will have prepared ourselves as best we can to face a future that no one can really know.

At upcoming meetings, the task force will continue the process of fact gathering and scenario development. At appropriate points, we will share our thinking with academics, legislative experts, and legislators to discuss their views on our efforts. Also central to this phase will be a discussion of the core values of the legislative institution and the role they play in constructive change, since neglect of these values may cause the legislature to lose its proper role in governing. This step will be an attempt at identifying those areas of legislative responsibility where radical change should be resisted or carefully tempered to preserve important principles of representative democracy. The result will be a separate deliverable - the task force's vision of the good legislature.

Beyond this point the future gets a little foggy... but ultimately we will present our future scenarios for review using the refined stories to seek consensus on models for change. The scenarios and proposed models for change may be developed into a presentation for legislative leadership; and if all agree it is appropriate, we will turn the process just completed into a handbook for use by interested legislatures or staffs who want to undertake their own study of the future. The final work product will be submitted to the Legislative Staff Coordinating Committee for endorsement prior to general distribution.

Editor's Note:
If you have comments or would like to share thoughts on the process of forecasting the legislature's future, please feel free to contact the author at Max.Arinder@peer.state.ms.us.

For more information about ASLCS, write or call:

Sally Kittredge
National Conference of State Legislatures
1560 Broadway, Suite 700
Denver, CO 80202
Phone: 303/364-7700
FAX: 303/863-8003
E-mail: sally.kittredge@ncsl.org