I’m an optimist. But seeing the glass half full doesn’t mean you’re not half out of water. When I traveled for my fraternity after undergrad (and before the days of cell phones), we were encouraged to get gas when the tank was half empty (or half full). Especially in the Desert Southwest, you never knew how far it was to the next gas station.

Foresight work, similarly, has its “half full” and “half empty” sides — I’ll come back to this in a bit — and is a key area of priority for me both in my daily work, and in my new role as chair of the I.C.E. Board of Directors. It is my pleasure to serve in this role as I.C.E. leverages insights from our foresight work and applies these new tools to help us navigate challenges and act upon opportunities. As chair, I’m looking forward to drawing on my deep interest in organizational strategy, future scenario planning and strategic thinking, all I’ve held since early in my career. I am a product of decades of association management, adult education (andragogy) and credentialing — all of which require informed decision making, taking calculated risks, a focus on user needs and starting with the end in mind.

Foresight Work: Half Full or Half Empty?

Over the last few years, I’ve been integrating I.C.E.’s Future of Credentialing and foresight work into my organization and our board discussions. During a conversation with a colleague last summer, I was reminded that an important part of this strategic work is considering opportunity costs (that of not taking action) and the risks that lie ahead for the organization. Some risks may be obvious, like an existing competitor in the market. Others may be less so, like a regulatory change that is unlikely to be approved but still a possibility. Still others may seemingly come from nowhere, like a new startup that targets your customers.

Back to “half full” or “half empty” — the “half empty” side of foresight work is a healthy focus on the threats related to plausible futures. While the work drives us toward understanding the possibilities and working to bring about our “preferred future,” we must consider the aspects of futures that we need to mitigate. For me, that’s the less exciting and not-so-happy side of the work. But as my mother would say: “Luck favors the prepared.” To ensure I spend appropriate time on this aspect of foresight work, I instituted a risk registry for our organization.

In project management and business settings, a risk register is a dynamic tool used to identify, analyze, track and manage potential threats that could affect objectives — detailing each risk's cause, probability, impact, owner and mitigation plan. Risk registers should be updated regularly to reflect evolving conditions and support informed decision-making. It’s another way to move your organization and board from being reactive (problem-solving) to being proactive (controlling risk).

Designing Your Own Risk Register

Getting started with something new is often hard. However, in this age of human-AI collaboration, I took to our internal Copilot for assistance. Given the reliance on public information for this environmental scanning activity, you could use ChatGPT or other generative AI tools without concern so long as you don’t include any sensitive internal information. Here are a few tips if taking this approach:

1. Start with a prompt to get a better prompt: I asked Copilot to, “Suggest a prompt to create a draft risk registry for a certification board in oncology nursing that considers a 3-5 year time horizon, charts key components of typical risk register tools, and is appropriate for use in guiding strategic discussions for organizational leadership.”
2. Refine and iterate prompts: Copilot delivered a detailed prompt with the following requirement groups — each including details that I could edit and refine for subsequent prompting:
   1. Incorporate typical components of a risk register
   2. Reflect trends and issues relevant to oncology nursing certification
   3. Align with nonprofit and certification‑sector risk management best practices
   4. Format the output as a usable tool for strategic leadership discussions
3. Create and gain input from users – I leveraged Copilot to create several versions of varying detail and format to discuss with my board. After agreeing on which format and level of detail was most appropriate for our purposes, we determined that the register should be updated and reviewed at least annually.

As these AI tools are prone to do, Copilot offered some additional tips on using the risk registry that are worth sharing:

1. Treat the registry as a living document and review semiannually at the board level. (So, we may have to rethink our commitment to an annual review!
2. Link each risk to strategic objectives, budget and KPIs; keep owners accountable
3. Calibrate risk appetite (what your organization will accept to innovate vs. what is intolerable).
4. Pair the document with an annual deep dive on three “red” risks and one “opportunity risk” (upside).

We will continue to use AI to quickly and comprehensively update our registry. Tweaking previous prompts (saved in a prompt library document) with new dates and other criteria will refine the outputs going forward. We are early in the process of using a risk registry as a core tool in our foresight work, but it already has provided increased awareness (by fueling thoughtful discussions and inquiry) and elevated our confidence in making future-based decisions (by giving us a matrix of topics, potential implications, priority for monitoring and possible mitigation strategies).

As a credentialing organization leader, my intention is to leverage the talents of my team and our community with the best technology solutions available to take ownership of our future. Foresight and strategic leadership require a focus on both the positive aspects of plausible futures (glass half full) and those risks we must work to mitigate along the way (glass half empty).

Thanks to I.C.E., we have a foundation of research, tools and colleagues to support us in leading our organizations and the profession. As I.C.E. Chair, I will work with my board colleagues, staff and all of you to take move forward, do the hard work and create our desired future.