Connecting Past & Future: Strategic Foresight at Nashville Public Library
Over the past year, Humanities Tennessee’s Shared Futures Lab has focused on strategic foresight – the systematic process of scanning for changes on the margins before they become major forces in the mainstream – as a professional development tool for public humanities professionals throughout the state. In August 2024, we hosted three workshops with Elizabeth Merritt, founding director of the American Alliance of Museums’ Center for the Future of Museums, across Tennessee.
Humanities Tennessee’s intention for these workshops was to increase cultural organizations’ capacity to imagine the future, identify sources of hopes and anxieties, and acknowledge the future impact of current choices. Rebecca Price, a program coordinator in the Special Collections Division at the Nashville Public Library (NPL), attended the workshop in Nashville. After the training, she felt other NPL staff would benefit from a similar workshop and hosted Merritt for a library-specific training in March 2025.
Strategic Foresight Links the Past to the Future
Price, who began her career in the museum field, has long followed Merritt’s work and the ways foresight can be implemented in museums. In her current role at NPL’s Special Collections Division, Price works with two curated spaces – the Votes for Women and the Civil Rights Rooms – which draw on two historical moments that occurred in Nashville. She observes that history organizations, including the library, have a lot of conversations “about how we talk about the past in our present to shape our future.” For Price, strategic foresight “is that missing link from going to talking about the future, discussing the future, envisioning the future – to implementing the future” because it provides individuals with the tools to achieve their vision.
Implications 1 and backcasting 2 are two foresight skills Price believes will work well in the library’s programs because staff can pull from the resources and stories they steward as examples. She points to the civil rights campaign that was led by college students in Nashville as one instance of these tools in action. “[The students] spent two years preparing before they went in, and if you break down all of the tactics and strategies that they used, they were basically [using] implications and backcasting.” Similarly, the women who fought for the ratification of the 19th amendment were working toward their preferred future. Price sees an opportunity to use NPL’s Special Collections to explore how the same tactics and lessons used in the past can be applied by today’s visitors to shape the futures that they want.
Going Forward
As the library considers how to bring strategic foresight into its programming, Price believes foresight will be especially useful for their younger audiences since it is forward-thinking by default. She’s also observed that foresight tools – particularly scenario building3 – organically began appearing in their programming after the staff training. Additionally, NPL is committed to civic literacy, and foresight tools may help form a future-facing framework for their work in this area. As for Price, her vision for the future includes providing opportunities for high school students to learn and engage with foresight tools. In these ways and more, strategic foresight has a public-facing future at the Nashville Public Library.
- In implication exercises, participants imagine possible outcomes if observed signals of change – events and trends already happening that have the potential to cause widespread change – come to pass. ↩︎
- Backcasting is working backward from a desired future to “remember” the actions taken to arrive there. ↩︎
- Scenario building involves creating a story about an imagined future based on observed trends and potentially disruptive events ↩︎