Look Back to Look Forward - Special Campus-Wide Inquiry

PSU Futures Collaboratory

Spring 2021

Coordinated by Sheila Mullooly and Dr. Laura Nissen

Subcommittee Members: Raiza Dottin, Patrick Kelley, Sally Mudiamu,

Judith Ramaley, Candyce Reynolds, Rossitza Wooster, Mark Wubbold

Future PSU

The PSU Futures Collaboratory is a campus-wide effort to explore how futures thinking and frameworks can inform and broaden our collective sense of possibilities and methods of dealing with current eco-systemic challenges.

Part of this process is exploring how our history informs our change style, breadth of perceived options, and sense of timing regarding our evolution as a university.

This year, we undertook a project that involved exploring how we've "met the future" during our past. We've explored how we defined and addressed challenges. We've also explored how our most important developmental moments might inform some of our current and future challenges. This process is known as "looking back to look forward" and recognizes the power of history in shaping how we as a community are most likely to perceive and prepare for the future.

There is a lot to learn about how we might face challenges in the future - by learning about how we have faced challenges in the past. This effort was a project to look backwards to understand these institutional "habits" and patterns - where might they help us in the future? Where might they get in our way? Where are the most important places for us to take risks with new approaches that disrupt or complicate our old way of doing things? How do we help each other get there?

To do this, we explored our strategic plans of the past - and considered how they shaped or influenced the life of our university. Here's our plan from 2011-2014 and here's the most recent plan from 2016-2020. As historical artifacts...they reveal clues to our style, our priorities - what we focus on, as well as what we don't focus on.

We also sought out a variety of PSU community members to interview, as well as provided the questions to all members of the collaboratory. We asked:

1. What do you think are 1-2 of the most important developments in the history of PSU and why?

2. What do these developments reveal about the way PSU responds to a changing world?

3. What do you hope are PSU's most important evolutions from this era of a)Covid-19 and b) a

reckoning with racial justice? (Do you think they will persist/continue?)

4. What are PSU's most pressing future challenges?

5. How might our history inform how we'll meet those challenges?

6. If you’re new to PSU, what has most surprised you about the way PSU “works?”

7. What is a metaphor for the "state" of PSU right now? What is a metaphor for how you'd like PSU to be in 10 years? (Some organizational metaphors are organizations as families, organizations as a boat, organizations as a machine, organizations as a living biological organism...but there are INFINITE possibilities…)

8. Is there anything else you’d like to add?

We are currently preparing our findings from this project and will post them here later this spring. We believe it does inform some important ways to think about how our past informs our present and future - and what kinds of valuable insights may accelerate our efforts towards a future we want. We'd love to expand the dialogue that has arisen from this effort to campus-wide conversations - and create even more momentum for a shared and successful future.