Guidance

Seven Questions: sample write-up of interview

Published 29 August 2024

Interview from 2011 with the Chair of a Professional Services Association regarding the future of the organisation.

If you could speak to someone from 2025 who could tell you about the Association and what it is doing, what would you ask?

• How is it funded? Does it receive money from the EU?
• Is there free mobility of [profession] around the EU?
• Are the members active? How do they promote the Association internally and to others? Has [professional] education been developed and qualified?

What is your vision for the Association?

• My vision is that the Association works across the industry to develop a shared strategy for change and to develop the education and training resources it will need. I’d like to see lots of activities and drive – both from individual members and organisation members.
• I’d also like to see fewer talking shops and less documentation being produced.
• This is not only important from a professional practice point of view. There’s going to be a lot of calls from regulators across the EU for cost-benefit evidence and for increased focus on quality of service. I want the Association to be an acknowledged leader in practice and partnership.

What are the consequences for the Association if your vision is not realised?

• It may slowly get obsolete. We may see a drop in the number of members if they perceive we are irrelevant and not delivering for them.

What needs to change (membership, relationships, structure, for example) to make your vision a reality?

• We need to have a strategy for the Association itself and for how we can lead change across the profession. We need a strategy for helping both individual members and organisation members and to support the network at a global level.
• We urgently need to address our information gathering and how we translate it into knowledge and better practice. One way is to systematise evidence-based practice. We need to gather and manage evidence urgently – our customers are already several steps ahead of us in their practice and they are noticing that we’re lagging behind.
• We need to engage the individual members. They don’t see the broad agenda and we have to help them engage with it and drive practice forwards.

Looking back, are there particular lessons – successes, failures – from the last 10 years that we can learn from?

• Our annual conferences always seem successful, but we should do an evaluation to see how they actually make a difference to working practice.
• We could learn a lot more if we followed up on the site visits to see what has actually happened with regards to quality improvement.
• We have to be better at showing the value in what we do.
• We need to support networking and the promotion of the Association.

What needs to be done now to make sure your vision is realised? This is a challenging question.

• We have to work on different levels and learn from experience to make sure [our practice] improves [customer experience]. How can we evaluate the sustained impact of [practice] on behalf of our customer base?
• Research has highlighted new ideas about [practice] that can help us think about what we do.
• Some [members of the profession] are still old-fashioned in the way they deliver services and a challenge for us is to develop a stronger customer-centred approach across all our membership.
• We need to continue to work with the EU so that they can see the benefits of the work we are doing. However, we also need to be open to and learn from good practice globally.
• We need tools to encourage members to take responsibility for practice. We need to share good practice more – I’m not sure we have a good enough strategy on sharing.

If you had the power to make anything happen, is there anything else you would do?

• I would like a physical centre where all members could be welcome and could come for advice on strategic action planning, for networking, for learning evidence-based practice and where we promote quality and lifelong learning.
• I would like to have very direct contact with governments and legislators – and be given the chance to be a part of strategic decision-making.

Read other Futures Toolkit resources.