In June 2017, BPS Council convened in Charlottesville, VA, home of then-BPS-President Lukas Tamm, to create the Society’s first formal strategic plan. Sharing Knowledge in and about Biophysics, Fostering a Global Community, Supporting the Next Generation, and Advocating for Biophysics emerged as the strategic priorities. Scientific excellence; integrity and transparency; diversity, equity, and inclusion; and community building were the agreed upon values. That plan has been the guiding document for the majority of BPS activities for the past five years.
While these priorities and values still resonate strongly for the Society, it is time to revisit, reassess, and re-envision the future for biophysics and BPS. To that end, we began a pre-strategic-planning process with a kick-off during New Council at the Annual Meeting in San Francisco in February. Shortly thereafter, we launched an all-member survey to get feedback on your priorities, levels of engagement, how you value the various programs and services provided by BPS, etc. We also surveyed Council, staff, and those who did not renew their membership for 2022. Three virtual focus groups were conducted in April and May enabling a deep dive into member priorities and anticipated trends in biophysics over the next few years.
That feedback, along with a S.W.O.T. (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) and competitive analysis, informed the participants as a part of our second formal strategic planning session held during Spring Council in early June. Council and several senior staff gathered at the University of Madison–Wisconsin, BPS President Gail Robertson’s home institution, for two days of thought-provoking, challenging, and inspiring discussions.
One of our first activities was to revisit the BPS mission and vision statements that were created in 2017. A mission statement is meant to describe an organization’s overall purpose and intent, while the vision statement is forward looking, inspirational, and aspirational, as to what we want to achieve. We felt that the existing statements needed some modifications to better express the purpose and aspirations of the organization in 2022 and beyond. Although not quite finalized, we look forward to sharing these with you in the coming months.
Another exercise empowered Council to take stock of all that had been accomplished in support of the original plan: the initiation of the Ambassador Program, the introduction of Student Chapters, the launch of our gold open access journal Biophysical Reports, and the development of BPS Conferences, to name a few. While we are proud of the successes, we recognize that there is always more to do in support of our original strategic goals.
After establishing a solid understanding of BPS’s current state, we envisioned what biophysics and BPS could and would look like in 2030. We imagined biophysics as more interdisciplinary and integrated. We anticipated artificial intelligence and machine learning will have significant impacts on biophysics (all science!). We envisioned information dissemination as more accessible, open, and transparent. Our thoughts about the future of our field were numerous and exciting! In terms of BPS in 2030, we brainstormed more than 50 ideas, including challenges and opportunities for what the Society will look like and how we’ll be supporting members into the future.
From here, we began to design our path to that defined future and considered what we could realistically achieve in the next few years, thinking about what outcomes we want to achieve and how we would measure success. A good strategic plan should cover a maximum of three to five years and should be reviewed annually so that, as things change, we can change too, and reprioritize or revise as needed.
We accomplished a lot in Madison, but there is still work to be done. Our strategic planning consultant, Elisa Pratt, is synthesizing everything we did during those 10.5 hours of strategic discussion and will be working with the Council and senior staff to review and reconcile a final draft that encapsulates our potential, our priorities, and our plan forward. It will include performance measures, metrics, and milestones. Staff will then be tasked with extrapolating the tactics necessary to achieve our objectives by way of an implementation matrix to guide future work of staff, committees, and other volunteers.
Our goal is to have this new strategic plan ready for Council to approve this fall, and we look forward to sharing it with all of you as we look forward to the next several years and leading biophysics and the Biophysical Society into the future.