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Today, Friday, and Saturday, I'm at the Digital Now conference, and I'll be posting thoughts from various sessions while I'm here.

First up is opening keynote Andrew Zolli, curator and executive director of Pop!Tech and a fellow at the National Geographic Society. More simply put, Zolli is a futurist.

Zolli shared the common qualities he sees in the world's most innovative leadership teams:

• They make the top (their executives) accountable.
• They make lots of small bets on future developments. (For the baseball-inclined, "They're winning the game on singles," Zolli says.)
• They invest in their employers who are closest to the customers, i.e. the bottom third of their organizations.
• They copy best practices sparingly. ("Best practices are outcomes, not inputs.")
• They take a "cognitive portfolio approach." (In plain English, they assemble a wide diversity of perspectives and thinking styles.)
• They scan for "weak signals." (Zolli says it's the slow changes in the world that have the biggest effects, not the fast ones.)
• They link up with unlikely partners.

Zolli named demographic changes, the rising power of networks, and mobile tech as the slow, powerful changes that we all must adapt to. Those are all deep topics for further discussion later, but the points Zolli mentions above about future-thinking organizations seem like a good checklist for any association board and staff leadership team to try to follow in order to give themselves the capacity to adapt and innovate.

For real-time updates from Digital Now, you can follow the conversation on Twitter via the #diginow hashtag.