The Association Renewal Blog

Renewal and Community

Jeff and I attended the Association Forum of Chicagoland’s Annual meeting this week. It was a great one-day meeting, with the theme of Community. Jeff did a fabulous presentation on “the Social Architecture of Community,” and I was also impressed with the keynote speakers. Seth Kahan did one of them. He did a keynote at ASAE Minneapolis last year, and I’ve known him for some time. There was also a keynote by Robert Putnam, author of “Bowling Alone” and his more recent book, “Better Together.”

Putnam presented very interesting historical data that shows a clear trend in America (since 1965) away from activities that bring us together or create community. Fewer people join groups, there are fewer picnics, fewer dinner parties, etc. He said that America experienced a similar trend in the late 19th century and early 20th century, and reversed the trend by creating new organizations to help build community (like the Boys Club, for instance, and I think a large number of associations). What interested me the most, however, was an important point he made about these new organizations (that we now take for granted as a “standard” way to join in community): at the time, these new ideas seemed very odd to people.

They didn’t make sense. People knew that you built community by participating in quilting bees and the like (which were no longer working in an industrialized, more urban society). It took courage to stand out there ahead of the curve and advocate for a new way of meeting some universal needs. Putnam argues that we are in a similar situation. We need to identify some new models for connecting people, and this challenge hits the association community smack between the eyes.

The dominant association model seems very clearly rooted in the early industrial society. Who is willing to stand in distinction from the traditional model and offer some new ways for people to be and work together in your association? Who in this community has the courage to propose some ideas that many will initially see as odd? This is the only way to stay ahead of the curve. Can your organization handle that?

I feel like a lot of people love the thought of “staying ahead of the curve,” but they assume that doing so will yield adoration and praise. In fact, “praise” seems to be the key metric for determining whether or not what you are doing is right. That will likely ensure your obsolescence. Being “odd” does not guarantee success, of course, but organizationally you had better be doing something different to create space for such activities. It is a key piece, I think, of what Jeff and I are talking about in terms of “renewal” in associations.

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I recently discovered a new and useful "hack" that I thought would be cool to experiment with on our blog here.  It is called Bitty Browser and it launches a small browser window within a site's existing window so you can quickly take a look at links.  I have placed a button to launch Bitty Browser on the left side of the blog.  Use it anytime and you don't have to leave our site to view the links we post!  We'll also embed some Bitty Browsers into postings, as I did above.

Power of Design

The June 2005 cover story of Fast Company magazine is about the power of “design.” There are actually several different stories, all about design, one of which was written by Ideo CEO Tim Brown. Brown’s article is about design and strategy (!), so it was of obvious interest to me. Here are a couple of concepts from the article that struck me.

“Design thinking is inherently a prototyping process. Once you spot a promising idea, you built it” (p. 53). If you want to put out a new product or system or service, you need to “build” a model of it—at least a video or drawing that shows, often in a rough way, how this new thing will work. Brown argues that doing so, and discussing these models in a senior management team, actually develops the much needed leadership skill of intuition.

Brown also argues that the prototyping process inherently supports a continuous evaluation and refining of strategy. “This gives you a big jump start over abstract, word-based forms of strategy, in which the first time you get to test the strategy’s outcome is when you actually roll it out” (p. 54). The model gives you something to test and refine before you have invested too much time and energy in the actual implementation. In fact, it creates a storyline that allows you to test and refine all the time.

I like these points because they shine some light on what I see as some inherent flaws in traditional strategic planning. There is a big difference between planning and design. There doesn’t have to be, but they have evolved in different ways. Planning seems to be about using words to describe a set of “answers.” You have to write the “correct” plan that will lead your organization to success. With that pressure, you spend a lot of time on that plan, and a year or two later you see if you were right. Design, on the other hand, uses more of your brain to create a living story—a narrative that can guide you (and everyone else in your organization) into the real world of unpredictable changes and developments. The toughest part of working design into your organization, as Brown points out, is “breaking away from your habitual way of working and getting out into the world” (p. 54).