The Association Renewal Blog

Active Waiting

Oxymorons are great, because they generally wake you up a bit. The contradiction initially strikes you as wrong, and requires you to think harder until you see the actual point of the phrase.

Donald Sull uses that in an article in the September Harvard Business Review that describes strategy as “active waiting.” In short, Sull argues that much of business success likes in reacting properly to a series of opportunities and threats, none of which can accurately be predicted, looking into the future. The really big opportunities and threats don’t happen very often, so the true work of building capacity to handle these “golden opportunities” or “sudden death threats” actually happens during times of relative calm.

His recommendations for more effective “active waiting” include “keeping the vision fuzzy and the priorities clear.” I particularly like this one. Here’s a quote:

Rather than hiring consultants or convening off-site meetings to wordsmith the perfect long-term vision, managers in unpredictable markets should concentrate on getting the short- and medium-term priorities right. A small set of clear operating, financial, or market priorities can align the organization. (p. 124).

If you put too much detail into your vision, it makes the same mistake as traditional strategic planning: it attempts to predict or control the future. I do think visions should represent clear choices, but they should allow for multiple paths to the same choice. The details go into the strategic concepts that will guide you over the next year and a half.

The generational opportunity #1

Jamie has been doing the heavy lifting on posting to this blog for the last couple of months, and I salute him for his efforts.  He certainly has done a great job, and I did a great job in picking a business partner!  ;>)  Seriously though, thanks Jamie for all of your work.

Today, I was moved to post something to our blog after I read an article in the Business section of The New York Times about how the hotel industry is trying to serve both the needs of Baby Boomer and Gen X travelers.  What's clear is that several hotel companies are trying to find the right combination of design, technology, amenities and cool factor to make their hotels attractive to a younger clientele while not completely alienating the very large cadre of Boomers who will continue to stay with them for the foreseeable future. 

One interesting point from the article:  a Marriott executive anticipates that Gen Xers are going to be the "majority of the business travel segment" by 2007. (BTW, this article puts the brackets around Gen X as 1965-1980, making our generation 58 million strong, but still 20 million fewer than the Boomers.)  What I found interesting on a personal level is that it is the first time I've ever seen Gen Xers presented as the dominant contributor to a given business segment.  I realize, of course, that this isn't the first time it's ever happened.  Still, articles such as this one typically focus on either the Boomers or Gen Y, and lightly gloss over those pesky and irrelevant Gen Xers.  I'm pleased to see that we have some economic power in the marketplace!

So here's a question for your association:  what are you doing to refurbish your organization for demographic shift?  If your answer is "we've created a young professionals (or emerging leaders) group," then you need a better answer.  You'll notice that the hotels didn't create a "Gen X club" for their younger travelers.  Instead they are trying to cater directly to the tastes of our generation, while remaining mindful of their long-time customers.  It's not easy for them strike the right balance and it won't be easy for you, but it is a huge opportunity, not to mention a necessary element of your association's evolution.  So, if I were you, I'd get started on it today.  We'll keep talking about it on the blog and we hope you'll join us in the conversation.

Continuous Adaptation

I promised to write about articles in the Journal of Association Leadership that I liked, so now I will deliver. The first article in the Summer 2005 issue is by Karl Albrecht, in which he suggests the association model needs some reinventing.

I like this article because it fundamentally challenges “the way we’ve always done it.” In the end, I don’t think Albrecht’s points are a profound “reinvention” of the model, but I think his premise of challenging the things that for years have been taken for granted is very healthy for the association community.

He points out, however, that reinventing a model is difficult when associations lack skill in creatively thinking about the future. Their only process for that, unfortunately, is “strategic planning.” Albrecht says:

For too many enterprises, the so-called strategic planning process is little more than an annual ritual that does little to shape the real future…. A number of association executives in our recent survey expressed the view that “strategic planning is dead” and that continuous adaptation is becoming their model of choice.

I agree, of course, that strategic planning is dead. Albrecht also uses the term that Jeff and I published in the May 2005 Executive Update article: strategic conversations, without which association employees, he argues, tend to operate as mere bystanders (and the leaders then treat them that way).

Albrecht doesn’t define, however, the “continuous adaptation” part, and that makes me a little nervous. I don’t think the alternatives are limited to a simple choice between (a) traditional, control-oriented strategic planning, or (b) a very flexible but direction-less strategy of “playing it by ear.” Taken to an extreme, “continuous adaptation” allows leaders to simply use immediately current information to make every decision. Whatever works now is what we do. I think this can be as dangerous as the traditional strategic planning path.

Hopefully he means something in between. Where associations make clear commitments to strategic principles that guide decision making, but they are also continuously adapting their implementation based on current information. It’s more of an integration of strategy and execution, rather than a choice between future focused and present focused.

Metrics Over Communication?

The summer issue of the Journal of Association Leadership has been out for some time now, and I’ve been meaning to comment on it. I love the Journal, so I like to bring people’s attention to it and the good stuff that is in there. And I’ll do that—in a later post—but first, there was an article in there that made me mad: the one on “metrics-based management.”

The basic thesis of the article is not terribly objectionable. It argues that management of an organization can be aided using quantitative measurement. If you want to move from your current state to a better state, you should identify things you can measure that will demonstrate progress.

Fine. Measure away! It’s better than just blindly assuming that whatever you’re doing is making things better. But at the beginning of the article, the author justifies metrics based management on the fact that “traditional” assessment methods of communication and observation are flawed. Measures, apparently, are not flawed, but any CEO that makes a decision based on what he or she observed or what was told to them through communication, is in trouble.

To illustrate her point, she tells a story of a misunderstanding between a CEO and some senior managers. In the story, what the CEO thought had happened (based on observation and communication) was not, in fact, what happened. Her conclusion is that observation and communication cannot be relied upon as decision-making tools. The only alternative is metrics based management. If you use quantitative measurement, apparently, the picture you get of reality is always accurate.

This is stunningly (and dangerously) simplistic. She literally concludes that you cannot trust what you see or what you are told. It is true, of course, that what you see or what you are told should not always be taken at face value. You may not have the whole picture. But that doesn’t mean you should abandon observation and communication! You should just do it better.

In fact, she is skating around a very important point: leaders in organizations sometimes lack skill in assessing what is going on in their organizations because they lack an understanding of the complexity of the situation and they lack communication skills. Her prescription, however, is to ignore that weakness and focus on metrics based management. I think managers are generally pretty GOOD at measuring things. So the solution of using metrics-based management could actually draw attention AWAY from their true weakness.

So by all means pay attention to what you are measuring in your organization. There are lots of “evidence-based” measures out there, so choose them wisely and intentionally. But don’t use that as an excuse to ignore possible improvements in the areas of observation and communication.