"Co-Development" and Strategic Capacity

I was finally able to read Ana Caraveli’s article in the Journal of Association Leadership. It is a FABULOUS article, and of course I love it because it challenges some of the traditional “givens” in the association field.

And given my recent complaint on my own blog about the lack of challenges to the Seven Measures report, I was glad to see ASAE & The Center publish this article directly following the article about Seven Measures in this issue of the Journal. Several of Caraveli’s points pose direct challenges to Seven Measures.

And not challenges in the “I’m right and you’re wrong” sense. The points she makes challenge by pushing deeper and trying to uncover the next level of refinement to what Seven Measures is saying.

For example, one of the seven measures is “data driven strategies.” The basic point is that you need to do research and gather data about member wants and needs and feed that information into your strategy. That’s fine, but as I said when the report was first released, I think it’s too blunt a message. When they provide a quote from a remarkable association versus one from the comparison group, the remarkable one says:

We ask a lot of questions, through interactions with our members and staff and through research and surveys. That’s how we learn more about our members.

The comparison group says:

No, we don’t do any formal scanning or research.

So that’s it? You have to do research? Yes, but I don’t think that’s enough. Caraveli seems to agree. She argues that traditional methods of research are inadequate. I think this is moving to the next level:

This is not to suggest that more formal mechanisms for customer assessment are not important. But organizations that rely solely on formal mechanisms and dismiss knowledge manifested informally—in the nuances of conversations or through informal interactions—miss the most significant opportunities for gaining in-depth knowledge. It is in behavior, nuances of communications, questions asked rather than answered that one can fathom motivations or extract needs that are not yet fully articulated.

The Seven Measures paradigm is not considering needs that are not yet fully articulated. It seems to reflect a more mechanistic world view: gather data (you ask, they answer), feed the answers into your strategic planning process, make the right decisions, implement them, and then repeat. Caraveli is articulating a more sophisticated, systemic approach.

She talks about co-development. In an ongoing relationship, you and the member learn together and are constantly asking and answering questions together, and out of that you actually create programs together.

Everything she says fits nicely with our approach to strategic capacity. Strategy is not about the planning process, or even only about the statements of direction that result from the process. Strategy is a capacity, a strength, a collective ability to create a successful future for the organization. Caraveli’s co-development ideas represent an important way of building strategic capacity. It’s not just about being “remarkable” because you gather data. It’s about strengthening your capacity for excellence by building better relationships with your members and other stakeholders.

Comments

[Dennis D. McDonald in Alexandria, Virginia USA]

I have addressed this same article from a somewhat different perspective by emphasizing the adoption of social media and social networking by associations:
http://www.ddmcd.com/codevelopment.html