The Empowered Association

On my other blog I linked to Maddie Grant’s great quote about a strategic plan perhaps getting in the way of thinking and acting strategically. I said I would write more about it here. Really what I want to write about is some thinking I have been doing about the whole "strategic planning is dead" debate. I've been frustrated with it for some time now, even though I've been an active proponent of "dead!" Jeff and I have been trying to get our thoughts down on paper about it—beyond the Strategic Capacity article that we wrote two years ago. We're making progress, but it hasn't completely come together yet.

I am now thinking that perhaps the whole dead/alive debate is more part of the problem than the solution. The following is a brief piece I wrote as part of the book that Jeff and I are working on. As such, it's not written in typical blog style. It's also longer than most blog posts, so you may have to click through to read the whole thing.

The association community has been actively debating the value of strategic planning over the last few years. Although it is still heralded as a best practice among many association executives, it has also been mocked on a regular basis at the major association conferences, and there are many (including the two of us) who have pronounced strategic planning dead. This defiant proclamation, however, only spurred the creation of "new and improved" strategic planning processes with shorter plan documents, more frequent revisions, and broader stakeholder participation, among other improvements. In 2005, we advocated abandoning strategic planning in favor of building capacity for improved strategic thinking, strategic conversations, and strategic action. The concept garnered some interest back then, but when we make that argument today, conventional wisdom responds with "But that is what we do in our strategic planning."

We now realize that we made a mistake. When we started engaging in a conversation about strategy in the association community, we centered the discussion on whether or not to use strategic planning. We saw (and still see) fatal flaws in strategic planning processes, so we set out to explore alternatives—both through ongoing conversations in the association community and through strategy consulting projects with association clients. We went into our work assuming that we would be able to demonstrate a viable alternative to strategic planning. What we discovered, however, was something different, and it really isn't about strategic planning. We discovered what it takes to create a truly empowered association.

That is what we should have been debating all along—making associations more powerful. This goes beyond whether or not you use strategic planning, or even how you design your strategy process. Both strategy questions and process questions are relevant, but they are not central. Through our work we discovered the more central question:

How do you build an organization that has the power to continuously create new value within a changing environment?

That is the simplest expression of the power we are talking about in the empowered association. Being able to continuously create new value within a changing environment will drive the success of any association. While this may seem somewhat obvious, it is still unfortunately rare in the association community. As we discovered when we started engaging in this debate, most associations focus on the process. They end up choosing a strategy making process that they believe will enable them to adapt to their changing environment. Unfortunately, the strategy making process does not encapsulate the organization’s power to create value. New strategy processes might make incremental improvements, but they rarely enable the association to truly reach its potential.

The process question becomes completely transformed, however, when you look more carefully at how to build a more empowered organization. Empowered organizations certainly understand strategy, but the power extends far beyond process. It reaches into structure, behavior and culture—it can even have you rethinking your job descriptions. It is about clarity and discipline. It is about your entry-level worker, your Board leader, and everyone in between. Debating the merits of strategic planning has distracted us from a fuller exploration of the power that drives associations' success.

So we are changing the conversation. Put aside the questions you have about your strategy process and focus instead on why your association lacks power. Here are some questions to get you started:

At what level in your organization does creative thinking about the future break down? How deeply does (fill in the blank here: board, staff, volunteers, committees, senior management team…) understand the true drivers of success for your association? How do you balance operational details and strategic direction? Are your Board meetings truly worth the time, effort and expense? What blinders does your organizational culture place on your people? How engaged are your staff? How engaged are your members? Why? Can everyone—from memory—tell you what the association's priorities are? Why can't your staff react to major shifts in your industry? Do your meetings people and your government relations people talk to each other? What did you learn from your activities last year? How do your entry-level staff lead the organization? What kind of experiments have you run in the last year?

These are just some of the questions that will reveal how powerful your association is—or isn't. And if you answer these questions and realize you need to make your association more powerful, I guarantee that there is not a strategic planning process on the face of the earth that will turn things around. Don't ignore strategy, of course. Those questions clearly illustrate the importance of the way you do the work of strategy, but if you really want to change things—if you want an empowered association—you need a different framework. You need an approach that will allow you to change ALL of the things that will generate more power, not just your annual strategy process.

The book Jeff and I are writing will provide that framework.

What do you think?

Comments

[matsonian]

Strategic planning is not dead... just how strategic planning is conducted, implemented and defined. In this day and age of truncated business plans and fast company strategic planning, non-profits and associations should embrace the success of these methodologies. By using these methods, non-profits and associations can better manage change and embrace new concepts and new dynamics for success. Programs like QuickPlanner Plus were designed to develop this new type of strategic plans - plans that do not require months of development, and are truly living documents.