The Association Renewal Blog

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.

On Growth and Strategy

Scott Briscoe has an outstanding post on the Acronym blog about growth. Since the current tagline of Association Renewal LLC is “Rebuilding associations for growth,” I thought I should respond! Scott makes this point early on:

One of the questions I want to explore is: why is growth so important? Why does your budget have to grow? Why does your membership need to grow?

That first question doesn’t belong with the other two. The first one is bigger, and not really about measurement (like the other two are). Growth is important, because the opposite is atrophy. Living things grow—not necessarily in size all the time, but they grow, develop, change, evolve. If they don’t, then they die, or at least start to die. Associations, like any organization, are living systems, so they need growth in that sense, and they need it all the time. This is the essence of strategy: how are we going to grow/succeed? Growth (in this big picture sense) is extremely important.

Budget and membership number growth is another story. I agree with Scott that they aren’t ends in themselves. I suppose it’s obvious why we focus on them. In general, growing memberships are associated with growing budgets, and growing budgets, in general, give you more resources to do stuff. This would give you more reach, power, impact, etc.

So it certainly makes sense that we focus on these numbers. But Scott’s point is that there are untested assumptions here. How do you KNOW you are really making a difference with those extra dollars or extra members? From his post:

The distinction is this: I think too many associations get caught up in designing products and services for the purpose of attracting people. It would be better to design those products and services so that they provide meaningful experiences for people. It's a subtle difference, but I think an important one. And pretty much by design, planning and budgeting guarantee the former approach, because inevitably the goals include revenue growth--more people joining, more people buying a book, more people certifying—these are the things we measure.

This is precisely the point we have been trying to make about the dangers of strategic planning. The work of strategy and the work of planning are two different animals. If you try to “fuse” them together (like Strategic Planning does), you invariably end up with the problems Scott is talking about. Yes, your operational planning and measurement need to connect to strategy, but they should connect through feedback and learning, not through a linear strategic plan document. If you connect them in a “fused” way, you invariably end up weakening your strategy (Our strategy is to grow by 3% this year). You take your eyes off of the ball. You stop talking about what will REALLY drive the growth and success of your enterprise. You essentially STOP doing the actual work of strategy.

If you want growth, you need to do the real work of strategy. And, as Scott points out, by its very design, “strategic planning” makes it harder to get there.

This is why we so strongly urge more discipline about the language we use when doing this work. So many people tell us, “It doesn’t matter what you call it. You can still call it strategic planning, you just have to make sure the plan is more flexible, updated more often, involves more people…”

No. It really does matter what you call it, because it starts to set a pattern in people’s brains. When you use certain language, certain behaviors fall into place without you necessarily realizing it. You don’t really see how the planning focus takes your attention away from the work of strategy—until it’s too late.

In Scott’s example, he says don’t measure the number of people you attract, measure whether your products are meaningful to them. Okay, but why? How does providing that meaning generate success for the organization? If you don’t have the answer to that question, then you haven’t done your strategy work! And too many associations haven’t. They don’t have a clear picture of what drives success. This is something that is below your mission, but above your program details. It is that missing “middle level” of thinking that I referred to in the Always Done It That Way book.

If you were clear on what drives organizational growth and success, then you would know WHY providing meaningful experience to members is so important. And of course you would design your products around that—because it works to your strategy! And you would learn how to measure that. You might also have other sets of measurements for tracking operational progress, but you would never lose sight of the strategy, nor would you stop learning from what you are doing. Strategy should drive your planning. Strategy should drive your measurement. Strategy should drive your learning. Strategy should drive your growth. And since we started doing “strategic planning” it has become harder to do this.

Tom Peters just gets it

Check out these two posts from Tom, written in the last two days:

The Right Plan Is to Have No Plan

First There Was The Word.  And The Word Was "Non-linear."

Tom's money quote for today's post, taken from Henry Mintzberg's The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning :  "Strategic plans work wonderfully ... when you don't need them, when tomorrow unfolds as a natural extension of today. They are useless, or even detrimental, when you do need them—in discontinuous times."

Amen.

We Have Always Done It That Way: The Sequel

Okay, we’re not actually doing a sequel. That would be the “we’ve always done it that way” approach, if you ask me. But we knew going into this project that there were more than 101 things about associations that needed to change. So we can’t help but write a few more.

Once again, we’re writing them on the always done it that way blog. We figure we can get another 25 up there before this year’s ASAE & The Center annual meeting in Chicago. We’re planning on putting the 25 new ones together in an ebook that we give away for free.

So I know the WHADITW blog hasn’t been very active since we published the book, but we’re starting to put the new posts up, so check it out. I’ve got two up there already, and Jeff has one. Note: yes, David, Amy, and Mickie, consider yourselves nudged.

Why do associations still embrace strategic planning? (COMMENT THREAD)

This is an open comment thread on a fundamental question:  why do associations still embrace strategic planning? 

Is the profound disconnect between strategic planning's flawed assumptions and the world in which associations operate today unclear?

Has it escaped our attention that few, if any, associations have achieved breakthrough success as a consequence of their strategic planning work?

Why are some leaders still committed to defending an approach that so many find ordinary at best, and painfully frustrating and useless at worst? 

Please share your insights and help us shed some light on this critical issue for our community.

Simplicity and Complexity

Jeff and I are big fans of simplicity. Simplicity is a critical component of the model for strategic capacity that we are working on right now (and Jeff had an article on the topic in Associations Now this year).

We agree with Oliver Wendell Holmes’ notion of “simplicity on the other side of complexity.” On “this side” of complexity (before really exploring the complexity of a subject), you have the overly simple. Oversimplified doesn’t help us. It distracts and misleads us. On the “other side” of complexity you have the elegantly simple. Distilled. Clear. Powerful.

We need to be able to tell the difference between the overly simple and the elegantly simple and have the discipline to see our thinking all the way through to the elegant side.

In that context, there is an article in MIT’s Sloan Management Review by Lawrence Stybel and Maryanne Peabody that talks about “stealth mandates” in organizations. The main point of their article is that you’re doomed if the leader is delivering one message about direction but the organization is beneath the surface operating under a different set of assumptions and directions. Hard to argue with that, actually.

But at the beginning of the article, the authors make this point:

Generally speaking, leadership mandates fall into one of three major categories; continuity, good to great, and turnaround. Continuity means business as usual: carrying on policies, procedures and strategies. A typical example is the interim CEO, selected to maintain the status quo until a permanent CEO is found. Good to great refers to Jim Collins’ bestselling book of the same name. A good-to-great mandate is essentially this: We’ve been doing fine, but we can—and need to—do even better. Turnaround means dramatic changes are necessary: no business process, job or strategy is sacred.

So is this the elegantly simple? Does this really capture (at a high level) the basic strategic options? And Jeff, I’m particularly curious about your reaction: should “continuity” really be on the list?

Three reasons why strategic planning is killing us

Let me follow up on Jamie's post from Monday, with a few reasons why I believe strategic planning is killing our organizations, and doing serious damage to our community in the process:

1. It induces us to believe that the form and process of planning are more important than the content of strategy.

One of my great frustrations with strategic planning is how much time is involved in laying out very elaborate processes to create more flexible and adaptable plans, without devoting anywhere near as much attention to deep strategic thought around the content of those documents, and whether they embrace bold and intelligent choices backed by appropriate investments.  The problem for knowledge-creating, synthesizing and brokering enterprises such as associations is that today, strategy is no longer simply the means by which we manage and measure disparate organizational activities.  In the hypercompetitive, Web-enabled world, strategy is about something truly non-trivial:  the ability to leverage the full range of available and accessible resources and relationships to create new and distinctive value for members and customers.  So while process does matter, it is what our strategy proposes to achieve and what we can learn from it that will make the critical difference for our organizations in the long run.

2. It does not encourage us to carefully examine the sustainability of current business models. 

It is a rare strategic plan that actually codifies the elements of a sustainable association business model for the future.  In fact, I don't think I've ever seen such a document!  Instead, we use strategic planning to dutifully go about the business of developing goals, objectives, strategies and tactics without stepping back and asking difficult questions, such as when we will exhaust our current strategy and business model, what will replace it and what capabilities will we require in order to make that shift and how will we develop them?  Strategic planning values continuity over creativity, hindsight over foresight and the ordinary over the radical.  It is small wonder, then, that so few strategic plans actually stretch organizations in our community to reach their full potential.

3.  It does not challenge leaders to accept personal responsibility for creating organizations of the future

Right now, I suspect that many people under the age of 35 (and certainly under the age of 30) view associations as organizations better suited to meeting the needs of their parents' or grandparents' generations than their own.  Among many people, young and old alike, associations enjoy a reputation for being rigid, highly centralized bureaucracies with a deeper commitment to defending the past and preserving the status quo than to creating the future.  Strategic planning doesn't help the situation.  Indeed, it exacerbates it by virtually eliminating the possibility of intelligent risk taking and genuine innovation, in favor of "doing what we've always done, because that's what the members want!"  Sadly, too many senior volunteer leaders buy in to this way of thinking, and operate unapologetically yet myopically as obstacles to meaningful progress.  Strategic planning offers nothing to either incent or require such leaders to accept personal responsibility for creating organizations that will thrive in a new world already in its early stages of formation.

Associations must break free of strategic planning's death grip on our community.  We need a new approach to the work of strategy and, as Jamie pointed out in his post, we are working on one that we look forward to sharing here in the near future.

Simplicity and Systemic Change

One of the most consistently inspirational authors I’ve read is Peter Senge (if you haven’t read the classic, The Fifth Discipline, by now, you really should). He has an article in the MIT Sloan Management Review that is no exception. It is an article titled “Collaborating for Systemic Change,” and it looks at the challenges involved when many different organizations or stakeholders need to collaborate in order to change something really big (like a move towards sustainability in business).

He found that in order to achieve “systemic change,” the stakeholders needed to engage in three different types of work:

• Conceptual
• Relational, and
• Action driven

These three together built a healthy “learning ecology” for systemic change. I like this for a couple of reasons. First, because it is simple. I just read of a leadership framework that Senge and others developed that is also simple, and I think simplicity is critical these days (read about it on my other blog). I also like it because it resonates with the work Jeff and I have been doing around strategy (strategic thinking, strategic conversations, and strategic action).

Senge had two lessons that he drew from conceptual work that he and others were doing on sustainability. First, build community through thinking together and sharing.

When faced with difficult conceptual tasks, it is faster and easier to leave the work to small groups of experts or to outsource it to consultants or academics. But doing so bypasses the collective intelligence embedded in diverse organizations and industries and can result in output for which there is neither deep understanding nor commitment.

This is also something we confront in our strategy work. Clients often want to pare down the group that does the critical strategic thinking, and Jeff and I are pushing for expanding it. It feels more messy, but you need that understanding and commitment for the strategy to be effective.

The second lesson was to achieve simplicity without reduction.

Clarity must not come at the expense of oversimplification and trivialization of complex issues. Conceptual working groups can sometimes produce rousing action agendas that include little penetrating insight; similarly, turgid analyses of complex issues can leave people better informed, but no more able to take action.

Simplicity without reduction is a critical concept, particularly in the work of strategy. Jeff and are pleased with the strategy work we’ve been doing, but we don’t think we have been able to simplify it enough, and that is what we are working on. It is so critical to achieve BOTH the insight and the actionability. Jeff just wrote an article about simplicity in Associations Now, but look for more from us that integrates that concept into the work of strategy.

Do Great Ideas Stick?

When I posted last week about Chip and Dan Heath's brief piece in Harvard Business Review, I wasn't aware that I would get a chance to meet them! Okay, one of them, at least. Dan Heath is speaking at ASAE & The Center's Great Ideas conference in January. I have a session at Great Ideas, as does Jeff (actually he has two: an innovation boot camp before the conference, as well as a session during), so we will be there to hear the keynote speech by Dan (and maybe get a book signed).

Continuing to make the case

As Jamie and I continue to make our case against strategic planning, please check out this post I made to the Principled Innovation Blog today.  It is Part II of the three-part series I am writing on that blog about strategy and innovation.  Part I can be found here.  Part III will be up before Christmas.