The Association Renewal Blog

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.

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.

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.

Strategy is a commodity

In my last post here, I wrote, "strategy itself is in danger of being commoditized and strategic planning is already there."  Let me take that thought one step further:  the association community's overall thinking about and approach to strategy has been commoditized by an excessive reliance on traditional strategic planning.  Let me explain.

One definition of a commodity is "a mass-produced unspecialized product," and that is precisely the way that strategic planning is packaged and practiced in the association community today.  Many consultants offer strategic planning services and many associations avail themselves of those services.  But there is precious little distinction in the approaches that most associations and their advisors bring to the work of strategic planning, creating the deep-seated yet wholly inaccurate belief among many association leaders that there is only one way to pursue the work of strategy.  A complicating factor that reinforces this narrow perspective is the past strategic planning experiences brought to the table by volunteers.  Although there may be slight variations across the whole volunteer group, most board members and other senior volunteers are invested in the same basic set of activities as their associations' staff leaders.

There are myriad problems with adopting this kind of undifferentiated approach to strategy, and the most significant among them is the extraordinary difficulty it creates for associations that are trying to be different and innovate in an increasingly competitive, complex and uncertain environment.  But this emphasis on sameness in the work of association strategy should not come as a complete surprise since associations themselves are all about a focus on what makes individuals and organizations the same.  Unfortunately, the work of strategy does not benefit from this kind of convergent mindset. 

If associations are going to make real breakthroughs in creating new value for their members in the years ahead, they will need to abandon any assumption that the discipline of strategy is something that can be ordered up and delivered in a box in a matter of a few months at a discount.  Going forward, I believe three critical factors are going to be the driver of genuine strategic success for all associations:  creativity, simplicity and execution.  I will expand on these ideas in my next post.

Thanks to ASAE & The Center!

We want to offer our thanks to ASAE & The Center for mentioning our article on The Long Tail in their most recent newsletter.  The article, Associations in the Age of the Long Tail, appeared in the February 2006 issue of Associations Now.  We think it is quite timely for you to go back and read it, especially with Wired editor Chris Anderson's book on The Long Tail coming out next month.  I've been reading an advance copy of the book and I think it definitely should be included on the must-read list of every association executive interested in new business models for their organizations.   

Vendor Partnerships

I encourage everyone to check out Kevin Holland’s interesting post about association-vendor relationships. I liked his refreshingly honest and forthright opinions on a topic that the association community rarely tackles beyond the platitudes.

I’ll also add that the issue of “partnership” between vendor and client is apparently viewed very similarly from both sides of that fence. Kevin pointed out that he gets better results with a vendor when he can get the vendor excited about the project and really work WITH him on it as a partner. When he (as the association) simply signs the work order and pays the bills, he doesn’t get as good a product (as the vendor is pulled down the “path of least resistance” into producing more generic work).

From the vendor perspective, it can look remarkably similar. We insist on partnership, and only work with people who recognize the power of the work we do together and want to fully engage in the project (see our strategic principles for more on this). We come to agreement about all this with the association client in the beginning. But the “path of least resistance” can hit the client too. They have a ton on their plate, and the partnership is, in fact, hard work. Vendors may get pulled away by other clients, but clients get pulled away by other priorities. The bottom line is, both sides have to work hard for it to be a partnership, and they both need to learn (constantly) about how to support each other in staying in it and resisting the path of least resistance.

More on the strategic planning counter offensive

Jamie makes most of the case in response to those who argue that strategic planning is still a useful investment of association time and resources.  But I want to surface an even more fundamental disconnect that I believe is the central issue we must address if we're going to make any progress in this critical conversation.  Here it is in a nutshell:

Buy Low, Sell High

Jeff posted Association Renewal’s strategic principles. The first one—which was the first one that he and I realized would be a principle for our work together—is that we only work with leaders who “accept the need for renewal.” Said another way, we only work with people who realize that their organizations must engage in real change and renewal in order to be successful in the future. Change is not optional.

We recently got a little push back on this principle from a Board member of one of our clients who said, in effect, “But why would we change if we are currently very successful?” I understand that it seems counterintuitive to change a winning strategy, but think of it in terms of a stock market analogy. The inexperienced trader might panic when the market is tanking and sell, or they may get caught up in the exuberance of a hot market and buy, and intuitively that makes some sense: sell before it gets any worse and buy before it goes any higher. But remember the basic principle of making money in stocks: buy low and sell high. So when things are good (market is up, or “high”), you sell and get out, and when things are going down (low), you would take advantage of bargains and buy. I know this is an oversimplification of stock markets, but the principle is actually in effect (and it keeps the markets from fluctuating too wildly).

Back to associations: when your strategy is working the best, that’s when you have the resources, energy and attention to focus on renewal (sell high). The reason you start changing your winning strategy is that the alternative would be to wait until it becomes a losing strategy and then change it. But then you’re “selling low” by trying to modify your strategy at a time when resources are tight and internal frustration is high.

You don’t have to stop doing everything that makes you successful. But you do need to take time during your success have some critical conversations about what will make you successful in the future and start working towards that (and yes, that will involve some change).

Our principles...

Jamie and I recently spent some quality time reflecting on the core strategic principles of our joint venture, Association Renewal LLC.  The work of surfacing strategic principles is something we challenge our clients to do, and we would not be credible if we didn't challenge ourselves to do the same.  By our definition, principles are statements of justified belief that reflect the necessary conditions for organizational success.  We are still working on the rationales but we wanted to share the principles with you, in the hope you will give us some feedback on the intentions they reflect.

Association Renewal LLC Strategic Principles

●We partner only with clients who accept the need for renewal.
●We drive renewal through authenticity in both thinking and acting.
●We pursue renewal as a holistic, interdisciplinary and collaborative process.
●We work to foster renewal throughout the association community.
●We challenge our clients to take responsibility for leading renewal within their systems.

You may be wondering why we're sharing these principles openly.  We think a close look at them should tell you all you need to know.