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.

Is Your Bubble About to Burst?

Here are some more good ideas from Peter Senge’s talk from a few weeks ago (other posts are here and here).

One of his themes was “inner contradictions.” In any system, there will be inner contradictions, where we do things that ultimately don’t make sense. Where one of our interests (that we defend strongly) turns out to contradict another of our interests, but we don’t make the connection. Senge’s examples centered on the environment. No matter what side of the global warming argument you’re on, you’d probably agree that much of what we do on a daily basis has at least a “not so great” impact on the environment, but we need a functioning ecosystem to live. That’s a contradiction. We’re biting the hand that feeds us.

So capacity to confront and deal with inner contradictions is key for any system’s growth and success. Senge used the metaphor of the “bubble.” Any historical civilization that thrived and then suddenly declined or disappeared was in a bubble. The dot-com boom of the late 1990s was clearly a bubble. It gets bigger and bigger until it can’t sustain itself any more, and it crashes.

But if you can address inner contradictions early enough and deal with them, you let some air out of the bubble, and the membrane does not pop. Ignore those contradictions, and you’re headed for a crash.

The key technique for deflating that bubble is, quite simply, conversation. Bubbles are supported by an “internally consistent” reality. That is, people in the bubble talk ONLY to other people in the bubble, and they each reinforce their view of reality. If you want to avoid a crash, you need to have conversations with people OUTSIDE the bubble.

Jeff and I stress that in our strategy work with clients. When we help them to structure their strategic conversations we push hard for them to include voices who are not normally part of the conversations. That means staff as well as people outside the organization. This is a real struggle for associations. Opening up those conversations to “outsiders” feels threatening, but it’s the only way to keep the bubble from bursting.

Leadership Renewal

There is yet another good leadership article in HBR this month. This one, by David Nadler, talks about the CEO’s “second act.” CEOs in the corporate world are often brought in to fix a problem or save a sinking ship (Act I). Successful ones do just that, but after a while,

…the experiences, skills, and temperament that yielded triumph in Act I turn out to be unequal to Act II’s difficulties. In fact, the approaches that worked so brilliantly in Act I may be the very opposite of what is needed to bring Act II to a happy resolution.

This is true of both leadership and strategy. When Jeff and I talk about strategy, we consistently warn clients NOT to wait until the strategy is an utter failure before trying to change it. If you want to keep the organization on its most productive growth curve, you need to think about changing strategy when you are succeeding, not when you are failing (when it will take so much energy to turn things around).

Of course, organizations are resistant to this. It took a lot of hard work to achieve success, so it feels wrong, somehow, to change it. But that is just what this article is talking about. Refusing to change, frankly, assumes the world is not changing. If you assume the world is changing, then it becomes obvious that your particular style or your particular set of strengths (or your particular strategy) will work for a period of time, and then become less effective. Your choice then is to change yourself, change the structure of the organization (so others can pick up the leadership slack), or move on.

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.

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.

Why The Long Tail Matters to Associations (LONG POST)

IMPORTANT NOTE: Let me reiterate that this is a long post.  I apologize in advance for causing any undue eye strain.

In his recent Acronym post about the Long Tail, Ben Martin moves me with his very kind compliment and words of support for my argument that association leaders should not dismiss new but untested ideas, such as the Long Tail, out of hand. He also offers a very thoughtful explanation of his view that the Long Tail theory will not work for most associations. It is entirely possible Ben is right, but then again, Jamie and I also may be right. In truth, we don’t know, and won’t know, until a handful of strategically-aware and highly capable associations begin to put some of these ideas into practice. We hope that will happen in the near future, but until we have some learning laboratories willing to experiment, let me offer a few comments on the specifics of Ben’s excellent post.

It's not about buckets...

Jamie and I are a bit frustrated with how the generational shift conversation is unfolding in association community.  Ben writes about this in a recent post on his blog:

Jeff De Cagna and Jamie Notter have both expressed disappointment about Cam Marston's session on generational differences at ASAE & The Center's Membership & Marketing Conference. I've been somewhat biased against generational research for some time now. I can draw as many conclusions about someone's disposition from their generation as I can draw from their astrological sign. And after hearing Cam's speech, I've now decided that knowledge about generational differences is overrated. Grouping people into buckets with tens of millions of others and calling it "segmentation" is sounding pretty ridiculous to me right now. (Bold emphasis added)

I both agree and disagree with Ben's post.  On the one hand, there is actually considerable value in understanding how different generations make sense of the world in different ways.  There can be no doubt that Silents/Matures, Boomers, Xers and Millennials hold vastly divergent perspectives on a wide variety of issues.  What's more, this full spectrum of ideas and opinions influences our society in ways that go far beyond the deeper meaning of the Zodiac.  (Except perhaps when Reagan was president...;>)  Getting inside the story of how and where generations disagree--as well as agree--must be a central theme of our national and organizational discourse in the coming years if we are to identify solutions to the profound problems we face.

On the other hand, Ben's last sentence shines a light on a big problem:  we are trying feverishly to put people into "buckets" for marketing and messaging purposes and it won't work.  While some brands may occasionally crack the code of generational understanding and enjoy spectacular, if short-lived, financial success as a result, the overwhelming majority of organizations will experience the same kind of frustration and disappointment we're describing in our posts.

If I may propose a different metaphor, true generational understanding isn't about buckets, but shot glasses.  Everyone is an individual and has his or her own shot glass, but because we can more easily move the glasses around, we can see the relevant patterns more clearly.  Achieving this depth of understanding, however, depends on our ability to think and talk differently about generational shift.

Which brings me to three guides I'd like to propose to shape a new generational conversation in associations:

• Use broad generalizations to ask better questions--Big and broad assumptions, even those based on survey data, can be dangerous, so test their meaning and validity by asking probing questions that help you get inside the story of individual members and stakeholders. 
  
• Use the answers to frame better conversations--Listen carefully to the nuances and textures of the responses to build your capacity for shaping conversations that move beyond the level of assumption, generalization and stereotype.
• Use your learning to craft better ways of connecting and connecting with your members--Developing an organizational strategy for generational renewal isn't about mass production or even mass customization.  It's about honoring the uniqueness of individuals by supporting their efforts to build new relationships and create new opportunities.
  

Are they playing A Flock of Seagulls?

I don't know about you, but I absolutely love 80s music!  I just can't get enough of it and so I've really noticed recently that it is being played everywhere I go.  When I shop in my local supermarket, I'm singing and dancing down the aisles to Come on Eileen by Dexys Midnight Runners or Easy Lover by Philip Bailey and Phil Collins.  (Quite a sight for the other shoppers, I assure you...)  When I drop some clothes off at the cleaners, I'm mouthing the words to Stray Cat Strut, and when I'm sitting in a restaurant having lunch, I'll tap my foot on the floor while Hungry Like The Wolf by Duran Duran plays in the background.  (BTW, all of the song links go to their music videos on YouTube.com)

For me, this is an incredibly exciting cultural shift.  There was a time not that long ago when you couldn't pry an 80s song out a radio station, except perhaps for about 30 minutes on weekday evenings or during the wee hours on weekend nights.  Today, the music of 80s is front and center again because pesky Gen Xers like me have cash to spend and we just love to hear the songs we danced to in high school wearing our Members Only jackets, parachute pants and white Capezios!  (Let me just state for the record that I only wore two of these three items when I was in high school.  I will not elaborate any further at this time.)

So if you're an association leader questioning the deepening reality of generational shift, I suggest you listen closely to the music being played where you shop or eat. If you hear A Flock of Seagulls on the sound system, you can be sure that the world is changing.