Thanks to Scott Briscoe for plugging the book in his recent Acronym post. He provides three reasons why associations don’t do new things: budget, no time, and culture. It’s a very interesting post, so check it out. I was disappointed to find no comments to the post (other than mine). What’s up with that?
I kid you not that within seconds of posting Roundtable Ruse, I got an e-mail from an association for which I agreed to lead a roundtable. Here are my instructions:
Thank all participants
Start the conversation on your assigned topic
Moderate questions from participants
Serve as a resource where appropriate
Communicate any necessary information to the ____ staff
Here’s where the rubber meets the road. The association wants and is content with me letting the session “go where it may.” Am I?
I’ve noticed lately that many associations are discouraging speakers from lecturing (you know – be the “guide on the side” versus the “sage on the stage”). Roundtable discussions seem to be the “in” solution.
But there is a problem. Being an effective guide on the side isn’t easy. I once attended a workshop in which the speakers utilized great in-depth case studies to generate roundtable discussions. They had the groups discuss the cases, report out…and then they moved to the next case. Here were two individuals with combined 30+ years experience and they offered no opinion on how the cases could or should have been handled. They didn’t even identify if they agreed or disagreed with the solutions identified in the report-outs. We all had interesting discussions, but left feeling we still didn’t know how to handle the situations if presented to us. Anyone off the street could have “facilitated” that session. It was easy, but not effective.
If you have experts available, use them – I mean really use them. Don’t let them just organize table discussions; have them use their experience and expertise to facilitate meaningful discussions and learning. As one model, consider how the workshop I attended could be reworked:
Now, building a session like this is harder than assigning table topics and letting the session go where it may. Roundtables need a purpose and structure. So, choose your experts carefully and provide them guidance. Your learners will thank you.
There seems to be a growing trend of associations providing Powerpoint templates for conference speakers. Really, what is the purpose here? Isn’t it kind of boring for each session to have the exact same slide graphics and color scheme? And why do they always seem to be orange? Plus, those header, footer, and sidebar images really compete with the content. Is your association logo more important than my content? (Don’t answer that.)
I understand the benefit of having the same look/message displayed at the beginning and end of each presentation – and I even understand the value of having the last slide serve as a promotion for association services/events. However, I do not see the benefit of mandated template slides for the core presentation.
Another problem is that requiring the use of template slides also implies speakers should use slides! And that’s a dangerous implication given the widespread abysmal use of Powerpoint slides. Of course slides have the potential to enhance a presentation, but when is the last time you were moved by a slide deck?
If you really want to make an impact to your conference sessions, nix the slide template and instead provide guidance and tools to your speakers to help them deliver more effective presentations, with or without visuals. A few ideas:
I am going out on a limb here, because I am not an expert in research methods, but I think it is time that we stopped using the standard evaluation forms at conferences. I started my career in the conflict resolution training business, and at the end of each of our training events, we gave our participants an evaluation form. It asked five or ten questions about the quality of the event, the instructors, etc., using a five-point Likert scale. We compiled the scores and included the data in our report to the funders.
Can anyone guess what the scores were? Around 4. There was slight variation (down to maybe 3.5), as some groups were more or less impressed with the venue or the instructors or the content. I learned early on that the instructors derogatorily referred to these evaluation forms as “happy sheets.”
Flash forward fifteen years, and here I am speaking for the association community, anxiously waiting to get back my evaluations to see if I am staying above the magic 4.0 line.
Stop. Throw these forms away. Never use them again. Go back to the drawing board and ask again (or maybe for the first time?), WHY are you using these sheets? I am guessing that the standard answers are things like, we need to compare the quality of different speakers (or the same speaker over time), or we want to know if participants are satisfied with their experience.
Those are laudable goals, but are the happy sheets really getting you there?
Quality of speakers should be based on the impact they have on participants, which is not always measurable at the end of the session (or even a few days later). Some speakers (dare I say, some of my fellow authors!) design sessions specifically to provoke new thinking in the audience. This can be uncomfortable for the participant in the moment, but immensely valuable over the long term. Other speakers need to deliver specific content to help people accomplish a specific task. One person can get tremendous benefit from both sessions, but in the moment rate the provocative session lower than the “just what I needed” session, whose impact is more immediately apparent. Happy sheets don’t tell you who your good speakers are.
Happy sheets don’t tell you much about the participants’ real experience either. As Amy Smith wrote in the first edition of the book, there are critical questions you need to ask when designing your learning experience in the first place, like what are the business problems of your participants that you can help to solve. With those in place, you should design some research to see whether or not your event made progress against those goals. You may find that more qualitative tools will be more effective than happy sheets. Do interviews with participants. Sit in and observe the speakers. Have a session at the conference where a facilitator can have a back-and-forth conversation with participants about what is working or not working at the conference (entice them with some good break food!). Gather data six months later in addition to right after the meeting. If nothing else, you should at least experiment with some of these methods.
The happy sheets provide relatively instant feedback, so I know they are “satisfying” to an organizer. But that is about you. Your event evaluation should be about the event and the customer, and it should be focused on learning, not earning a score. Approach this as a research issue, and design your evaluation research so it will generate learning, which then leads to experimenting and changing the way you do things.
To reinvent eroding membership-centric business models, association leaders will need to answer a fundamental question:
What is the strategic relationship between membership and participation?
In answering this question, leaders also will need to confront the even more fundamental truth that dues payments do not create members. Instead, going forward, association membership must be based on a personal commitment to participate, irrespective of dues payments. The approach associations adopt in this area must be open and flexible enough to accommodate both the absolute need to fully engage the payers of dues and the non-dues paying participant’s choice to be active in the association. While the former will pay for membership in order to participate, the latter will use participation as a form of currency to “pay” for membership.
This type of business model innovation is made necessary by what is happening online. The ease and simplicity with which anyone can make immediate and passionate contributions using free and inexpensive Web 2.0 technologies highlights the lack of an equally clear and accessible “architecture of participation” in most associations. A phrase that originated with the Web 2.0 revolution itself, a useful definition of an architecture of participation as it pertains to organizations in our community is “the collaborative design of pathways for meaningful engagement in and substantive contribution to the association’s work.” Designing an architecture of participation is about much more than simply offering opportunities for involvement. It is about innovating our associations for the future.
Association professionals must begin experimenting right away with developing new architectures of participation. Some of those experiments will fail, while others will evolve to become integral elements of new business models built for sustainable growth. To facilitate these processes of experimentation, staff and volunteer leaders can use the following six design principles:
+Keep it simple—In developing wiki technology, creator Ward Cunningham kept asking an important question: what is the simplest thing that could possibly work? In designing a new architecture of participation that will attract your next contributors, you should be asking yourself the same question over and over again. Try to create the simplest possible participation experience for everyone who wants to contribute by looking carefully at the factors that make your current architecture of participation complicated and less satisfying for your stakeholders.
+Tear down the garden walls—It is impossible for any association today to possess all of the ideas, knowledge and talent it needs to succeed. Fortunately, those resources are quite abundant, connected and mobile in the current marketplace, but they will not be attracted to our organizations if we continue to put up obstacles to keep them out. Just like the Web itself, your new architecture of participation must fully embrace open networks as a tenet of a new business model, and sunset the idea of the association as a walled garden.
+Take down the ladder—The ladder is the most enduring symbol of association participation. Contributors spend years, and usually decades, climbing these ladders in pursuit of leadership opportunities with increasing responsibility and authority. But what if your next contributors aren’t interested in climbing your ladder? What if they are comfortable leading horizontally and don’t necessarily want or need vertical authority to accomplish their goals? To address these questions, your new architecture of participation must reconsider traditional structures and roles, and fully engage the self-organizing leadership talents and coordination capabilities your next contributors bring to the table.
+Be modular—If the ladder is no longer the appropriate metaphor for association involvement, what should replace it? Think Legos. To fully engage your next contributors, your association’s new architecture of participation needs to be as modular as Lego bricks, allowing individuals and groups to quickly assemble, disassemble and rebuild “pieces” of different shapes and sizes to create new experiences that easily connect and enable meaningful collaboration with globally-distributed peer networks on a near real time basis.
+Trust first—Associations use a combination of policies, guidelines, requirements and similar mechanisms to enforce “synthetic trust” within their contributor communities. But community on the Web, as well as the trust that bonds the members of those communities, is considerably more organic, and it is this more authentic way of being that associations must embrace going forward. Your new architecture of participation can energize its next contributors by first demonstrating real trust in them, without requiring prior proof of their fidelity to the association.
+Make success a shared responsibility—Associations are still more comfortable with concentrating responsibility for success in the organizational core at a time when most of the energy for future progress lives at or near the “edge” of our organizations. By distributing real responsibility away from the core, associations can challenge their next contributors to direct their efforts toward executing strategy, advancing mission and realizing vision. Your new
architecture of participation can energize contributors by offering them the opportunity to connect their passionate interests and commitments to the long-term growth and success of the association.
The continuing decline of the membership-centric association business model means the end of association membership as we’ve always known it. To flourish in the years ahead, associations will need to shift their focus away from the inertia of transactional relationships and toward dynamic approaches that can unleash the full potential of passionate engagement.
Ever since Good to Great hit the scene, the association community has gotten data religion. Count this, measure that, does this metric make my balanced score card look fat? The problem with too much data collection is that you can be paralyzed by an undifferentiated mass of input. You become the crunchee rather than the cruncher.
Repeat after me: If a piece of data can’t enable a decision to be made, it isn’t worth measuring. Using this simple rule will dramatically reduce your measurement efforts while simultaneously enabling you to take more action. What’s not to like?
This same approach can be invaluable for your Board of Directors and other leadership bodies. When you are pressed for more and more data, push back. Ask what decisions the requested data will support. If it doesn’t support any, it is in everyone’s best interest to not go through the labor of producing it nor the time of assessing and discussing it. You can move on to those metrics that really matter to your leaders making decisions about the future of the organization.
Do not allow your measurement efforts to crunch you and your leadership.
Marketing is the full process of conceptualization, pricing, promotion, and distribution of a program, product or service. Intellectually you probably knew this, but do you live it? In reality, too often the focus of association “marketing” is a slick brochure or an e-mail blast. This, of course, isn’t very effective.
Try something different. For those products that aren’t selling well, cut your promotions budget in half. Then apply those resources to product concept (or re-concept). Why? It may be your product that is the problem, rather than the promotions. You can promote the heck out of a mediocre product but it doesn’t change the fact that it’s a mediocre product. So, most of those promotional dollars are wasted. Even if you’ve created a gem of a promotional campaign and gotten buyers for that mediocre product, will they be satisfied buyers? Repeat buyers?
Consider this real case. An association has been offering a certificate of training program for the past six years. It spends very little on promotion – a listing on its website, occasional e-blasts, and a simple printed flier included in select mailings. Yet, almost all programs have sold out – many with a long waiting list. How? They spent their time wisely and generously on program concept and design. The program meets a real need, and exceeds participant expectations. Now, they don’t have to promote the program; it sells itself. Well, actually, graduates of the program sell it for them. Evaluations data show that over 95% of participants would recommend it to a colleague…and they do. Word-of-mouth marketing at its best.
Consider which of your products, services or programs aren’t selling well regardless of how much you promote them. Then, delve into the product’s concept. Who is the target? What are their needs? Is this product meeting a need? If not, can it be redesigned to meet a need? Is it a mediocre product or a remarkable one? Is it so remarkable that your buyers will “sell” it for you through word-of-mouth? Can you make it so? (Of course, remember that not all products are worthy of a redesign; some may need to be retired.)
A place to start: the product of membership. Do you really need to promote membership more…or do you need to work on making it worth buying?
In the first edition of this book, I advocated separating “strategy” and “plan.” The primary reason is that when we do “strategic planning,” we end up bolting the weight of our strategy to the details of our plan, making it hard to change, to take in new information, and, in many cases, even to implement. Planning and strategy are simply two different things. They should be “tethered” together, not “bolted.”
But the standard response to my argument since that first edition has been: “Okay, but if we don’t do strategic planning, what do we do instead?” The answer is, you do the real work of strategy. Unfortunately, too many associations find the real work of strategy unfamiliar, and even uncomfortable.
The real work of strategy focuses first on strategic direction—clarifying precisely what drives the association’s success and orienting all decision-making, implementation, and learning in that direction. Honestly, most associations do not do this. They are good at identifying their mission, and they know what programs and services they have, but they rarely can articulate “middle level” strategic thinking that helps everyone from the Board down to the staff understand not only where they are headed, but how they can best get there given the current operating environment. Strategy becomes a guide that everyone uses to evaluate decisions and understand changes in the environment, rather than a thirty-nine-page instruction manual that tells people what they should do.
The second focus of the real work of strategy is learning. What if the world weren’t linear? What if you had to articulate a strategic direction, knowing that you would need to change it on an ongoing basis, but at irregular intervals, based on how the real world unfolds, rather than on the availability of your executive committee? If the world did work that way (and, of course, it does), then you would need to build your organization (structure, process, culture) around learning. Suddenly the work of strategy becomes integrated at all levels, as everyone learns from what they are doing and feeds that learning back into strategic decisions.
Strategy may not be a new concept in your association, but what about the real work of strategy? If you want to go down this road, then prepare yourselves to do things differently. For example:
• Demand creativity. Thriving without creativity only happens in that non-existent linear world.
• Bring more voices into your strategy process. It’s not just beneficial; it is required.
• Describe your association’s entire strategy on the back and front of one page. If you can’t tell a simple story, the system won’t be able to make it happen.
• Re-evaluate your meetings. To learn from what you are doing, you need better conversations.
In a survey of full-time employees in the U.S., Katzenbach partners found that the group was split 50/50 in their assessment of their own organization’s ability to “change the way things are done.” In the group that said it was easy to change things, 51% described their work environment as positive (and 67% of them enjoy their work). In the group where it was hard to change things, only 21% described it as positive (and only 48% enjoy their work).
Hmmmm. Which side are you on?
One of the most common arguments made in defense of the “we have always done it that way” approach to leadership in our organizations is that associations have existed for many years, indeed for many decades, and thus have a demonstrated ability to survive and thrive in the face of profound change. So, the argument goes, why should association leaders dramatically change their beliefs and practices to accommodate what’s happening today? Isn’t today’s brand of change simply an extension of what we’ve always known?
Let’s unpack this argument. First, there is no question that associations are resilient organizations. It’s absolutely true that many associations have managed to stick around for a long time, and the leaders of those enterprises deserve most of the credit for keeping them going during periods of considerable difficulty, including depressive economic conditions, social and technological disruption and world war. Whether these leaders made all of the right decisions in their time is immaterial as far as I am concerned. They accepted the responsibility of leadership, and they’ve earned both our gratitude and our respect for everything they achieved.
Going forward, however, the question is not where we’ve been, but where are going and how we will sustain what our predecessors entrusted to us. In our time, we face a fundamental question that those who came before never had to confront seriously: what role, if any, should associations play in our society? We are neck deep in a period of accelerated political, economic, social and technological shift that is unlikely to abate anytime soon. Precisely what it will take for our organizations to be successful in this environment remains somewhat unclear, making our historic resilience useful. What is increasingly clear is that our standard set of responses to new realities is no longer getting it done. We need new approaches, which diminishes the value of being resilient because it may prevent the deep and sober reconsideration of the conventional wisdom that is the basis for doing what we’ve always done.
So associations must continue to be resilient, of course, but not in a way that ignores the solemn responsibility to create a more vibrant future. We cannot defer the hard strategic choices that we certainly will need to make in the next few years. To do so, would be absolutely irresponsible. Rather, we must embrace the challenges and opportunities of a new era, and act decisively, confidently and responsibly. Our ancestors would expect nothing less from us, and we should accept nothing less for ourselves and our successors.
On an association listerver discussion recently, several members debated the pros and cons of what to call their volunteer leadership group: board of directors or board of trustees. The consensus conclusion was that it really doesn’t matter. What matters is the way the Board does its work, not what we call it. We have heard this argument before. For example, since the first release of the book, we have engaged people in the association community in conversations about different approaches to strategic planning. When we propose a new way of doing strategy work, people often respond with, “Well, that’s what we do, but we call it strategic planning; this is an issue of semantics.”
While I agree wholeheartedly that action is critical, I think the association community is underestimating the power of language. Dee Hock, the founder of VISA International, has said, “Language is only secondarily the means by which we communicate. It is primarily the means by which we think.” The words we choose can actively change the way we see the world, and this can then change the way we behave. We are frequently not aware of the impact it has, so it is important that the association community pay more attention to the language it uses. Better execution is fundamentally about different action, and this requires careful attention to the words we use.
Michael Roberto is an expert in decision making, and he has done research that demonstrates the power of simple word choice. For example, at a hospital in Minnesota, a manager was trying to address the issue of medical accidents. She noticed that the language that was used in the official reporting of these incidents was focused on “accusing, blaming, and criticizing” individuals. The leader changed the language that was used in reporting so that it emphasized both the systemic causes and the importance of learning from mistakes that were made. When they changed the language, the hospital actually started reporting MORE accidents, but was also able to learn from them and make improvements.
It is rarely a case of changing a single word, like director to trustee. But if you wanted to change the behavior of your board away from individuals who seek to control and direct the operations, towards a group that worked to protect the interests of the enterprise, changing that word (and a host of other words) could be critical. You would also have to change some processes and have some important conversation with the Board members, but attempting to make the change without addressing issues of language can slow you down. The same is true if you want your staff to think more strategically on a regular basis, and the same is true if you want your people to place more attention to quality control.
Language matters.
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