In the association space most of us in the education arena are very focused on one thing, education. And that tends to be defined in terms of conferences, seminars, and perhaps online education. A smaller population of educators focuses on certification or accreditation of professionals. This education focus is simply one very small piece of the overall human capital arena.

Human Capital cuts across every single traditional division or department within an association. It impacts IT, marketing, communications/PR, government relations, education/certification, meeting planning, finance, and research…every department or specialty. I have been touting for years the need for associations to start thinking about the shift from Education Director to Chief Learning Officer, and some organizations have made that leap. But the next evolution is a focus not just on learning, but on Human Capital.

The WHADITW might go something like this… It is time for associations to think in much grander strategic terms about how Human Capital is organized across the association’s entire trade or profession. Not simply themed conferences or seminars, but in the broadest, most global sense. Here are some questions to ponder.

How is your organization…

• Managing human capital across your entire trade or profession? Is it a cross-functional area (as it should be) or is it in a silo within the organization?
• Identifying and managing knowledge creation within your organization but outside of conferences and seminars? How about managing knowledge creation outside of your organization?
• Addressing the need to really know each specific job function within your trade or profession? Can you even identify them clearly? Can you map knowledge, skills and abilities (KSAs) to each job function? Do you even have the KSA’s identified?

Focus educational programs and services around the four values Mickie describes. Work very hard to provide as many of these values to your members as possible. But in the short-term, focus highly on the context and filtering aspects of content. Perceived value is what drives participants to education programs. Identifying what that perceived value might be is absolutely critical to the marketing and pricing challenge. Many times it is saving a member time and money by filtering out irrelevant content and explaining how and why that content can be applied to someone’s professional or personal life. Time and money are the two most common “value” items. With this in mind, here is a philosophy on pricing…

Free is not good. Unless you have some sort of legitimate reason for not charging for a program (a grant funded program, for example) you need to charge something to participants. The more you charge the higher the perceived value of the program. When you offer something for free, the buyer’s mentality is that it is not as valuable, even if it truly is. We also see significant numbers of no-shows for “free” programs versus paid ones.

Bundling products and services creates higher value. If you offer an education product, be sure to think about other products you can bundle with it. For example, you offer a seminar on how to build a great tree house. Your organization also happens to have a research report on new trends in tree house building. Bundle the products together to add value. You could even simply send an email out to everyone who attended the ‘how to build a great tree house’ course that lists all of your other tree house resources, with links to each. This links back to the filtering aspect of value creation.

Here is the ultimate issue… New staff members need to be educated on how your organization purchases products and services from third parties. How this is done is a direct reflection of your organization. It comes back to the bigger issue I have which is simply this. We spend huge budget dollars educating our membership but very few dollars educating our own staff. Professional development of our own staff members is absolutely critical in this knowledge economy, yet I can’t tell you how many times I hear staffers say, we don’t have the budget to attend that seminar/conference, etc. If I were the HR director of an association, here are the critical topics I’d have new employees go through.

• A 101 course on your industry or profession (if your organization doesn’t have one, you should)
• A course on the association and its role in the industry/profession
• A department-level and individual-level overview of how that individual’s job fits into the bigger picture of the organization
• A general association management 101 course
• A vendor/supplier management course
• A general association finance course (see my previous rants on this topic)
• A management course that reflects the organization’s philosophy of staff management, if the individual is going to manage staff

I’d also have a thorough conversation with a new hire about the areas of professional development that they want to focus on and create a learning plan for that individual. And yes, your organization should pick up the tab for this. Employees who feel their employer invests in them stay longer, are more loyal to the organization, and do not tend to turn over nearly as much as those who feel less supported.

My best advice…simply ask them. Get them involved. Empower them to participate and plan. A few years ago I was at an ASAE Annual conference and talked with a young Executive Director of a smaller association. During the cocktail reception he was telling me about his organization’s issues around attracting and retaining younger members and specifically, around new graduates. His solution was to use his current volunteer leadership to identify two dozen or so young professionals across the country. On the association’s dime, he had them all come to the headquarters for a weekend retreat. In essence he locked them in and gave them a simple directive. Design a program that would bring together young professionals in the industry. Something that was fun and engaging for their peers.

At the end of the weekend the group designed a parallel conference to the national conference, just for young professionals. They chose that design to be able to pull from industry experts that would already be at the national conference, but gave themselves their own learning space to deal with their unique issues. The Executive Director got vendors to sponsor the young professionals program as well as offsetting the registration fees. The group of 25 or so managed a word-of-mouth campaign and brought in over 300 of their peers to the first event. The association was thrilled with the turn out and the sponsors were thrilled at the exposure they got with these young professionals.

The key concept is that eLearning might be best “consumed” like Americans eat fast food. It needs to be convenient, quick, and taste decent enough. What I simply mean is this. Participants need to be able to find your eLearning products easily and it needs to be formatted in a way that is convenient to your participants. Strongly consider the participant’s work environment and plan the design accordingly. Second, people need to get in, consume the content, and get out quickly. eLearning programs that go on for hours do not typically get the results the organization is looking for. Finally, the program needs to be decent tasting enough that members will come back. There isn’t an expectation that it is a Kobe steak, just a decent burger will do.

Make the learning engaging but convenient, quick and decent.

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?

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:

• Experts shares enough information and context about the cases to enable a rich discussion
• In small groups, learners discuss case studies and generate ideas for how they would handle the situations
• Each group reports back ideas generated
• Experts debate, clarify and/or build upon the ideas/actions suggested (providing the rationale and/or evidence for their advice)
• Experts close the session by highlighting the key lessons to be taken from the each of the case studies
• Learners depart with knowledge they can use

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.

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:

• Be flexible in room set-up and AV requests; requiring classroom set-up and a podium mike is begging for a traditional lecture.
• Provide speakers with as much information about the audience and their needs as possible; don’t assume they’ll do the research on their own.
• Ask speakers to identify and provide to you their key points (you’d be surprised how many speakers can and will present without ever identifying key points!).
• Provide a guidance document that outlines principles of effective presentations (you can find several model documents online).
• Provide speaker training sessions virtually and at your events – these could be by invitation only or for all potential speakers.
• Hire a presentation coach to work with your speakers one-on-one.
• Establish an arrangement with a presentation coach to offer discounted coaching sessions to your speakers in exchange for your promoting his or her services to that target.

So, I’m vowing to schedule reflection time when at all possible. I’m thinking about starting a private blog of my reflections, ideas, and learning. Quite a while back Amy brought up the idea of a personal learning blog here on WHADITW. Anyone doing it? To be able to capture and categorize my ideas as a blog easily does has real appeal – the blogging platform seems a good fit. My notepad notes sure aren’t working. A bunch of ideas written down that I never refer to again. One downside of the blog formats is that it is web-based. Are there platforms that allow drafting off-line? David, help.

Albert Einstein suggested that “imagination is more important than knowledge,” and who am I to disagree with him. In a time of paradigm shift, what we think we know is increasingly less useful than what we can learn, imagine and create. In a recent post, Micropersuasion blogger Steve Rubel suggested that “the most important ‘tool’ you can have today in business is insatiable curiosity. The minute you lose it, you’re dead.” I think Steve is right on target and, from my perspective, curiosity and imagination go hand in hand: our curiosity feeds our imagination, and our imagination drives our curiosity.

Which brings me back to my inquiry about the possible imagination deficit in our community. I suppose what I’m really wondering is whether the work environment in associations today cultivates and nurtures the curiosity and imagination of staff and volunteers. One specific source of concern in this regard is the recent emphasis placed on so-called “data-driven strategies,” as advocated by ASAE & The Center’s 7 Measures of Success report. Without a doubt, there is a need to infuse the strategic decision-making process with useful data. But we must also recognize there are limits to what data can tell us, and there is good reason to challenge the notion that backward-looking information will always illuminate the wisest course of action for the future of our organizations. Associations definitely need clear, simple and focused strategy, but it should be “driven” by the value it will create for members, customers and stakeholders. Identifying and implementing that potential value necessarily will involve some combination of what we know, what we can learn, what we can imagine and what we can create together.

The powerful forces of paradigm shift are reshaping our society, and associations are going along for that very bumpy ride. But in the midst of this uncertainty, association professionals and volunteers have an extraordinary opportunity to envision a very different and more vibrant future for the organizations to which they have committed themselves. I challenge you to do just that by remaining curious and using your imagination everyday. If you’re able to do that, then in time the more important question won’t be whether there once was an imagination deficit, but what we did to eliminate it for the benefit of our community.