It’s very exciting to be a part of the latest Post2Post Virtual Book Tour, organized by Paul Williams of Idea Sandbox. I’m particularly happy to be leading off this tour with a podcast interview with Daniel Burrus, author of Flash Foresight: How to See the Invisible and Do the Impossible. Daniel is one of the world’s foremost thinkers on the impact of new technologies on organizations, so it was a great pleasure to speak with him.
In our interview, we talk about what flash foresight is, and why it is important to organizational leaders, as well as a couple of the seven key principles Daniel explores in detail in the book. We also discuss some of the specific challenges facing associations, including the impact of mobile and the future of events. It was a great conversation and, in the end, I certainly agree with Daniel’s sense of excitement and possibility for the future of the 21st century association, but not for associations that remain entrenched in 20th century thinking.
I highly recommend you pick up your copy of Flash Foresight as soon as possible. And when you do, be sure to visit the book’s website to find out how you can receive bonus resources valued at over $20,000! In the meantime, here is the blogger lineup for the rest of this week’s Flash Foresight Post2Post Virtual Book Tour, including links to Twitter:
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Another Great Ideas Conference is almost here, and I wanted to post a couple of time sensitive announcements for those of you who are going to be at the conference.
+On Monday, March 14, I am leading a four-hour Business Model Innovation Workshop beginning at 1:30 pm in the Robert Trent Jones Room in the Spa & Golf Building. If you’re planning to attend the workshop, please e-mail me ASAP so I can send you information on how to prepare for the session. This preparation is really important, so please do not delay in reaching out.
+On Tuesday, March 15, I will facilitate an informal group discussion of the new book, The New Capitalist Manifesto: Building a Disruptively Better Business by Umair Haque on Tuesday, March 15, beginning at 2 p.m. in Colorado Hall Room E. I recently posted a podcast interview with Umair on this blog, and I have been blogging about the book on ASAE’s Acronym Blog. Below are links to the first three Acronym posts, and the last post will be up on Tuesday.
Everyone is welcome at the group discussion, regardless of whether you’ve read the book. We will use Umair’s thinking as a lens for viewing the challenges and opportunities facing associations over the next decade and beyond.
Finally, I hope you’ll take the opportunity to listen my podcast interview with Matthew May, the Great Ideas conference opening keynote speaker. Whether you’ll be at the conference in person, or monitoring the happenings from wherever you are, I think you’ll enjoy my conversation with Matt.
I’m really looking forward to seeing many long-time friends and colleagues in Colorado Springs. Travel safely everyone!
As many of us prepare to head to the Great Ideas Conference in Colorado at the end of next week, I wanted to chat with author Matthew May, the conference’s opening general session speaker and a guest on the P.I. Podcast in July 2009. I really enjoyed my first conversation with Matt, and I was so grateful when he agreed to take a few minutes to speak with me again.
In this new 20-minute podcast, we discuss the state of innovation today, the key themes from Matt’s March 13 talk at Great Ideas, his latest book, The Shibumi Strategy: A Powerful Way to Create Meaningful Change and how to shift organizations away from the default setting of “doing more with less.” If you’re looking for a quick and interesting way to get ready for the Great Ideas Conference, or if you can’t make it to the conference and want to get a flavor for the discussions we’ll be having there, I hope you’ll take the opportunity to listen this interview.
If you’re going to be at Great Ideas, please be sure to say hello. I look forward to seeing you soon!
Quite some time has passed since my last podcast, so I really wanted to start off 2011 with a completely awesome guest. Fortunately, I was able to make it happen, and it certainly was a great thrill it was for me to interview bloggerUmair Haque, author of The New Capitalist Manifesto: Building a Disruptively Better Business from Harvard Business Review Press. BIG WIN!
I’ve been wanting to interview Umair for years, but we were unable to connect before now. For me, the conversation was totally worth the wait, and I hope you’ll agree. This is one of my long-form podcasts (more than one hour running time), so it will be an investment on your part. But it’s a rich conversation and I’m confident that if you take the time to listen to it, you’ll take as much away from it as I did.
During the podcast, I mention author and blogger Stephen Denning’sreview of Umair’s book. You should read the whole review, of course, but let me share Steve’s “bottom line” with you:
Overall, the book is courageous, thought-provoking, profound, incisive, daring, brilliant, trail-blazing, witty and ethical. In accordance with its own principles, it gives us value that matters, value that will last and value that will multiply. For anyone who cares about the future of the human race, a must read.
WOW! That is a remarkable endorsement, and in my view, completely deserved. The New Capitalist Manifesto is an extraordinary book filled with insight, foresight and powerful original thinking about what is possible (and necessary) if we’re going to build better organizations and a better world.
To bring the conversation I began with Umair into our community, I’m very pleased to announce that I’ll be guest blogging about The New Capitalist Manifesto on ASAE’s Acronym blog throughout the month of February. So go ahead and listen to the podcast today, and look for my first blog post tomorrow!
Today’s post: What factors prevent associations from making innovation an on-going priority?
The “Innovation for Associations” white paper proposes four barriers to innovation in associations: diffuse leadership, low tolerance for risk, unwillingness to commit resources and complex organizational structures. While these barriers certainly exist to varying degrees in most associations, they are not the real root causes of our community’s continuing struggle with innovation. Throughout my career working in and with associations, I have observed four other deep-seated obstacles that have rendered the phrase, “association innovation,” something of a contradiction in terms.
Sameness–Sameness is the defining characteristic of the association experience. Associations bring together people who are alike in more ways than they are different: same fields, same jobs and, thus, similar ways of seeing and thinking about the world. Sameness also shapes the typical association value creation process itself: everyone must be treated the same, receive the same benefits and participate in the same activities. Unfortunately, this homogeneous way of being engenders an inherent resistance to radical and disruptive thinking that is very hard to overcome. Innovation thrives in vibrantly imaginative environments filled with diverse experiences, divergent points of view and the creative friction they inspire. The native sameness of associations makes it hard to spark these conditions in the first place, and difficult to sustain over time.
Politics trumps everything--Politics exists in all organizations, and certainly can be an obstacle to innovation in any setting. But it is the unique role politics plays in both the selection and decision-making of voluntary association leaders that creates special problems for making innovation a priority. In far too many associations, political considerations trump all other factors, including individual capability, in determining who will occupy critical leadership roles. The rise to office of politically-popular leaders, often as a result of contested elections, is rarely good news for the pursuit of innovation. Senior voluntary leaders have no real incentive to jeopardize their standing within a status quo they helped to create and over which they now preside by embracing so-called “risky” ideas. Leaders elsewhere in association hierarchies take their cues from the top and tend to favor more conservative courses of action to ensure their future political viability.
Markets vs. membership–For better and for worse, for-profit companies live in the world of turbulent markets and, as a consequence, use continuous innovation as a strategy for anticipating and serving rapidly shifting customer needs. In contrast, associations exist in the more proscribed world of membership and, as a consequence, try to meet the needs of vastly smaller self-selected groups of stakeholders with similar (see above) and often more conventional attitudes and preferences. For most associations, member loyalty, rather than sustained new value creation through innovation, has been the historic driver of both strategic and financial success. Over the last 10 years, however, the end of any credible belief in unquestioned member loyalty–a belief that blinded both leaders and organizations across our community for a very long time–has left associations with no alternative but to consider how to deal with unfavorable market realities from which they were previously insulated.
Plans matter more than possibilities–Contrary to our community’s conventional wisdom, strategic planning has done more to squander association potential than it has to harness it. Indeed if the Task Force is correct, and a low tolerance for risk and an unwillingness to commit resources are two major barriers to innovation in associations, much of the blame goes to our continued use of strategic planning as a tool for “creating the future.” Through an endless series of strategic planning processes, association leaders have learned to value the plan above all else. Planning is about creating certainty by requiring all answers upfront and eliminating all risk. Innovation leverages risk to create new value. Planning is about prioritizing the operational needs of the organization ahead of the profound challenges facing association stakeholders. Innovation builds on empathy and learning to create new value. Planning concentrates organizational efforts on achieving the feasible. Innovation expands organizational capacity to embrace the possible. So, exactly what kind of future are associations trying to create for themselves and their stakeholders?
In my final post next week, I will address how associations can embrace innovation more easily and turn it into a genuine strategic priority.
What do you think? Why isn’t (or why is) innovation a priority in your association? Please join this important conversation by sharing your thoughts below. Back to you Eric!
My final post: How can associations embrace innovation more easily?
As we begin this series, I would like to thank Eric Lanke, chair of the WSAE Innovation Task Force, and all of the Task Force members for their excellent work in creating this white paper for the benefit of the entire association community. It is a terrific conversation starter that leaves plenty of room to explore divergent perspectives on the critical issues of association innovation, and I’m really pleased to be able to make a contribution to the dialogue. Please make your contribution by sharing your thoughts in the comments below.
In this initial post, we will consider the following question:
Why is innovation critical to the future of associations?
It comes as something of a surprise that the white paper is silent on this specific question, given the lack of consensus in the association community about the need for innovation. The white paper states as its goal the desire “to define an evidence-based model of innovation for association community,” but does not make clear why such a model is necessary. It also offers a fairly generic definition of innovation–a process that effectively generates and applies creative ideas to the achievement of defined objectives–that does not explain why associations need to make innovation central to their work over the next ten years and beyond. Perhaps the Task Force did not want to advocate too strongly on behalf of innovation, or perhaps it felt the rationale for the pursuit of innovation is self-evident. Either way, I believe it is a missed opportunity to help “make the case” for innovation with associations that still do not fully grasp the strategic and operational significance of this conversation to their future success.
According to the late Peter Drucker, innovation is “change that creates a new dimension of performance.” It is an amazingly simple and insightful definition, yet it is incomplete because it does not recognize the core argument for innovation in any context: new value creation for stakeholders. The association blogosphere’svibrant discussion on the value of membership has revealed the steep price associations are paying today for the failure to innovate over the last ten years. And in the turbulent decade ahead, associations face unprecedented and serious challenges that will not be solved through conventional approaches. What will we do when “what we’ve always done” not only doesn’t work, but makes things worse?
As the white paper suggests, the sustainable pursuit of innovation is as much a matter of organizational culture as it is of capabilities and resources. But associations cannot wait for the hard work of changing stubbornly traditional cultures to take hold before embracing the pursuit of innovation. The idea of building an “evidence-based model of innovation” for our community is intuitively appealing and a worthy long-term goal. What associations need right now, however, is a genuine commitment to an accelerated and intensive process of continuous experimentation, shaped by empathic understanding, driven by meaningful co-creation with stakeholders and constantly attentive to the power of serendipity. In Part Two of this series, I will explore some of the reasons why making this kind of deep commitment is so difficult for associations.
The next post: What factors prevent associations from making innovation an on-going priority?
Several years ago, I attended an innovation master class presented by guru Gary Hamel. Hamel told us that today’s operational challenges typically begin as strategic challenges 3-5 years before, offering yet another reason for continuous innovation. After all, why would you allow unsolved problems to damage your core business if you have an opportunity to address them before they become critical? The recent blogosphere conversation on the value of association membership, inspired by association professional Joe Flowers, is further proof of Hamel’s point and, unfortunately, clear evidence that associations are now paying a price for the failure to innovate more aggressively.
For as long as I have been a part of this community, association leaders have been wringing their hands about the necessity of innovation, and they have made every conceivable excuse for why it cannot be done. It’s too risky, it’s too expensive, it’s too difficult they say. But over the last ten days or so, the conversation about association membership has revealed how much riskier, more expensive and more difficult the consensus choice to preserve the status quo has become. Membership has been, and continues to be, the core business of associations, and it is in peril. This danger is created not simply because of a more social web, but a more open and social world. Many of the technologies that amplify connection, cooperation and collaboration online have enter the consciousness of our community over the last 3-5 years, but most have been around in different forms for an even longer time. Over much of this same period, we dismissed the impact of these tools on our work, inexplicably assuming that what we do is so unique and special it is immune to the powerful forces reshaping the rest of society. As we have learned, it isn’t.
So what do we do now? Instead of the reflexive recriminations this conversation has surfaced, what we need is empathic understanding. As I read through Joe’s original post, the comments and what others have written in the days since, it occurred to me that no one asked him a pretty fundamental question:
If the value you received for your $100 dues payment was insufficient, what kind of value would you pay for? What really matters to you?
I e-mailed this question to Joe yesterday and he graciously took the time to respond. I’ll let him decide if he wants to post the specific thoughts he shared with me, but what I took away from Joe’s response was a deep desire for a vibrant professional learning experience grounded in meaningful peer and mentor relationships, something he ultimately discovered by associating with colleagues in online social spaces rather than through his professional association. This is an important empathic insight that associations can use to rethink the value and business model of the traditional membership offer. For every Joe out there with the willingness to express dissatisfaction in a public forum, I believe there are many others who feel the same way, but never say anything about it. We need to access these hidden perspectives to build a more intimate understanding of the kinds of relationships our stakeholders would like to have with us.
This is the time for deep experimentation in every phase of association work. It’s actually something we should have done years ago, as Gary Hamel suggests, but now that we have arrived at a true inflection point, we can no longer ignore the absolute necessity of undertaking a serious innovation effort that will help our organizations thrive in the years ahead. Thanks Joe for reminding us why innovation is so important to our future success!
It’s an important question for associations, and one I’ll be asking often, as well as trying to answer, in 2011. To help get this critical conversation started, I’m extremely pleased to be collaborating with my friends at Peach New Media on an exciting three-part “Power Learning Series” in February 2011.
The series is called “From Tradition to Transformation: Building 21st Century Associations to Thrive,” and it will be a high impact learning opportunity for all association leaders. Instead of the traditional webinar format, we’re using flip thinking to create a deeper, richer and more meaningful experience that will help you build the right capabilities to lead your association into the next decade of the 21st century.
You can find more information on the Power Learning Series by visiting the registration page. I hope you will consider joining me in February!
This afternoon’s trip to the mailbox held a very exciting surprise for me. My article, “The New Work of Governing: Leading 21st Century Associations into the Social Future,” is the cover story in the October/November issue of Association Magazine, the publication of the Canadian Society of Association Executives (CSAE). I knew the article would appear in this issue, but I didn’t know it would be the cover story until today. Way cool!
My friends at CSAE have kindly provided me with a PDF of the article that you can download. Please share your thoughts below. What’s also cool is that my original text is translated into French, so if any of you read French, please share your reactions to that version as well. Looking forward to your comments!
Earlier today, my friend and colleague Lindy Dreyerargued in a blog post that mobile apps are a waste of time for associations. It probably doesn’t come as a surprise to P.I. readers that I see it differently. Below is the comment I posted in response:
Provocative post Lindy, but I completely disagree with your take. Mobile app development is not at all a waste of time for associations. On the contrary, I think it is a critical element of 21st century association strategic thinking and business model innovation. Let me briefly respond to each of your points above:
1. This summer, the Apple App Store reached 5 billion downloads and the current count of app downloads from the Android Market is more than 2 billion. So I guess I don’t see any actual evidence of barriers to use.
2. There is a long tail marketplace for mobile apps, and associations don’t really need to be concerned about competing with “lifestyle” or gaming app developers who want to be at the head of the tail. The goal of mobile app development for associations is to create a meaningful mobile presence that delivers unique and enduring value to its stakeholders. Association apps will always be niche offerings, and that’s not a problem as long as they are well done, useful and serve a strategic purpose.
3. We cannot say with any degree of certainty that association members aren’t using apps, but we can say that there have been fewer smart phones in use than feature phones. According to comScore, as of this summer, more than 50 million smart phones were in use in the United States, and while feature phone use is on the decline, smart phone use is growing dramatically. As the number of smart phones in the marketplace increases over the next few years, I would expect to see significant increases in app use (see below), which makes this exactly the right time for associations to create apps that serve their stakeholders.
In addition, while texting is a convenient and very popular communications tool, it does not offer a rich experience to users. It is the pure mobile equivalent of e-mail and listservers. It’s ubiquitous because it is simple, but it is clearly insufficient for building deeper relationships.
4. It is premature to declare that native mobile apps will be in decline in the next few years. This summer, Juniper Research reported that mobile downloads should reach 25 billion per year by 2015. The arrival of app-based tablets in the marketplace is likely to spur new growth in apps as well, and thus new opportunities for associations. Web app development with HTML5 is definitely a promising direction to explore, but the experience with apps developed in this way is not as seamless and rich as native apps. The technology will improve in the years ahead, but during that time, the native app marketplace will continue to grow.
5. We agree that associations should do a complete exploration of the mobile space to determine the best opportunities for meaningful value creation. I wholeheartedly endorse the idea of gaining more information on their members mobile behavior and I have created a list of 12 questions that associations can use to get this kind of information. Those questions can be found online at http://bit.ly/12mobilequestions. Until we build our understanding in this area, I don’t believe we should be rejecting mobile app development out of hand.
Let me add that we cannot overlook apps for tablets, the growing adoption of iPhones/iPads in the enterprise or the equally impressive growth of mobile outside of North America. All of these trends create new opportunities for associations willing to invest in mobile app development as part of their strategy for value creation.
Lindy, I can recall a time no so long ago that we were all looking at data showing the low adoption of social technologies, and yet we were rightly arguing to associations that they should embrace these tools because they were going gain more traction. Given the huge growth and innovation in the mobile space, I believe that associations will benefit by being more proactive now instead of playing it safe, which is the default setting of most organizations in our community. We need to encourage more disruptive innovation in associations, not less of it, and I am convinced that mobile app development is a important part of building a future in which associating is mobile.
What do you think? Please share your thoughts as comments below.
