Today is July 4th, 2008, the 232nd birthday of the United States of America. Economic concerns, particularly the high price of gas, have made it a somewhat different holiday this year, with fewer people driving long distances, “staycations” on the rise and some jurisdictions canceling their fireworks displays due to budget shortfalls.
Still, this is a good day to pause and reflect on the meaning of independence, freedom and liberty. Despite everything that has happened in recent years, these big ideals still inspire all Americans, including me. I am incredibly proud to be an American, and I am enormously grateful to my fellow citizens who serve and protect me, my loved ones and our shared beliefs.
Whatever your plans for the day, I invite you to take a moment to pause and reflect on what creates meaning and inspiration for you. Even if there aren’t any actual pyrotechnic displays where you live, you can still be moved by the awesome internal fireworks of an engaged mind and a passionate heart.
Have a very happy and safe Fourth of July!
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Now that the Association Social Technology Survey is closed, we are hard at work crunching the numbers so we can have an executive summary available in mid-August. Preparing the final report will take a bit more time, but we should have that ready in October.
We’ve already received some inquiries about the full report, so if you’re interested in getting a copy, please complete our reservation form. As soon as the report is ready, we will reach out to you with an e-mail.
SPECIAL BONUS: All advance reservations qualify for special pre-release pricing, so we encourage you to take a few minutes and complete the form!
The survey closes tomorrow, Monday, June 30 at 11:59 PM PDT (2:59 AM EDT), so don’t delay in completing it if you have not done so already.
ATTENTION BLOGGERS: Any assistance you can provide in this last push to spread the word over the next 28 hours or so would be greatly appreciated. And we want to show our thanks for all of your efforts on behalf of this project, so if you help us by linking your post about the survey back to this entry before it closes tomorrow (PDT), we’ll follow up to find out what we can do to help you and your blog!
Let the countdown begin. The fun is just getting started!
It is really exciting to see a great conversation bubbling up on the topic of insanely cool conferences. The reaction to this post isn’t at all what I expected…it’s much better…and so I’ve been thinking about how to keep the discussion moving forward so we can keep learning from each other. So, here are three quick and dirty principles of insanely cool conferences extrapolated from my Fast Company experiences earlier this decade:
+Organizational DNA matters–It should not come as a surprise to anyone who is familiar with Fast Company that this particular magazine was able to create a vastly different and exceptionally compelling conference experience. From the very beginning of the publication, Fast Company has been about looking at the world of business through a different lens, and in creating their RealTime events, the organizers were able to very successfully translate the magazine’s brash, edgy and break-all-the-rules editorial worldview into physical space.
+Violate the participant’s expectations–My friend and fellow blogger Patti Digh planted this phrase in my mind years ago, and it has stuck with me ever since. In my view, truly engaging experiences don’t simply meet or even slightly exceed the expectations of those who participate in them. Meaningful engagement emerges when you stretch people and challenge them to fully commit to the experience from the very beginning by changing the accepted norms.
For example, at RealTime Phoenix in 2000, the very first event of the conference was an activity in which everyone was randomly assigned to small hot teams and asked to build the tallest possible free-standing structure (in the shape of a letter representing one of the conference themes) using materials that were available in the room. We had sixty minutes to complete the activity, and prizes were handed out for the most creative structures. Needless to say, this was no ordinary icebreaker, and it definitely set the tone for the rest of the conference. Our expectations for how we were going to interact were violated from moment one.
+Focus on design–As someone trained in education, with years of service as an association educator, I have always thought of myself first and foremost as a designer of learning environments and experiences. In my work, I always sought to design conferences, workshops and other learning sessions for cumulative effect, in much the same way that a museum curator begins with a fairly small artifact or artwork and builds toward the grand conclusion of the most important archaeological discovery or striking masterpiece.
Design was a critical element of each of the Fast Company conferences I attended, and you could really tell the difference. Instead of a series of mostly disconnected concurrent sessions, each conference featured speakers on a single stage whose presentations merged into a rolling narrative around the primary conference theme. The richness of these conversations was particularly well captured in San Diego in 2002 when conference staff created mini-posters featuring some of the most pithy and provocative quotes from both speakers and attendees, and taped them to the walls of rooms we were using at the hotel. Attendees were free to take any posters they wanted for their own use. Now that was a stroke of insane coolness!
What are your principles for insanely cool conferences? Please add your brilliant insights to this list!
There are only FIVE DAYS LEFT (including the rest of today) to complete the Association Social Technology Survey, so if you haven’t done it already, please do so by Monday, June 30 at 11:59 pm PDT!
Yes I know, I’ve been doing alot of reminders. No, this isn’t the last one. :>)
What is the most insanely cool conference you’ve ever attended? What made it insanely cool?
For me, it was the two Fast Company RealTime conferences I attended in October 2000 (Phoenix) and May 2002 (San Diego) It wasn’t just the novelty of the subject matter or the quality of the speakers that made them great, but the “edge” of the experiences. These conferences were very professionally managed, but somehow they were able to convey a sense of meaningful incompleteness that drew the attendees in and engaged us more deeply. I really enjoyed those conferences, I learned alot from them, and I’ve thought about them often over the years because I’ve never had a conference experience quite like them ever since.
I hope you’ll share some of your insanely cool conference experiences as comments below. If you’re a real evangelist for a particular conference, you might consider posting a video comment!
John Kao, a guest on the P.I. Podcast back in March, published an excellent entry on The Huffington Post on Monday, in which he questions five “false arguments” against a national innovation agenda for the United States. Among the arguments John challenges is the belief that our country faces more important issues than our degrading innovation capabilities. Here is his counterpoint:
The indifference of the American public to the innovation agenda is one of the mysteries of the 2008 election in my book. Sure we’ve got immediate economic and national security issues. But the big issues of day — energy policy, health care reform, education — are the kind of wicked problems that desperately require innovation at a time when the skills of large-scale innovation and collaboration are lacking both in government and society at-large. Innovation isn’t just about iPods; it’s about our future.
Unfortunately, much of the association community exhibits a similar lack of interest in making innovation a true strategic priority, despite the need to confront its own “wicked problems.” So what will it take for us to change this dynamic? Please share your thoughts.
The irony of creativity is this: people want to be creative without change. They want innovation with no risk. They want a new result with the same exact behavior. They can talk for hours about how passionate they are about creativity, but when it comes to actually changing anything, they’ll find a way to repeat the same thing again and again…No one can make change happen except the person who must accept the fears, and consequences, of change. (Bold emphasis in original)
When you get down to brass tacks, making innovation happen is entirely a matter of personal and organizational will. It’s that simple, and that hard.
Do you have the will to innovate? Does your association?
Okay, so I’m thinking out loud here, and I want your reactions.
Not only is relevance a losing argument for associations, but in our zeal to heighten our members’ experience of relevance (or tap into their pre-existing feelings of personal irrelevance), we often engage in marketing conversations that employ fear-based language and scare tactics, and it is these very approaches that damage our capacity to create the inspiration and meaning we need to make our organizations attractive and sustainable.
In other words, it often feels as if the only way we can make the relevance case for our associations is to make our members feel inadequate, or at least less capable than they are. Our relevance comes at their expense, creating an artificial and unrealistic sense of their need for what we have to offer. It becomes a zero sum game. We win only when our members lose something, but we still see it as a gain.
Have you ever seen this dynamic play out in your organization? Please share your experiences and perspectives.
In the words of Leonardo da Vinci, “he who loves practice without theory is like the sailor who boards ship without a rudder and compass and never knows where he may cast.” Jamie’s recent post on the value of theory was an important statement on behalf of new thinking, but from my perspective, it didn’t go quite far enough. So let me push the conversation a little bit further.
Association management and leadership are applied disciplines that place far greater emphasis on the day-to-day experiences of practitioners than on the inventive models and still untested perspectives of theorists. In my career, I have played both roles, and I am very concerned that even as the tried-and-true approaches of the last 20+ years continue to diminish in value, we are not doing nearly enough to build a new theoretical base for the future of associating and associations.
What I find most surprising about our community’s reluctance to engage in theory-building is just how many of the strategic questions with which we are currently grappling cry out not for yet another “best practice,” but a fundamentally new orientation. For example, it seems to me that in a Web-enabled world, the issue of association membership is less a matter of applying incrementally better marketing practices and more of an opportunity to adopt a new theory of engagement. Unfortunately, for today’s harried association executives, the former invariably is the easier solution to sell to the CEO and the board of directors.
Even though building a theoretical base is difficult, we still must pursue this critical work. As a consultant and blogger, I embrace as part of my role the responsibility to actively undermine conventional wisdom and prevailing orthodoxies, even when that obligation means I will be criticized for being too “theoretical.” Jamie’s client took him to task for “telling CEOs what to do even though [he has] never walked a mile in their shoes.” In response, I will take CEOs and their boards to task for being closed off to new constructs for driving strategic success, and I strongly urge those leaders to walk a mile in the shoes of frustrated association members who are waiting for outdated approaches to organizational decision-making and value creation to change for the better.
We must do more to create the future we most desire. In the 21st century, associations cannot afford to cast about a roiling sea rudderless and without a compass. Our capacity to thrive in a new time will depend, in part, on the quality of the new theoretical concepts of management and leadership we devise today.
