Catch Spark at #ASAE16

I’ll be presenting two sessions at the upcoming ASAE Annual Meeting in Salt Lake City in a I'm Speaking ASAE 2016 Annual Meetingfew weeks:

  • Unsession: The Association Role in the New Education Paradigm, Sunday, August 14
  • Deep Dive: The Lean Startup Changes Everything, Tuesday, August 16

For the unsession, join me and Shelly Alcorn (Alcorn Associates) for a town hall-style discussion of how associations are being impacted by and can in turn impact trends in education and employment. Both of these sectors are undergoing profound disruption, and we believe associations are uniquely positioned to play a vital role in helping our current and future stakeholders adjust and even thrive in this rapidly changing environment.

In this unsession, we’ll share a preview of our soon-to-be released whitepaper, The Association Role in the New Education Paradigm (yep, the next Spark white paper is about to drop, y’all!). We’ll highlight some of the latest research on this topic, identify what we see as association advantages in these areas, and share the stories of associations that are doing good work preparing their audiences for the future.

We plan to challenge your thinking about the role associations can play in bridging the education to employment gap. We’ll have some questions for you, and we hope you’ll have some for us. Our goal is to have a productive dialogue that opens all of our eyes to some new possibilities for benefitting our members, our other stakeholders, and society at large.

We’ll be in one of the pop up session pods, probably around 3:30 Sunday afternoon.

For the Deep Dive session, join me and Guillermo Ortiz de Zarate (National Council of Architectural Registration Boards) for a full 90 minute session on lean startup methodology.

There’s no bigger waste than investing resources working on the wrong thing. Lean startup is a development approach that requires articulating and testing assumptions, favors rapid experimentation over elaborate planning, relies on customer feedback over intuition, and encourages iterative design, all in the service of ensuring you’re investing in the right thing.

It’s based on our October 2015 white paper Innovate the Lean Way: Applying Lean Startup Methodology in the Association Environment, and because we have a deep dive session, we’ll have time to work through a multi-part exercise, using the lean canvas, where attendees will get to work with lean concepts like the MVP, The One Metric That Matters, and the Pivot, so you can learn to apply this technique in your own organization to eliminate waste, validate your learning, and innovate faster and more successfully.

The deep dive session will be in Salt Palace room 255E from 9 – 10:30 am on Tuesday.