Category: innovation

Book Review: The Back of the Napkin

Posted on | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE

Yes, I know this book was published in 2008, and it’s been sitting on my “to read” pile almost that long.

Fortunately, the Association Chat book club got me to bump it to the top of the pile, and I finally read it last month.

The book’s subtitle is: solving problems and selling ideas with pictures, and teaching you to do that is author Dan Roam’s ostensible goal.

Short version: it’s a great concept, but I’m not quite sure how to implement it.

Longer take:

According to Roam, there are three types of people: black pen types (who LOVE to draw ideas), yellow pen types (who are quick to jump in to edit and add), and red pen types (“I can’t draw”). Confession: I am definitely a red pen type.

On the other hand, I also LOVE visual representations of information. I love infographics. I’m always the one urging colleagues to use fewer words and more pictures to share information with senior leadership. I think every organization’s board status report should be a series of 5-10 key metrics that are tracked over time and shared in graphs or charts. I’m the person who infamously talked a panel  for the 2009 ASAE Annual Meeting into doing a presentation with NO words on the slides (that didn’t go over all that well).

So what I’m saying is that, while I am a red pen, I’m also someone eager to be persuaded that representing problems visually can help us solve them and to learn how to do it.

I’m just not sure that this book can get most of us there.

It’s not that Roam doesn’t provide plenty of information and explanation. He spends almost 150 pages explaining six key ways of seeing and five key ways of showing, then placing all that into a grid (page 141 if you have the book handy) that can tell you, based on the type of framework you need and a short series of either/or questions, which type of picture you’re going to need to explain what’s going on and spot a solution.

The second half of the book uses a single case study to work readers through the ways of seeing and showing, the framework, and the questions to get to, in chapter 15, a not-immediately-obvious solution and description of how one would present that solution to a team of executives.

But I still don’t feel like I would be able to apply the techniques he describes successfully the next time I’m faced with what looks like an intractable problem at the office.

Maybe I just need more practice. I have, in my last two positions and since hearing Roam speak at ASAE’s Great Ideas Conference a few years ago, insisted on having a white board in my workspace. I even use it sometimes. And once in a while, it doesn’t even feel forced.

The book does, however, make a GREAT case for hiring Roam to help your organization solve big, hairy problems, assuming you can afford him. And maybe that’s really the point.

Forget the Box! There is no Box!

Posted on | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE

How often do you hear the phrase: “think outside the box”?

I’m guessing the answer is: “way too damn much!”

When did we decide that ideas are supposed to live in boxes?

(Well, OK, we can find the origin story, but that still doesn’t answer the question.)

Or that ideas could be divided into “box” (aka “safe”) ideas and “non-box” (aka “risky” or “wacky” or “dangerous”) ideas?

What if we forgot about the stupid box entirely? What if there was no box to confine or exclude our ideas? What if there were just ideas, available to be evaluated on their own merits, not their relationship to some cliched box?

 

Who Are Your Allies?

Posted on | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE | 1 Comment on Who Are Your Allies?

Associations, particularly small associations, tend to suffer from a lack of resources, aka “that’s a great idea, but we don’t have any money for it.” Which can have a seriously negative consequences on impact and what the organization is able to accomplish.

One way to address this is through creating a network of allied organizations.

So how do you do that?

The first step is research. You need to figure out what organizations have similar enough, but not identical, missions and audiences. You’re looking to compliment each other, not to compete. And you want organizations that are at a similar level of influence. Too many orders of magnitude bigger or smaller, and the power dynamic gets out of whack, which can make it hard to find mutual benefit.

The next step is to think through what mutual benefit might look like. What can you offer that they might want? What do they offer that you want? Can you create packages of roughly equivalent value? Possible areas of interest might include discounts for members on programs, products or services, exhibit booth swaps, conference speaking session swaps, mailing list swaps, ad swaps, article swaps, guest blogging, joint products, advocacy alliances, joint workshops or webinars, applying for research grants together…think through everything both organizations offer and look for places you could work together.

Third, you have to make contact. This is where things like LinkedIn can come in handy. Look for a path, ideally, to the person who seems most likely to be able to say yes or no, but also realize that the first person you’re able to connect with might not be the right person to negotiate a relationship. Don’t be afraid to pick up the phone, and do be persistent but don’t be obnoxious.

Assuming you find the person with the appropriate authority and willingness to make a deal, the next step is to negotiate something that will work for both of your associations. You want both organizations to have an initial positive experience, so your beta should be structured to make that as likely as possible, which means start small. But brainstorm big. Assuming your first test goes well, you want to have ideas waiting in the wings to expand the relationship.

Lather, rinse and repeat with additional organizations, and watch your association’s sphere of influence expand exponentially.

Do We REALLY Know What Our Members Need?

Posted on | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE | 3 Comments on Do We REALLY Know What Our Members Need?

For ONCE I was able to participate in #assnchat this week! KiKi was taking the week off, so Nikki Jeske (aka “Affiniscape“) hosted. Nikki did a great job, but I thought her closing question was particularly good:

[Q7] What’s one thing you could do TODAY to better serve your members? Go do it! #assnchat
— Affiniscape, Inc. (@affiniscape) January 10, 2012

And….there was silence. And this was in the midst of a hoppin’ #assnchat. Which I think was really informative. I don’t think we know the answer to that question. I think, if most of us association professionals were honest with ourselves, we’d admit that we’re so insulated from our members that we don’t know what they need. We know what WE THINK they need, but we don’t truly know what they think they need.

So my real A7 is: find ways to have more interaction w mem so I can answer that question from place of knowledge #assnchat
— Elizabeth Engel (@ewengel) January 10, 2012

Of course, that begs the further question: how? How do you – how do I – ensure that meaningful member interaction between large numbers of our members and large percentages of our staff takes place on a regular basis? And how do we capture the knowledge that results?

I don’t know the answer to this – but I damn well am going to try to find out.

Book Review: Humanize

Posted on | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE | 1 Comment on Book Review: Humanize

If you’re one of my regular readers – or someone who knows me IRL – you probably know of my disdain for business books. Generally, they state the obvious or the *painfully* obvious at a fifth-grade reading level, with LARGE print on pages with LOTS of white space. I firmly believe that, with very few exceptions, reading them actually makes you dumber.

So I don’t say this lightly: Humanize is genius.

Authors Maddie Grant and Jamie Notter use the lens of social media to examine our “modern” business, management, and leadership practices and find them au courant…with the Industrial Revolution. At that time, perhaps a mechanical view of the world made sense, or at least more sense than it does now. But social media has spurred a revolution in the way people relate to each other on the individual, micro, and macro levels. The genie’s loose, and he’s not going back.

And while we shouldn’t – and in many cases don’t – even want to go back, our organizations are not keeping pace. Our focus on best practices (imitation) over innovation, a strategic planning process that assumes that the future is knowable and unchanging, human resources management that relies on hierarchy, org charts and knowing (and keeping to) your place, and leadership that’s viewed as some sort of “secret sauce” that individuals either have (so they get to be at the top of the org chart) or don’t (so they’re one of of the proles) keeps us stuck in those old systems and patterns that are killing us.

Maddie and Jamie go on to identify four key qualities that can help our organizations be more human (or, more accurately, stop trying to force organizations made up of people into an assembly line mentality): being open, trustworthy, generative, and courageous. In the meat of the book, they examine how these four qualities, expressed through the mediums of organizational culture, internal process/structure, and individual behavior, have the power to create organizations that, to quote p. 247, “inspire us and bring out the best in us.”

If business people read, accept and implement the ideas contained in Humanize around these qualities and how they can be fostered at the personal, process, and organizational level (hardly a given of course), I believe this book has the power to RADICALLY transform our organizations and, just possibly, save the world of associations in the process.

 

“Done is the engine of more.”

Posted on | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE | 7 Comments on “Done is the engine of more.”

A few months ago, I was having a discussion with some smart association peeps, and we got talking about the fact that, in membership organizations, it’s not so much that we fear failure for its own sake. What we really fear is criticism – from our colleagues and bosses, sure, but even more so from our members and boards.

Because of that, we’re change-averse, decision-averse, and completion-averse. If I keep working on a project forever, and never roll it out, no one can ever find anything wrong with it, right?

The thing is, all those partially completed projects that should’ve been done in 6 weeks but drag on for 6 months weigh us down. If it’s never finished, you never get to check that one off and move on to the next project or idea. You never even get to move on to the 1.2 version of the current project.

We get so caught up in the “everything has to be PERFECT” mindset that we shut out our members and their ideas and opinions, and make them passive consumers rather than active partners.

What if, rather than waiting until we had everything just so to roll out our new member service, we went to our members with: “This is a new service we’re considering. We don’t have all the kinks worked out yet, so we know some of you will want to wait to check it out until it’s in a more completed form. And that’s fine. But for those of you who are willing to try something that may not be 100% functioning yet, we’d love it if you could test it and give us your feedback so we can make sure that, once it is fully ready, it truly meets your needs and is easy for you to use.”?

What would that world look like? How much more engaged would your members be? How would that change their perception of ownership in your association? How would that impact relationships between staff, members and board? How much faster could you move? How much more could you provide for your members?

Idea Swappin’

Posted on | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE

This week’s Super Idea Swap at ASAE was great, as usual! We had lots of new faces – and plenty of familiar ones – and sessions with different topics than we often see.

I chose to participate in the session on diversity in the morning, led by Constance Thompson from the American Society of Civil Engineers, and Clinton Anderson, from the American Psychological Association. In the afternoon, I participated in the session on generations in the workplace, led by David Miles from the Miles LeHane Companies.

My top takeaways included:

  • When pairing up mentors and padawans, stop putting like with like (Asian man with Asian man, Latina with Latina, etc.), and look at people’s professional goals and who can best help them meet those goals.
  • Diversity is about how we’re the same and different. Inclusion is about using diversity to make us and our organizations better.
  • DJ Johnson shared two great tools: the diversity wheel and the concept of the diversity paradigm by Roosevelt Thomas.
  • If you don’t measure it, you can’t change it – getting data from our audiences is key to becoming more diverse as organizations, but we have to be transparent about why we want the information to allay people’s fears about sharing it.
  • We have to let people express the “who cares?” thoughts, since stifling those uncomfortable conversations helps no one.
  • Conflict is a sign of diverse voices, which, to a group that has been historically homogenous, feels threatening.
  • The decisions of a heterogeneous group take longer, but tend to produce better outcomes.
  • “Do you know next?”

 

 

Innovation: Small Staff v. Large Staff

Posted on | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE | 9 Comments on Innovation: Small Staff v. Large Staff

In the past 14 years, I’ve held a variety of positions in association management: senior staff in a mid-sized professional academic society, senior staff/acting CEO for a small ed-tech association, consulting, and now mid-level management at a large medical trade association.

Each place has had upsides and downsides. The academic society was in my “official” field (from undergrad and grad school), so I was really engaged in the meat of what we did and felt a deep personal connection with my members. I had the opportunity to manage a fantastic team, most of whom I’m still in touch with 14 years later. But tradition weighs particularly heavy on an august association of PhDs. Even though I had good internal support to try new things, there was only so far we could go. And the annual meetings were murder!

The small association was nimble and innovative, and I had pretty much totally free reign to try anything I wanted. We turned on a dime and had an AMAZING mission and community. Unfortunately, resources – staff, time, money, capacity, space – were a constant problem. Comes with the territory, but we constantly struggled to figure out ways to push all our great ideas forward on the cheap (or preferably, the free).

Consulting brought lots of fun, exciting variety, and I got to meet and work with terrific people from all sorts of associations, finding out about worlds I never would have encountered otherwise (and I got to work with a metallurgy organization staffed and led by a bunch of guys who reminded me a lot of my dad, which rocked – I love engineers!). But I was often in the position of turning over a bunch of (hopefully) useful recommendations that would have an immediate positive impact, with an “OK! Let me know how it goes!” It killed me to mostly not be able to help make change happen.

Large organizations allow you to be more specialized, so you develop deeper expertise in your areas of responsibility. Resources are rarely a serious impediment. And once again, great mission (there may be a theme here). But decision making can be glacial, and it’s often not entirely clear who needs to be involved in a given decision until you’re down the path and someone’s upset they’ve been left out.

So here’s my question for you, association peeps: how does one bring some of the good things small staff organizations enjoy with regards to new ideas and nimbleness to a large organization?

That’s not rhetorical – I’d really like your thoughts.

User Innovation in Practice

Posted on | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about the concept of user innovation versus producer innovation.

As a follow up, I thought it might be fun to share a small example of user innovation in practice.

One of the hats I wear at NACHRI is to fill our exhibit hall and keep our exhibitors happy.

You know what keeps exhibitors happy? Traffic.

So we’re always looking for ways to increase traffic. And I love to “borrow” good ideas from other places. One thing I noticed a lot of shows do to drive traffic in the exhibit hall is various types of exhibit hall games for drawings. So we instituted an exhibit hall passport game, drawing for one big prize (we’ve done a Wii, a Nook, and an iPad to date) and some smaller prizes.

Another thing we do after every show is survey our exhibitors about the experiences. The three most important questions we ask are:

  • Please rank your overall satisfaction with the show.
  • How likely are you to exhibit with us again?
  • If there was ONE thing we could do make your show experience better, what would it be?

In the fall, one of our exhibitors indicated that, while he liked the passport game because it did bring people to his booth, many of them only wanted to get their passport stamp and move on. He asked if we could maybe set it up as a trivia game, where you had to get the answer to question from each participating exhibitor. So we did.

Result? About 1/3 of our exhibitors generally participate in the game, and our recent spring conference was no exception. But 85% of our spring conference survey respondents said they’ll participate next time because of the meaningful exchanges they either experienced with attendees themselves or watched other exhibitors having around the cards this time.

What great ideas are lurking out there among the users of your products and services? Have you asked them recently?

User Innovation v. Producer Innovation

Posted on | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE

A recent piece in MIT’s Technology Review by Eric Von Hippel (excerpt freely available, subscription required to read the entire piece) on the topic of the sources of innovation got me thinking about innovation and associations.

The innovation faith is being widely preached in the association world these days, and many of us have converted. But that brings with it a certain amount of pressure, namely, to come up with great new ideas (since that’s really what’s at the root of innovation).

But there’s hope: YOU don’t have to come up with all the great new ideas in order for your association to be innovative. You just have to be open to new ideas, recognize them, and be ready to pursue them, no matter what the source.

How does that play out for associations? Technically, we’re all in existence because of our members (remember them?), to serve them and their professional or industry needs.

Does your association allow room for innovation, aka great new ideas, from the people who actually use what you produce – you know, your members and other audiences?

What mechanisms do you have in place to solicit their ideas on a regular basis? No, not just the board – the “regular” rank and file members. We all tend to be guilty of the fallacy of composition when it comes to our boards, including the board members themselves, but in reality they tend to speak mostly for their own needs and not be some sort of objective, impartial voice of the membership as a whole.

Once ideas bubble up from the membership, what happens next? Do you do anything with them? Do you even reserve the capacity (time, money, staff, other resources) to do anything with them?

Regardless of the outcome (because not all new ideas are necessarily good), how do you let people know what happened and why?

The thing is, your members are a lot closer to what you’re doing and producing, ostensibly for their benefit. Why not ask them what they think about how you can make your offerings better for them, and then try to do something beneficial with what they tell you?