Category: innovation

Getting Lean

Posted on | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE | 1 Comment on Getting Lean

Is it just me, or is lean process trending?

I recently read a great Harvard Business Review article on the lean startup. According to HBR, lean:

…favors experimentation over elaborate planning, customer feedback over intuition, and iterative design over traditional “big design up front” development.

It also includes the ideas of the “minimum viable product” and the decide –> experiment –> learn –> iterate cycle.

Per the HBR article, lean is built on three truths:

  1. All you have to start with are untested hypothesis, aka “good guesses.” And investing a lot of time in crafting a detailed five-year business plan based on “good guesses” is a fool’s errand.
  2. Your good guesses will never be more than that until you actually start interacting with your potential customers. So the sooner you start talking to them, the better. Yes, before you actually have a product to show them.
  3. Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Get a product out there, even if – especially if – it’s still in beta and plan to make improvements immediately and continually.

Lean also requires us to be transparent. No more operating in secrecy until you have everything just right – invite your customers in as part of your design and development process, with the goal of making your product better.

How does this all apply to associations?

Associations Now recently addressed that, with an article looking at lean process in associations. The AN article addresses the more old-school concept of lean manufacturing, developed by the Japanese after WWII, which focuses on eliminating waste and redundancy.

While I get that eliminating waste and redundancy is important, particularly in typically thinly-resourced tax exempt organizations, if we stop there, we’re missing the good stuff.

I think the most important thing for us to remember is that, at the beginning of any new program, product, or service all we have are good guesses. Admitting that publicly and celebrating it is the key to everything that follows. It grants us tremendous freedom, because it removes a lot of the ego involved in decision making, allowing us to have more than one good guess and to know right from the beginning that they aren’t all going to work out. If you’re just making an educated guess that you know you’re going to have to test, it removes all the pressure to be 100% right 100% of the time.

What could your association accomplish if you could be free to guess, test, and learn?

 

Association Alumni Networks

Posted on | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE | 3 Comments on Association Alumni Networks

I was recently reading an article in Harvard Business Review on the changing employer-employee relationship. The main point of the article, to quote, is:

The time has come, we [authors Reid Hoffman, Ben Casnocha, and Chris Yeh] believe, for a new employer-employee compact. You can’t have an agile company if you give employees lifetime contracts—and the best people don’t want one employer for life anyway. But you can build a better compact than “every man for himself.” In fact, some companies are doing so.

Hoffman, Casnocha, and Yeh propose taking lessons from start-ups and learning to work with and accommodate the “entrepreneurial” employee. They have a lot of interesting suggestions, and if you have time, I recommend reading the entire article, but one in particular drew my attention: Employee Alumni Networks.

Again, to quote:

The first thing you should do when a valuable employee tells you he is leaving is try to change his mind. The second is congratulate him on the new job and welcome him to your company’s alumni network.

The idea behind employee alumni networks is similar to that behind college alumni networks: they allow you to maintain long-term relationships with good people after your formal relationship ends, and for them to keep affiliation with you, even if they no longer have a direct financial relationship with you.

According to the article, 98% of Fortune 500 companies have formal or informal employee alumni networks. The benefits to the company include rehires, expanding your network of evangelists, new business opportunities, and collecting competitive intelligence.

The authors also stress that there needs to be a two-way exchange of value. They posit things like discounts, company swag, free insights or intelligence reports, and alumni newsletters for company alumni.

It got me thinking: why don’t we have association alumni networks?

When members leave, we tend to write them off. Why? Members leave for a variety of reasons that may have nothing to do with the association: they changed careers, they retired, their employer stopped supporting(financially or philosophically or both) association membership, etc.

What if, rather than treating them as disloyal pariahs, we could figure out a way to keep them engaged as an alumni audience?

Why wouldn’t your association want to get the benefits of rejoins, added evangelists, information sharing, and new business opportunities?

What could you offer to your membership alums? A LinkedIn or Facebook group? Discounts? A special newsletter? Association swag? Occasionally sending them a free publication?

I think this all gets to a larger question I plan to address in an upcoming post: why do we feel compelled to act as if “membership” is the only relationship people can have with our associations?

The Looming Retirement Crisis

Posted on | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE | 5 Comments on The Looming Retirement Crisis

No, I don’t mean the typical “Boomers haven’t saved enough!” wailing, although that’s certainly likely to be a problem. I mean the hourglass problem.

As in, there are somewhere between 72-79 million Baby Boomers, and there are a lot fewer Gen-Xers. I’ve seen figures ranging from 39-49 million, and I find it telling that while it’s easy to get a definitive answer to “how many Boomers are there?” it is not easy to get the same information on Gen-X.

Much like we hear today in regards to Millennials, in the early/mid-90s, associations were freaking out about Gen-X not joining. “It’s the damn Internet! Websites will be the death of us!” Uh, no. Turns out, it was mostly a life stage issue. As in, “I’m 25, and if you’ve seen Slackers, you realize that there’s a good chance that I not only haven’t settled on a career, I’m not even sure if I’m coming back in to THIS job tomorrow.” Sure enough, as Xers started to settle on careers, we also started to join associations.

But – and this but is important – we’re approximately 50% smaller as a generation than the Boomers that preceded us. What that means is that, even if we join and participate at the exact same rate at Boomers, associations are potentially facing a membership and leadership (both paid and volunteer) crisis.

But – and this is also an important but – it’s probably temporary. Coming up behind Gen-X is the even larger than the Boomers (80+ million) Millennial generation. Who are currently in their “I’m 25 and I’m not settled” phase. The good news is, due to various generational characteristics (like their team orientation, interdependence, connectedness, and community-mindedness), the future looks pretty good for civic and professional engagement, volunteering, networking, involvement.

So there’s probably no reason to panic, but associations are still going to need to bridge that gap created by the Gen-X waist of the hourglass. How?

Reach up, and reach down.

Plenty of associations are currently focusing on young professionals, with discounted or even free dues, mentoring programs, outreach, networking opportunities, leadership programs, educational programs, creating set-aside seats in governance for young professionals, reaching out to students in their professions or industries, career services, etc. And all that’s important. This is a generation that is likely to be more loyal and respectful of authority than their cranky Gen-X elders, which means bringing them in and giving them a place early is likely to pay good dividends.

The area that I see associations ignoring, though, is reaching up to retired and retiring members. They are a huge untapped resource for associations. Boomers are, generationally, people who will support things for the common good, at least far more so than cynical Gen-X. They are retiring more gradually and partially than previous generations. They are living longer, healthier post-retirement lives.

In retirement, or at least semi-retirement, they have some tremendous assets that associations can use. They have time, wide networks, and expertise. They also have less money than at the height of their careers, and less need to stay up to date on all the latest in their professions or industries.

How might that play out in keeping them engaged to help associations over the Gen-X dip, until the Millennial cavalry arrives?

Boomers make great mentors. Not so much to Gen-Xers (remember, we’re the “kids these days are no good” generation), but definitely to Millennials, who are just starting out in their careers and who are inclined to like, trust, and want to work with their elders. And they like to share their expertise in new technologies. Is your association running a cross-mentoring program to match experienced Boomers with early career Millennials, who can, in turn, help those Boomers learn tech?

Boomer make great fundraisers. Retaining elements of their youthful idealism, they do believe in causes. And they have the time and networks to do some dialing/visiting for dollars, or even contribute themselves as major donors. What Big Idea projects does your association wish you had the funds to try? Who among your long-term members can help you get there?

Boomers have great experience and institutional knowledge. They can teach courses on key issues in your industry or profession, or even help prepare the coming generations for volunteer leadership roles in the association. Some might provide that expertise for free, and some might appreciate a little extra cash for developing and teaching high-level courses in your field.

What other ways can you think of to engage your “elder statesman” members to benefit your profession, your industry, your association, your membership, and your young professionals?

I think finding good answers to that question will be one of the major keys to association financial health in the coming decade.

Novelty for Novelty’s Sake

Posted on | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE

As associations, we have to be wary of “we have always done it that way.” And if you read this blog regularly, you know that I rail against unwillingness to change pretty frequently. I would count myself as strongly pro asking new questions, proposing new ideas, and coming up with new ways of doing things.

But.

I think we also have to watch out for changing gears just for the sake of changing gears. Sometimes, we’re too quick to dump things that are working.

I’m not saying rest on your laurels, get stale, and never ask any questions about how you can improve. If something is working well, there’s almost always a way to make it work even better. We should always be looking for opportunities to expand, improve, tweak, test, and learn to see if we can get better results.

But we also need to be make sure we don’t throw out effective campaigns or programs or services just for the sake of novelty.

 

Is It Time for a New Model of Membership?

Posted on | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE | 5 Comments on Is It Time for a New Model of Membership?

I recently spoke on this topic as part of the April Alexandria Brown Bag focusing on Grassroots Membership Strategies, where I shared the story of my fab client the American Medical Student Association. About a year ago, they switched to a free membership model (disclaimer – I cannot claim any credit for this, as we started working together in the aftermath of the switch). They’ve had some really interesting outcomes, as I’m sure you can imagine.

At the same time, there’s recently been a big discussion about membership models on ASAE’s Collaborate community, which frankly, got a little chippy. I think the reason for it resulted from a fundamental misunderstanding: one, considering new membership models doesn’t automatically mean an organization is going to switch; and two, “new membership model” does not automatically mean “free membership” (despite the fact that it’s been garnering a fair amount of attention recently).

In fact, I’m currently working with another client on looking at their membership model with an eye towards a potential change, and we’re not even considering free membership as a possibility.

If you are considering doing the same, there are a few key things you need to think about:

  1. You need to make an accurate and clear-eyed assessment of your association’s financial picture. No rose colored glasses, no overly optimistic assessments of future increases in revenue or decreases in expenses, review of your investments, review of your reserves and what you are and are not willing to use them for, how big a change in revenue or expense you can absorb and for how long, etc.
  2. You need to know where your revenue comes from and where the potential for growth lies.
  3. You need to have an open and honest conversation with your Board and your senior staff about potential risks, what you will do to ameliorate them, and how you would handle the worst case scenario, should it arrive.
  4. You need to be CRYSTAL clear about your goals and be certain about how you’ll know you did or did not achieve them.
  5. You need to be willing and able to give it time.

 

Are You Creative?

Posted on | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE | 2 Comments on Are You Creative?

If you ask a group of kindergarteners if they can sing, dance, draw, paint, act, etc., every single one of them will raise her hand.

If you ask that same group if they can read or do math, you might get a few hands, but largely, no.

If you ask a group of middle schoolers if they can read or do math, every single one of them will raise her hand.

If you ask that same group if they can sing, dance, draw, paint, act, etc., you might get a few hands, but largely, no.

We all know this. What happens? Do nearly all humans somehow become NOT creative in eight years?

No, say the guys who founded IDEO in a recent article in the Harvard Business Review.

What we have to do is “reclaim our creative confidence.” In fact, it’s critical to our ability to come up with new ideas and be willing to try them – in other words, to innovate.

They identify four fears that block creativity:

  1. fear of the “messy unknown”
  2. fear of being judged
  3. fear of the first step
  4. fear of losing control

Think these apply to associations?

Fear of the messy unknown is about being uncomfortable with ambiguity. We want answers – not only AN answer, but THE answer. We like budgets that account for every pencil we’re going to buy down to the penny and that balance with a respectable 5% profit (only we call it “revenue over expense”). Our volunteer leaders like projects that start and end within their term. We want to be able to measure everything, and share a dashboard with our members that shows how awesome we are because we grew 2% over last year. We want guarantees that “it” (whatever “it” is) is going to work before we’re willing to try it. We want to invest only in sure winners.

Why? Because we fear not failure, and not even necessarily judgement, but criticism. Twenty members might love the experiment, and fifty might be willing to give it the benefit of the doubt for now, but if three complain, we have to shut it down. NOW. Board member? Only one person has to complain.

So if we know that we can only bet on winners and only make bets everyone agrees with and supports whole-heartedly, no wonder we can’t take the first step. Too risky.

In the end, it is all about control, or the illusion thereof. It comes from a good place – we want everything to be perfect for our members all the time – but it leads to a very bad place, known as The Land of We Have Always Done It That Way.

Where could your association go if you could learn to face and release your fears?

(Read the article – it will inspire you and maybe help you see a way out.)

 

What Is Your Real Mission?

Posted on | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE

Last fall, I had the opportunity to participate in The Boondoggle. Organized by Joe Gerstandt and Jason Lauritsen, it provided an opportunity for 10 people who didn’t know each other to sit in a cabin outside Omaha for 2 1/2 days and think and talk deeply about the future of work.

By the afternoon of day two, we’d pretty much all gotten past the posturing, and we were finally getting real. We had grouped all the previous day and half’s work into key themes, then we did an exercise where teams were assigned to facilitate a discussion around each of the key themes.

My partner and I were assigned to facilitate a discussion around finding meaning in your work, which led us into talking about organizational mission, and how that aligns – or doesn’t align – with personal values.

Now I’m not saying that everyone has to find deep meaning in her work. I think it’s completely acceptable to “just” a job that pays your bills, and find your meaning in your family and friends or your religious community or your volunteer work or your avocation.

But I do think that if you want to find meaning in your work, that option should be available to you. And everyone doesn’t have to find the same meaning. If your meaning is saving puppies or teaching kids to read, that’s great. But your meaning could be a fat title and a fatter paycheck. It could be amassing personal power. You should’ve have to “greenwash” what’s really important to you.

The problem is, every organization – for profit or otherwise – has a mission statement. But most of them are so much sunny bullshit.

If you want to know what an organization really values, look at what they reward.

Do they say they value customer service, but their default answer to everything is “that’s against policy”?

Do they claim to value teamwork, but reward kingdom building and territoriality?

Do they say they provide quality products and services at competitive prices…and don’t?

Do they say they want innovation, then automatically shoot down every new idea anyone proposes?

And even when what the organization actually values isn’t in direct conflict with what the organization claims to value, mission statements are often nothing more than empty platitudes that sound nice and mean nothing.

Why not be honest?

If your organization will do ANYTHING – exploit low-skilled workers, pollute the environment, skirt taxes and regulations – to make your widget 5 cents cheaper than the other guy’s, admit it.

If you really do value excellent customer service above all, live it, and tell people.

If what your organization really wants is to never, under any circumstances, rock the boat in your industry or profession, say so.

If you aim to change the world in some tangible way no matter what the cost to the people involved, let people know.

Brand authenticity drives brand loyalty. If you’re open and authentic about what life is really like inside your organization, you’ll find yourself doing business with staff and customers who are truly of a like mind and can align themselves with what your organization is truly values, not some nice, sappy-sounding thing that’s on your website that is patently false.

There really are people who would love to work at a place where the profit motive is the most important thing. There really are people who want to change things so badly, they will not count the personal cost. It’s not everyone, but if, as an organization, you can be honest about what you really value, the people who do choose to do business with you will be choosing that from an authentic place and will, ultimately, be happier.

Be authentic, warts and all. Someone will still love you and want exactly what you’re offering.

 

Strategic Planning v. Strategic Thinking

Posted on | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE | 2 Comments on Strategic Planning v. Strategic Thinking

Lots of chatter about strategy and strategic planning on the ASAE Collaborate groups recently, with lots of people throwing around lots of VERY IMPORTANT sounding terms.

Me, I like simplicity. To quote the Eaglet from Alice in Wonderland: “I don’t know the meaning of half those long words, and, what’s more, I don’t believe you do either!”

What do we mean when we talk about strategy?

Strategy is a plan of action designed to help you achieve a set of goals. The best strategies answer a few deceptively simple questions:

  • Where are we now?
  • Where would we like to be?
  • How are we going to get there?
  • How will we know we arrived?

The way that tends to manifest in associations is that every 3 to 5 years, we hire an outside facilitator to sit down with the board and – maybe – the senior leadership team and do “strategic planning.” The inevitable result? A lovely report that spends the next 35 to 59 months sitting on a shelf collecting dust.

Meanwhile, the world is changing EVERY SINGLE DAY.

Henry Mintzberg wrote a famous article for the Harvard Business Review in 1994 (that’s almost 20 years ago, people) titled “The Fall and Rise of Strategic Planning.” Short version: he’s not a fan. As Mintzberg points out, strategic planning is about analysis of data, while strategic thinking is about synthesis of data. Strategic planning is a process (see above, RE: report that sits on a shelf), while strategic thinking is about vision, intuition, and creativity. In other words, about where you would like to be as an organization and how you get there,

Dissecting strategic thinking versus strategic planning:

  • Dynamic rather than static
  • Flexible rather than rigid
  • Continuous rather than episodic
  • Focused on emergent trends rather than historic standards
  • Rapid rather than staid
  • Fluid rather than fixed
  • Invention rather than reifying what already exists
  • Journey rather than destination
  • Accommodates disruption rather than being thrown into chaos by it

Again, quoting Mintzberg:

“Strategic planning often spoils strategic thinking, causing managers to confuse real vision with manipulation of numbers. And this confusion lies at the heart of the issue: the most successful strategies are visions, not plans.”

What are you doing to generate a vision of the future in your organization?

Dump Your Committees

Posted on | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE | 1 Comment on Dump Your Committees

Volunteerism is changing.

I know I’m not the first person to think – or write – about this. Hell, Peggy Hoffman and Cynthia D’Amour have built their businesses on working with new volunteer models. But recent events have conspired to bring it top of mind for me.

The thing about standing committees is that they’re standing.

Think about that for a moment.

Not “walking.” Not “running.” Not “flying.” Not “innovating.”

Standing. As in “still.”

OK, that may be excessively harsh.

One of the problems with standing committees is that they can easily become zombies, continuing on with calls and meetings and reports to the board whether or not there’s actually anything for them to DO.

Now maybe, at some point in the past, nobody really cared all that much. It was part of your community responsibility to be on the call or in the meeting or to write the report, and if nothing was happening, you were OK with that. Common good and whatnot. At least that’s the theory about Boomers, although I tend to think it’s way less true than everyone pretends it is, but whatever.

One thing we know about following generations is that we’re at least more comfortable expressing our irritation with wasted time and effort. We want to come together, GSD (Get Shit Done), and move on.

What does that remind you of? A task force, right? Bring together a group of people who are genuinely interested and skilled in the task at hand, work on it until it’s done (whether that’s an hour, a day, a week, a month, a year…), have a nice happy hour to celebrate your success, disband.

I know what you’re about to say: “Our standing committees are set in our bylaws. Do you know what a pain in the ass it is to try to change our bylaws?”

Actually, yes, I do, having been through it in prior associations. And you do probably have to maintain a standing finance committee. But just because something is hard to do doesn’t mean it’s not a good idea.

Scared?

What about an experiment?

The next time one of your board members comes up with a great idea that doesn’t have a natural home in one of your existing committees, try putting together a task force to work it, and see what happens. If it goes well, try disbanding one of your standing non-bylaws-mandated committees (you know you have at least one) and spreading their work to some task forces. If that goes well, maybe it’s time to open the conversation about which standing committees you really have to have, and which you don’t.

 

Mastering Your Craft

Posted on | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE | 4 Comments on Mastering Your Craft

This past fall, I had the opportunity to participate in a multi-day retreat with a bunch of smart people where we focused on the future of work. Talking about the future of work led us naturally into  talking about the future of getting ready to work, aka our education system.

One of the concepts that came up, tying both work and education together, was apprenticeship.

On the education side, we are facing a crisis in higher education. It is increasingly difficult to get into college. Once there, students are having increasing trouble finishing on time, or even finishing at all. However they exit, young people and their families are incurring substantial debt burdens. And a college degree, even in a fairly “job training” focused field like business, marketing, or computer programming, is no longer a guarantee of a good job, or any job.

Meanwhile, employers complain that recent graduates lack the type of critical thinking, reasoning, and analytical skills the employers truly need in their workforce. And, in fact, the skills we need to be successful at work are changing dramatically.

Now some people – myself included – would argue that what is commonly referred to as a “traditional liberal arts education” (aka, studying impractical stuff like philosophy and literature) can, in the right circumstances, get you quite a long way towards acquiring skills like critical thinking and sense making and analysis and transdisciplinarity. But with the neighbors’ kid not finding work with her shiny new engineering degree, how many parents (how many students?) are really going to be willing to take that particular risk?

Even very technical degrees, like computer programming or engineering, don’t, in most cases, mean that the degree holder is ready to be a professional in that field. The degrees indicate an aptitude for the subject matter and a willingness to learn more about it, but people still need a period of mentored training to learn their craft.

“Mentored training”? Sounds a lot like apprenticeship.

For large chunks of human history, apprenticeship was the ONLY way to learn one’s work. You had a family business. You joined a guild. You clerked for a lawyer on the way to becoming a lawyer. You “watched one, did one, taught one” on the way to becoming a doctor.

You can still become a lawyer through clerking and taking the bar – in some places – rather than going to law school. Many licensed trades – plumber, electrician, welder – still work through apprenticeships.

Why not office/information worker jobs?

In the current model, a young woman completes high school and, with rare exceptions (i.e., the “gap year” model), proceeds directly to college. She studies something “practical,” like business, and graduates in four or five years, with an average school debt of more than $26,000. She may or may not have any real idea of what she actually wants to do, and even if she does, she may or may not be able to get a job in her chosen field.

Picture this as an alternative: a young woman completes high school. She takes a gap year to do a little looking around at the world, thinking about what she might want to do, and having adventures. At the end of that year, she gets an entry level job, but not flipping burgers or pulling espresso shots or answering phones. She gets assigned to a senior professional in a field that’s of interest to her – medicine, law, carpentry, association management, whatever – and starts learning her trade on the job and while drawing a paycheck.

“But,” you ask, “what happens when she realizes that she does need a class in biology (for medicine) or trigonometry (for carpentry)? And she didn’t go to college!”

Enter MOOCs (massive open online courses).

Right now, MOOCs are great – take classes from an Ivy for free! – and problematic – sure, but the best you can do is a completion certificate. In other words, it’s not a degree program.

But what if you just need the knowledge, and the degree doesn’t matter? What if, in other words, you’re an apprentice?

I’m not trying to argue that this is THE solution to all our student debt and unemployment woes. I am saying that it’s an interesting potential contributor to a solution.

What do you think? Would you have skipped college to apprentice to your profession? Would you encourage your kids to consider it?

Image credit: Institute for the Future