Best Of Zen

Recalibrating Normal

Five years ago, I wrote an article for Association Management magazine--now Association Now--in response to the editor's question: "When will things return to normal?" My answer? "Maybe normal isn't all it's cracked up to be.  Maybe we lost our way when we became so professional that we lost touch with the passion of those who founded our associations."

That rant was the cover story in December 2003, Recalibrating Normal, challenging association professionals to return to what really matters by starting with the right questions.

"What if your association could attract the next generation of volunteers with a mission that matters and activities that also deliver personal and professional growth--financial success as well as a more equitable society?" 

• What if we were a movement, not an industry?
• What if values created value?
• What if members were our products, not our customers?
• What if work was a calling, not a career?

If you're an ASAE and Center for Association Leadership member, you can find the original article online here.   You can also download it at amazon.com. 

In this post-abundance era, maybe these questions will provoke another round of responses. Over the next few weeks, I will pick up and examine these questions again in this space.

Sweat Equity

News Flash:  An association is the means to achieving an end--it's not an end in itself. 

Far too many association professionals are losing sight of that fact, at their peril. As I talk to private enterprise CEOs about getting involved in their industries' associations, all signal their distaste, citing dissatisfaction with either the association staff or its exec. 

"No one on the staff knows what we really do,"  one disgruntled player said.  "The guy who runs that association thinks he's king," another noted.

Odds are if you think you have all the answers, you are not asking the right questions.  Are you neutering member engagement to save time, replacing your judgment for their's on what's best? 

Keep your eyes on the prize--the mission that holds everyone together.  How decisions are made is much more important than what you ultimately decide to do.   

A Future By Design

Strategic planning is under attack by those either frustrated by its misuse or incapable of harnessing its power.  Just look at the litany of failures summarized in a sad commentary by Jim Hallon, CAE, in the current issue of Associations Now. 

Luckily, for those who see strategic planning as the means to engage members in a conversation about their own future and their association as the means to change it, there is a new edition of ASAE and the Center's environmental scan by Rohit Talwar of Fast Future Research, due to be released later this month. 

Compared to other so-called strategic exercises of the recent past that were little more than painful recitations of the obvious, the new environmental scan, Designing Your Future: Key Trends, Challenges, and Choices Facing Association and Nonprofit Leaders, is an extraordinary achievement. 

Reading it, I am reminded of Lester Thurow, my all time favorite economist on the speaker circuit, who in 45 minutes can reduce terrifying geopolitical and economic forces to a virtual adventure game, drop you in the center of the action, and arm you with the weapons to fight your way out.

Designing Your Future confronts some extremely unpleasant realities, reduces the most significant to sets of patterns, and offers up alternative responses, each of which produces a bubble of hope.  The case studies make it tangible, the methodology is persuasive.  And a failure of imagination will render it completely useless, protecting you from less adept competitors.

Use tools like Designing Your Future and strategic planning to create a shared dream, mobilizing the people who can achieve it together.  Otherwise, like Jim, you will have to learn to live with disappointment.