There is No Recipe for Innovation

image source

Or so seems the conclusion of this fascinating blog post from Tim Leberecht of the the frog design and innovation firm, in which he reviews and connects several established and not-so-established kinds of innovation.

Jugaad seems the latest in a long list of innovation fads, "a colloquial Hindi word that describes a creative ad hoc solution to a vexing issue, making existing things work and/or creating new things with scarce resources." But that's just a launching pad for Leberecht, who gives his reader a stream-of-consciousness tour of different approaches to innovation floating around the business landscape. Design Thinking, Disruptive Innovation, Hybrid Thinking, Hacking, Shanzai--they're all given a quick but cogent treatment, the differences and distinctions between them blurring under Leberecht's scrutiny.

His larger point seems to be that there is no magic pill for innovation.

Most of these consultants are trying to sell innovation as a toolbox, but as former BusinessWeek writer Helen Walters aptly points out: Innovation cannot be reduced to a process. “A codified, repeatable, reusable practice contradicts the nature of innovation, which requires difficult, uncomfortable work to challenge the status quo of an industry or, at the very least, an organization,” she writes, and suggests that: “Executives are understandably looking for tidy ways to guarantee their innovation efforts – but they'd be better off coming to terms with the fact that there aren’t any.”

Which is an interesting backdrop for this week, because this is the week of WSAE's National Summit on Association Innovation, where association executives, professionals and industry partners will work together to create new capacities for innovation in the association community and to help individual association professionals develop practical innovation roadmaps for their own organizations. In the words of our summit facilitator, Jeffrey Cufaude:

By associating with each other in the collaborative learning environment of the National Summit on Innovation for Associations, we have the chance to not only gain fresh insights and develop tactical plans for our own organizations, but identify shared paths for moving together as a community.

I'm up for it. I'll be there and tweeting throughout the conference (following along and join in at #innovationhub).

It'll be another major step on the innovation journey I embarked upon when I joined the WSAE Board of Directors and became the chair of its Innovation Task Force. I went into that role with the impression that there was a way of "doing" innovation in the association world. Based on the innovation principles and processes I had been exposed to in the for-profit world, there surely was an adaptation to those models that could made for associations. It would be difficult to find, I believed, and it would take association professionals willing to experiment with different strategies in their real world, but it was there, and we could find it if we worked hard enough.

Now, almost two years later, I'm more confident than ever that associations can be innovative and can find ways to make innovation work for them. I've seen it in my own association and in many other associations in my network.

But I have increasing skepticism for the idea that there is a single innovation model that will work for everyone in the association community. Today, Helen Waters' words ring really true for me. We want innovation to be an established, predictable process, because established, predictable processes are easy for us to manage and master. But your innovation solution is going to be messy, and different from mine. There is a common body of innovation knowledge we can all draw from--things that have been shown to help and things that have been shown to hurt--but it is up to each one of us to study that body of knowledge and figure out how to apply it in our own situations.

I'm going to rededicate myself to that this week in Madison. When will you?

Recipes for Innovation

So here's a funny story. Trish Hudson of the Melos Institute sent me an email a few days ago.

Reason for writing - is I was at San Fran's Museum of Modern Art yesterday - saw something that made me think of you.

Dieter Ram is an industrial designer - did a lot of work with Braun in Germany. He has designed some very innovative tools...and created innovative designs for traditional tools. SFMOMA had an exhibit of his designs. On one wall -they shared his princples of good design...thought there might be some relevance to your interest in innovation...

So - here goes. Possible opportunities for adaptation to association management, maybe?

Dieter Ram's 10 Principles of Good Design
1. good design is innovative.
2. good design makes a product useful.
3. good design is asthetic.
4. good design makes a product understandable.
5. good design is honest.
6. good design is unobtrusive.
7. good design is long-lasting.
8. good design is thorough down to the last detail.
9. good design is environmentally friendly.
10. good design is as little design as possible (back to simplicity).

I wrote back and told Trish how odd it was that she should email me this, because just a few days before I had read a post of one of frog's blogs about the work of Dieter Ram, and how it had inspired me to prepare a post for Hourglass on its similarities to innovation in the association (and other) worlds. The frog post talks about Ram's collaborations with Braun and Apple, and highlights the following attributes as pivotal to their successes:

1. Close collaboration of designers and engineers, and deep involvement by designers in working with materials and manufacturing processes.

2. Supportive executives that made design integral to the way the company operated (Steve Jobs for Apple, and Erwin and Artur - the sons of founder Max Braun. And to their credit, when Gillette acquired Braun in 1963, they recognized the value of Braun's design team and gave it free reign.)

3. Obsessive attention to detail, supported by relatively long gestation cycles and an iterative, prototype-driven process.

4. A small, stable team (Apple's ID team is famously tight-knit, and the core of Braun's design team was largely unchanged for a quarter century during its golden age of output).

As far a recipes for innovation go, I prefer this shorter list than the one Trish sent over (although I remain jealous of her proximity to SFMOMA--one of my most favorite places in the world). Close collaboration of people with different perspectives, executives supportive of experimentation, obsessive attention to detail coupled with an iterative prototyping process, and small, stable teams who know their jobs and who they're innovating for--these are all themes that we've outlined in the WSAE white paper on innovation and which have been subjects of discussion on this blog.

"Funny how people and ideas are connected, isn’t it?" I wrote back to Trish and she replied:

Dare I get freaky in saying that there's a bigger force out there that connects like-minded folks at pivotal times in ways that defies description?

And when we listen intuitively and act accordingly - we have the opportunity to experience something that goes way beyond the intellectual realm....and often when we are able to blend intellectual and intuitive - we find innovation?

Blending the intellectual with the intuitive. Be sure to add a pinch of that to your innovation recipe.

Taking a Bullet for Your Association

There's a really critical lesson for association professionals in this guest post on Hugh MacLeod's blog from Kathy Sierra. In it, she challenges the traditional wisdom many organizations have for customer loyalty programs.

“Customer Loyalty” is a figment. Business “Loyalty Programs” are nothing more than rewards-based marketing. And by rewards (aka “incentives”), I mean bribes. That we so easily refer to a customer with a bagel punch card or virtual badge as more “loyal” is an example of just how far we’ve allowed corporations to abuse the language around human relationships.

Loyalty, Sierra argues, is not something customers have for the products they love, but for the way those products help them better realize their own potential and their own vision of who and what they want to be.

The key to understanding (and ultimately benefitting from) true “customer loyalty” is to recognize and respect that customers–as people– are deeply loyal to themselves and those they love, but not to products and brands. They are loyal to their own values and the (relatively few) people and causes they truly believe in. What looks and feels like loyalty to a product, brand, company, etc. is driven by what that product, service, brand says about who we are and what we value.

In making this distinction, Sierra (half jokingly) talks about "taking a bullet" for the products and services customers are supposedly loyal to. No one, she argues, would rush into a burning building to rescue their iPad, but people would risk their lives to save that sense of who they want to be and the essential tools that help them get there.

Reading the post made me think about my own association and my members. Would any of them "take a bullet" for the organization that employs me? Some would, I think, yes. I have some passionately loyal members, and I suspect you do, too. But like Sierra says, they wouldn't take the bullet for any of the programs or services we provide. Their loyalty is not to our products, but to the way the association can help them realize a better vision of themselves and their industry.

Think about that the next time you're writing marketing copy for your membership brochure.

Image source

Thoughts on Association Education

Just two.

Webinars. They must engage the audience. Recording the plenary sessions from your Annual Conference and letting people watch them on the web is about as useful as letting them read your committee reports. There are fundamental differences between the way you deliver education from a podium to a room of four thousand people and the way you deliver it over the Internet to a single individual sitting at his/her computer. Respect those differences.

Live Workshops. Schedule them so that no more than 20% of the time is spent in presentation mode and at least 80% of the time is spent with the participants interacting with each other. Trust me. If the room is filled with my peers, I can learn more and more quickly from interactive discussion than I can from listening to 75 minutes of didactic presentation. Really. I'm not kidding.

Special bonus thought on association board meetings. The same 20/80 rule applies. Yes, the CEO should makes sure the board members have accurate information and that their discussions are framed correctly. But then he/she should facilitate interaction by as many board members as possible. Talk less. Listen more.

Daring to Lead 2011

CompassPoint and the Meyer Foundation have come out with a new "Daring to Lead" study. I blogged a bit about their 2006 study, so thought I would give the 2011 update a read as well. It's a survey of more than 3,000 executive directors of non-profit organizations and, although it seems weighted towards charitable and social service organizations, there are a few interesting parallels and tidbits for associations.

First, the good news.

...the distribution of executive tenure across the 3,000 respondents reflects a healthy continuum of new and veteran leaders in the sector. Nearly a third of current executive (31%) have been on the job for fewer than three years; this is more than the 27% who have been on the job for ten or more years. Alarm at the potential widespread sector disruption executive turnover might cause has given way to concern about how best to prepare new leaders and their organizations to weather, and even leverage, inevitable transition.

It's good to hear the generational transition in leadership is actually taking place, and that people are starting to mellow out about it. In the 2006 study, there was a lot more angst about the crushing inevitability of time, and concerns that the new group of younger leaders were not prepared for their positions and (shockingly!) had higher expectations for pay and for work/life balance than the sector traditionally provided. Boomers, it seemed, would have to stay in their positions longer, or the critical missions of their organizations would not continue.

Daring to Lead 2011 seems to indicate that this is no longer the worry. It reflects, I believe, the leadership trend we're also seeing in the association world. More and more GenX and even Millennial leaders are coming into positions of prominence (something obvious to anyone who attended the recent ASAE conference in St. Louis) and, although old and new challenges still linger, the world is not crashing down and the work is somehow getting done.

Now, the bad news.

Executive time invested in working with boards of directors was notably low. Sixteen percent (16%) of executives reported spending fewer than five hours per month on board-related activity, yet nearly half of these executives described themselves as spending the right amount of time. The largest group of executives (39%) spend between five and ten hours per month--just 6% of their time overall--and half of these executives said this was the right amount of time. Other studies have found that executives who spend 20% of their time on board-related activity have high rates of satisfaction with board performance. Similarly, among these respondents, executives at the low-end of the time investment spectrum were the least happy with their board's performance.

This is disturbing and a trend, I hope, that is NOT reflected in the association sector. Speaking for myself, the predictive indicators defined above work. I definitely spend more than 20% of my time on board and board-related activities, and I am satisfied (to say the least) with the performance of the board in my organization. For executives who are not satisfied, I would ask them to reflect on how much time they are spending on the board and on board development activities. Investment of time and levels of satisfaction naturally go hand-in-hand from my perspective. To think that there are organizations whose executives are unsatisfied, but who are unwilling (or unable?) to spend more time on the problem, says something fundamentally deficient about the organization and its capabilities.

Good and Bad Lessons for Association Innovation

Here's a link to a 15-minute HBR video with Vijay Govindarajan, coauthor of The Other Side of Innovation: Solving the Execution Challenge. It's worth a look, full of some interesting lessons about innovation from the for-profit world. Unfortunately, from my point of view, only some of those lessons are good for the association community.

Let's start there--with the good. Govindarajan describes the truism that it is the rare organization that lacks the ability to produce new and creative ideas. Far more common is the inability to turn those ideas into action. This is the "other side of innovation" mentioned in his book title, and without it innovation truly doesn't happen. It's one thing to have an idea. It's another to turn that idea into reality.

The same problem plagues many associations. Govindarajan's (and my) advice is fundamentally to start small and build on success. He talks at length about how innovators at IBM created a revolution in computer processing power by implementing this simple formula, and I think the ideas and methods described are directly transferrable to the association environment. Don't try to change the world overnight. You won't be able to do it. Start instead with a bunch of experiments focused on incremental improvement in a wide variety of service areas. Honestly measure the results and reinvest resources dedicated to the losers in the winners and repeat. Doing so builds momentum behind the good ideas and allows for greater and greater leaps to take place with each reinvestment. It works. I've seen it. But it requires the ability to turn things off if they don't go well, something not all associations can do.

So that's a corporate practice that associations can learn something positive from. But some of Govindarajan's other ideas are not worth the same emulation. For example, his innovation prescription for companies is predicated on the idea that you have to separate the innovators from the performers. The people in the trenches, the people actually doing the work, are too busy and too close to the problems to be truly innovative with them. Better, says Govindarajan, to create a separate innovation team, let them tackle the problems and develop creative solutions, and then manage the inevitable conflict that will rise when the innovators try to thrust their ideas on the performers for implementation.

This frankly seems crazy to me. It's a strategy that's definitely biased towards large organizations with large resources at its disposal. Govindarajan admits as much near the end of the video. Some associations may fit that description, but I question whether such a separation is ever a good idea, regardless of the size of the organization.

Bringing in diverse talents and perspectives--that's a good idea. As is generating more ideas and building the capacity for translating the best ones into action. Govindarajan seems to say that those goals are best accomplished by a separate innovation team, but I think it's better to engage your performers in these tasks. It may be more challenging than delegating those jobs to an "external" group of experts, but it also builds a deeper capacity for innovation in your organization. And that's going to pay larger dividends in the long run. Not just in the generation of ideas, but on Govindarajan's other side of innovation as well. Who else, after all, is going to develop the programs and deliver them to your members?

The Season of Innovation

That's certainly what it feels like with the ASAE Annual Meeting next week and the WSAE-sponsored National Summit on Association Innovation five short weeks after that. ASAE has put together some deep dive sessions on innovation, and something they're calling the Innovation Exchange Forum, a place where association staffers can get together and share innovative ideas with each other and with recognized experts.

Jeff De Cagna will be heading up a lot of those ASAE activities, and Jeff will also be leading an important session at the WSAE event. On September 14 he will be gathering together a group of association and other thought leaders for a half-day session on how organizations across our community can collaborate to accelerate the overall pace of innovation. Our intention for this conversation is to bring together a group of stakeholders willing to invest in the creation of platforms and prototypes that will make it possible for associations to build their collective capacity for innovation and new value creation. Many of our organizations face common challenges. We want to test the idea that through a commitment to broad-based collaborations we can all address those challenges more effectively.

WSAE's second day, September 15, will be a full-day educational conference on association innovation, facilitated by Jeffrey Cufaude and Mark Anderson. Its focus will be on leveraging the collective wisdom of our community so that participants can develop detailed innovation roadmaps for their own organizations. If you’ve struggled at all with how to make your association more innovative, this would be an excellent opportunity to share your challenges and work together with your peers to develop actionable solutions.

I plan to be at both the ASAE and WSAE events. I hope you do, too.

Image source