What's Your Innovation Readiness? Part 3

For Part 2 go here. For Part 1 go here.

The Innovation Task Force of the Wisconsin Society of Association Executives (which I chair), is trying to develop an assessment tool for association executives to use in determining the "innovation readiness" of their associations. As part of our effort to develop an evidence-based model of innovation for the association community, we want to provide a way for associations to determine where they are on the continuum of innovative practice, and plug them into a set of proven strategies tailored for their own position.

Our draft tool consists of three questions. The first, discussed in Part 1 of this post, is "Does your leadership embrace innovation as one of the strategies necessary to achieve your goals?" If you can confidently answer "yes" to that question, you get to move onto the second question, discussed in Part 2, which is "Do you have a defined process for how innovation will function in your association?" If you've got both the culture for innovation and a defined process for how it will occur, you're ready for the third question:

Is that process working?

A simple question, but perhaps the toughest of the three to answer in the affirmative. This is where the innovation rubber really hits the road. Like all successful business processes, innovation does not happen without the appropriate resources to support it. As we observed in the for-profit case studies we examined, successful innovation meant, among other things:

1. Time in employee schedules for engagement in the innovation process;

2. Money allocated in the necessary budgets to allow the process to move forward and to capitalize on the ideas it generated; and

3. Management personnel that were in place to oversee the process and make sure it ran effectively.

There are certainly other factors that may keep an innovation process from working, but these three are among the first to look at if you're having difficulty. And if your process is suffering, then give your association a "readiness score" of "3". You've got the necessary culture, and you've defined a process, but something isn't working as effectively as it should. If that describes you, then we'd like to hear about your challenges and work with you to identify the strategies that can help your association and associations like yours to overcome them.

Please comment if you'd like to get plugged into our process.

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What's Your Innovation Readiness? Part 2

For Part 1 go here.

The Innovation Task Force of the Wisconsin Society of Association Executives (which I chair), is trying to develop an assessment tool for association executives to use in determining the "innovation readiness" of their associations. As part of our effort to develop an evidence-based model of innovation for the association community, we want to provide a way for associations to determine where they are on the continuum of innovative practice, and plug them into a set of proven strategies tailored for their own position.

Our draft tool consists of three questions. The first, discussed in Part 1 of this post, is "Does your leadership embrace innovation as one of the strategies necessary to achieve your goals?" If you can confidently answer "yes" to that question, then ask yourself the next question:

Do you have a defined process for how innovation will function in your association?

Having a leadership culture that embraces innovation is not enough. The culture is a necessary first step, but without a defined process for how innovation will occur, culture alone is generally not disciplined enough to capitalize on the innovative ideas that it may produce.

It's important to note that there is probably not one universal innovation process that will work for every association. But in the case studies we examined, all of the successful innovation processes we found included the following attributes:

A. Precise strategy. The problem to be addressed by the innovation process was clearly defined. Teams working on the problem knew what risks were acceptable and unacceptable, and how their success would be measured.

B. Eclectic teams. Who participated in the process was as important as the process itself. Team members were all creative thinkers, usually from different departments in the organization, and brought a variety of experiences and perspectives to the table.

C. Nimbleness. In the case studies, the objective of innovation was invariably to deliver better products or services to a constituency. In these competitive environments, the processes were designed to move quickly and be highly responsive to the needs of the community being served.

D. Clear decision points. These successful innovation processes generated high numbers of creative ideas. The method for selecting which ideas would be pursued and which would not was always defined up front, was clearly understood by all participants, and did not change as the process went forward.

Does your association have a defined process for innovation that encompasses all of these points? If not, give your association a "readiness score" of "2". You've got the necessary culture, but you need to design a process that will allow your association to harness and execute the innovative ideas it produces.

We'd like to hear about your challenges in building such a process and work with you to identify the strategies that can help your association and associations like yours to overcome them.

Please comment if you'd like to get plugged into our process.

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What's Your Innovation Readiness? Part 1

Regular readers of The Hourglass Blog know that I'm chairing the Innovation Task Force for the Wisconsin Society of Association Executives. Examining case studies of successful innovation in the for-profit community, the task force has drafted a set of principles of innovation--organizational traits the must be present to allow innovation to occur--a list of barriers common to associations that prevent them from adopting those principles, and some advantages unique to associations that could be better leveraged for innovative purposes.

The task force met again on September 10, and one of our tasks this time was to create a tool that would allow association executives to assess the "innovation readiness" of their organizations. Knowing that every association is probably at a different point on a continuum of innovative practice, and that the strategies that will work for an association at one point of that continuum won't necessarily work for an association at another, we want to provide a way for associations to determine where they are and then plug them immediately into a set of strategies best suited to their position.

Remember that our long term goal here is to create an evidence-based model for innovation in the association community, one replete with tested and practical strategies for how to "do" innovation in an association. With our principles, barriers and advantages developed, we want now to reach out to association executives across the country to engage them in an interactive dialogue about the practical strategies for innovation in an association. The "innovation readiness" tool will also provide a framework for this discussion, and will help us organize the strategies we hope to develop.

So, when it comes to assessing the innovation readiness of your association, we believe there are three basic questions you need to ask yourself. Here's the first:

Does your leadership embrace innovation as one of the strategies necessary to achieve your goals?

At one of recent meetings I attended I tweeted this:



Jen is Jennifer Blenkle of ASAE (who's spearheading an innovation initiative of their own) and Jen is 100% right. The first and most important piece of the puzzle is the culture of your organization, and your leadership is the key to your culture. If your leadership--however leadership is defined in your association--isn't on board with innovation, no innovation process you try to implement will succeed.

Does your leadership embody a true culture of innovation? If not, give your association a "readiness score" of "1". You've got the longest journey ahead of you, but we need you as part of our future discussion. We want to hear about the challenges you're facing and work with you to identify the strategies that can help you overcome them.

Please comment if you'd like to get plugged into our process.

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Generational Herd Mentalities

A little while ago, Neil Howe called attention on his blog to a New York Times feature story about a 24-year-old Millennial who, even amidst the Great Recession, is living at home and turning down $40K job offers until just the right opportunity comes along. As Howe notes:

The story lit up a firestorm of reader responses: no less than 1,487 comments thus far, and much larger echoes on the blogosphere. Many of the commenters lambasted the NYT for suggesting that this privileged young man’s experience (he lives in a nice suburban home and his dad is president of a small manufacturing company) is in any way representative of the employment hardships most youth are facing today.

But here's the part I find interesting:

Even more excoriated the young man for turning down the $40K offer—and the family for letting him live at home while turning down such offers. The most vicious remarks seemed to come from older (Generation X and Boomer) readers, who often cited their own tough, low-salary beginnings. Apparently, they disapprove of this generation’s tendency to hold fast to long-term plans and dreams. Be realistic, they insist. Eat humble pie. It will be good for you (to repeat what older Chinese now tell the rising “Little Emperor” generation) to “taste bitterness.”

Howe is perplexed by this reaction, citing (persuasively, I think) several mitigating factors, statistics and situational realities that make the Millennial's decisions more understandable. It's a good read, and it parallels the perspective of many Millennials in the job market today, wanting to succeed, but not willing to settle for second best.

Howe concludes his post by asking his readers:

Why do the sober-minded, future-oriented career choices of today’s Millennials make so many Boomers and Xers jump up and down in agitated condemnation?

And he gets his own slew of snarky comments from Xers, including this one:

I wonder if Mr. Howe would spewing out the same supportive verbage if it was, say, the late 1980s or early 90s when most early-20 Gen Xers were emerging into the job market, donned with glorious degrees. There was a recession going on then, too, and many of us had to go back home to live until we found a job. But, if I recall, Gen X was looked down upon for not being able to land stellar jobs with fabulous degrees and stuck living at home. As such, I wonder if this clearly Boomer parent would've been quite so supportive of a Gen Xer turning down a $40K a year job while living at home, hmmm? I think we know the answer to that one.

Okay. So why am I going into so much detail on this? Because as I said in my recent Only Xers Care About Work/Life Balance post, I sense an undercurrent of jealousy in a lot of Xer talk about Millennials. After all, we had to pay our dues when we were 20-something, taking any job we could find and clawing our way into leadership positions by compromising our values and learning to play by the rules set by the generation that preceded us. Why should Millennials be spared that difficulty and humiliation? Why should they be able to set their own rules and write their own tickets?

Here's a quick story.

I went to the University of Wisconsin in the late 1980s. Back then, in order to register for your classes at the start of each year, you had to hike all the way out to the Stock Pavilion on the western edge of the campus (the Stock Pavilion where livestock were once housed, shown and judged), stand in line like cattle to get your registation forms, and then march all over campus to the different buildings to get your forms signed by the appropriate departmental paper pushers. Need to take that Physics 201 class? Better get yourself over to the Physics building before all the sections with the good teaching assistants are taken. And what about that foriegn language requirement? Do you know where you need to go for that? Is that in the Humanities building?

In my senior year they introduced a new telephone registration system where students could do all of that by pushing buttons on their dorm room phones rather than hoofing it all over town--and many of the seniors I knew were angry (and jealous) that the new freshmen coming in wouldn't have to suffer the same difficulties and indignities we had all suffered for years. Why shouldn't they have to pay their dues? We did! These young kids--they've got it too easy and expect everything to be handed to them on a silver platter.

It's the same thing today. When young people have access to better opportunities than we did, why do we berate them for having the simple sense to take advantage of them? Do we expect them to adopt the same herd mentality we did?

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Those Fish Aren't Dead, They're Just Tired

This post from David Simms of the Bridgespan Group on the Harvard Business Review Blog got me thinking. In it, Simms bemoans the state of many nonprofit Boards, describing them as "aquariums of dead fish"--unengaged and unproductive. Here's one of his key observations:

What some board members tell me, when pushed, is that they tolerate things on a nonprofit board that they wouldn't stand for in their day jobs. The boards don't ensure that the organization has a sound strategy, they tolerate mediocrity in management, they don't hold the organization accountable for results, and they don't ensure that resources are adequate to accomplish goals.

I've seen this in my own experience--individual board members who demand excellence in their own organizations and in their own careers, but who don't insist on the same high standards for the association they have accepted governance responsibility for.

Why is this? One reason could be that the "fish" aren't dead, they're just tired.

Individuals who are driven to succeed in business or in their own careers generally have a lot of energy, which they need because success is hard. It takes focus, commitment, and endurance to be the best you can be at something. Association success is no different, except that it may be even harder than individual success, because the objectives are bigger, the stakeholders are more varied, and the politics are more complicated. New Board members may come into the situation intending to drive greater success, and even be ready to swim upstream, but step away after realizing the amount of personal time and energy real change will require.

How many times have you seen this happen? An association board says do X, and the executive director responds with, okay, that will require Y, with Y being some combination of staff time, money, and board member engagement. Staff time is never a problem from a board's point of view, and there's usually a solution laying around somewhere when it comes to money. But board member engagement? That's one of the most valuable resources an association has, and it is in very limited supply. If a project requires too much of it, even if it's something the board believes in, odds are the project is not going to succeed.

One of the essential responsibilities of a board is to ensure that the association has adequate resources to accomplish its goals. Board member involvement is one of those resources, but how many boards talk openly about how much of this resource there is and how it should best be applied? If you deal with this subject frankly, you may give some of those dead fish a reason to start swimming again.

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Association Advantages for Innovation

Here's part three of the "innovation for associations" white paper I'm helping to write while chairing the Innovation Task Force for the Wisconsin Society of Association Executives. As I've described before, our overall goal is to define an evidence-based model of innovation for the association community, and we've been analyzing several case studies of innovation in the for-profit community to see if those successful models can be adapted for the association world.

Part one of the white paper focused on the principles of innovation we identified from the case studies--organizational traits that are necessary to create a true culture of innovation. Part two discussed some barriers to innovation in the association world--obstacles that associations need to overcome if they are going to embrace the principles. Part three is the flipside of the barriers--organizational advantages that associations possess and which they can leverage for greater innovation.

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Potential Association Advantages

While associations in general experience the barriers described above when it comes to adopting the for-profit world’s principles of innovation, there are also several advantages that associations have over their for-profit counterparts given their unique organizational position and structure. These advantages include:

1. Direct access to the mind of the community

Innovative organizations know the needs and desires of the constituencies they serve—what we described above as understanding the “mind of the community.” In for-profit companies, this community is generally comprised of customers external to the organization. Developing an effective mechanism for understanding their needs can therefore be time-consuming and expensive. But an association’s community is made up of its members, and members typically comprise a number of established networks internal to the organization. Boards of Directors, committees, task forces—even supplier networks and, sometimes, staff departments—they all provide associations with a direct connection to their community that for-profit corporations committed to innovation would envy. These ready-made networks of key stakeholders are a clear advantage for developing a successful process of innovation within an association, as they can be continually leveraged for suggesting, selecting, testing, promoting and, ultimately, using the resulting innovative products and services.

2. Experience with diverse teams and team-based decision-making

Although associations are often hampered by overly complex organizational structures and decision-making processes, another clear advantage they have for adopting the principles of innovation is their experience in bringing diverse teams together for collective action. An association can be thought of as a gathering of colleagues/competitors who have come together to advance their given profession/industry while advancing their own careers/businesses. In this environment, associations have developed several successful strategies for identifying common objectives, creating partnerships, and dealing with dissension and debate—all based on helping diverse constituencies focus on the elements that unite them. When coupled with a targeted objective and clear decision points, these same strategies can be effectively leveraged as part of an effective innovation process.

3. A stewardship position for its profession/industry

Most associations enjoy a position as advocates and champions for their particular profession or industry. Although there is certainly competition in the association world, each successful association is viewed by its constituents as a necessary institution—something critical to the continued growth and development of the profession or industry. They generally would not be members if they did not think so. This provides the well-managed association with a kind of stability not enjoyed by for-profit entities, with some buffering from the vagaries of the marketplace. This should, but often doesn’t, allow for greater risk-taking opportunities in associations. But the reality is that association members are often committed to the success of the association, and to its ability to serve their needs, in a way that customers are not committed to the success of all but the most iconic companies. Their vocal leadership and participation can be effectively used to help an association find innovative solutions for even its most perplexing problems.

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I'm sharing the sections of our white paper here on Hourglass to hopefully get some feedback from a broader cross-section of the association community. Please comment and tell me what you think.

Only Xers Care about Work/Life Balance

So I finally got around to reading the article in the August 2010 issue of Associations Now about Generation X moving into leadership positions in the association world. You would've thought that someone who runs a blog dedicated to "exploring generations and leadership in associations and in society" would've gotten to that a little more quickly--but, hey, what can I say? Sometimes life gets in the way.

And that's exactly the proposition I want to put in front of you today. Like a lot of articles about generations in the workplace, this one calls X out as being particularly motivated--to a degree not seen in Boomers or Millennials--by a quest for "work/life balance." One GenX leader quoted in the article says this about the potential of pursuing an executive role at an association:

"[A leadership role] is something that I am comfortable with. But at the same time, I hesitate from time to time to take on too much because I do want that balance in my life. ... It's not because I don't want to do it [or] I'm lazy. I just want to keep that balance and make sure I don't lose my personal life over my work life."

When I read that it hit me. There's a reason why work/life balance is a particular concern of Xers and not Boomers or Millennials.

Boomers long ago figured out how to make their work their life. To an Xer, this means they sold out--adopting a work ethic that subjugates the personal to the professional. Boomers are experts at using personal connections for professional gain, something I think older Xers secretly wish they were better at. To use a metaphoric cliche, Boomers took up golf not to challenge themselves as an Xer would, but because the were savvy enough to realize that business deals get done on the golf course.

Millennials, conversely, are busy figuring out how to make their life their work. To an Xer, this is even worse--shamelessly putting the self ahead of any other concern. But I sense an undercurrent of jealousy in a lot of Xer talk about Millennials. I think some Xers fear that Millennials may actually succeed in changing the game they've been struggling to play by their own set of rules. To extend the same metaphoric cliche, while the Xers are taking the Danny Noonan approach--hoping to win the caddy tournament in order to become a member of the club--Millennials are playing their own game and creating their own spaces in which to play it. It's not so much that they don't like golf. It's more that they just aren't going to do what they don't like, no matter how many business deals Boomers and Xers are cutting on the 18th green.

And this puts Xers in the middle again, the only generation who seems overly concerned with this thing called work/life balance. They want a separation between what they do for work and what they do for fun--a professional life and a personal life, both fulfilling but neither intruding on the other. But the other two generations in the Hourglass have already figured something out that X is just beginning to learn. When it comes to having a personal life and a professional life, it's tougher to manage them when you keep them separate than when you decide to push them together.