Now there’s a good idea…
Posted: March 16th, 2010 | Filed under: Why beyond relevance? | 1 Comment »
Jeff De Cagna
For those of you who enjoy hypotheticals, here’s one you can consider before this afternoon’s webcast:
Let’s say you’re the leader of an association that is struggling to establish its relevance not only with its current members, but with the new members you’re trying to attract to secure your future. Despite your best efforts to make valuable offers to these stakeholders, nothing seems to be resonating.
Then, one morning, you spring out of bed with a powerful brainstorm: we should benchmark the best practices of other organizations in the area of relevance. YES! Now we’re cooking with gas…we can adopt the practices that work for other associations and see if they work for us. Why didn’t we think of this sooner?
Oh yeah, now there’s a good idea…
The inherent bankruptcy of “best practices” increases by what feels like an order of magnitude when we seek out such practices within the arena of relevance. Think about it…best practices on relevance? It may not be quite the white flag of surrender, but it comes pretty close.
Why am I being such a pest on this topic? Believe it or not, there is a method to my madness. The strategic success of any organization is determined not by the simple aggregation of practices, best or otherwise, but by achieving a unique and compelling insight about the meaningful and enduring value the organization can create for those it intends to serve both today and tomorrow. When we seek merely to replicate the work of others, we abandon our commitment to originality and imagination in favor of playing it safe and small, which guarantees we will extend the cycle of irrelevance.
In 2010, it is absolutely critical for 21st century associations to be authentically distinctive in their approach to value creation. As I have already written on this blog, the relevance conversation is a distraction from the important new work on which association leaders really must focus their attention today. Let’s not compound the distraction with the misguided belief there are shortcuts to creating a vibrant future.
Moving beyond theory in our second Webcast
Posted: March 11th, 2010 | Filed under: Uncategorized | 2 Comments »
paulgannon
I want to thank Jamie, Ken, Jeff and Nedra for leading us through a stimulating opening conversation on the notion of going beyond relevance. My special thanks go to everyone who participated in the conversation remotely. As we have learned, some of you experienced technical difficulties, which we hope to avoid in our two remaining Webcasts. We have taken measures to correct these problems and apologize for any frustrations they may have caused.
As far as content is concerned, we achieved our goal for the first Webcast, which was to lay the theoretical groundwork for our ongoing conversation. For me, one of the highlights of the Webcast came when an audience member asked for examples of best practices for moving beyond relevance. Jeff’s now famous response was that that is the wrong question to ask.
And, he’s right.
While many associations are thriving, despite shifting demographics, a turbulent economy and the introduction of disruptive technologies, many others are fighting for their very survival. In many cases, the business models that have sustained them for decades are no longer sufficient. For organizations wrestling with these and other existential issues, suggesting options for operating more efficiently, in many ways, misses the point.
The purpose of the first Webcast was to stir things up; to get people thinking about the essence of what they do, rather than ways to do what they’re already doing better. I think our panelists achieved this objective admirably.
In the second and third Webcasts, we’ll move into more practical territory. While remaining true to the theoretical underpinning of the subject at hand, our speakers will share their thoughts on how organizations move beyond relevance. They will talk about what success in this area looks like, and offer examples of how some organizations have been able to create real value for their members, customers and other constituents.
The conversation continues.
Create “Containers” for Conversation
Posted: March 5th, 2010 | Filed under: Uncategorized | No Comments »
nedraweinstein
I very much enjoyed the first conversation on “Beyond Relevance” and look forward to the continuation on the 16th. I wanted to build on Jamie’s comments in which he talked about using one’s feelings or reactions to ideas that are generated within your Association as a signal that this in fact may be an idea that needs focus and attention although your instincts and gut is wanting to retreat.
I love this notion and wanted to expand on it just a bit. It won’t be enough to just have you challenge your assumptions on what is contributing to the concern, although that is a great place to start. You will have to engage your colleagues in this conversation as well. You can look for opportunities to create “containers” for your associates to talk about their reactions, concerns, and fears. These could be meetings set up for just this purpose, or allowing time at the end of another meeting to reflect on what has been talked about and what reactions participants had. There needs to be an explicit structure that allows for these conversations, which creates some degree of safety (there can never be complete safety when venturing into new territory). Perhaps you can use these webcasts as a jumping off point to open up the conversation on how your Association needs to experiment with “beyond just being relevant” to its members.
There are some concrete things to try
Posted: March 4th, 2010 | Filed under: Uncategorized | No Comments »
kenwolff
Courage is certainly a big deal and thank you Jamie for echoing that. But how does one go about identifying the things their organization can lead with that aren’t readily available in the marketplace from other sources? Some ideas: Look at the technological, regulatory, competitive and economic trends in your industry and then ask yourself how your target audience evaluates their own success and finally what keeps them up at night. With this list of trends, needs and drivers, one can search out other sources of info to see how well the trends, needs and drivers are acknowledged and supported. My bet is you will find lots of white space where info is not well covered by these other sources and where your association can take a thought leadership stand. This view from the community perspective can be very revealing and that could be a big start.
At this point, Business Intelligence and Data Manipulation (gathering and reporting) also become critical. Serving up the right content at the right time communicated in the right way (from server through cell phone), would likely drive collaboration, community and e-business for the association bold enough to take these risks. Not easy by any stretch but necessary. Incremental improvement may not be enough anymore but reinvention certainly can be transformational.
Look for the Fear
Posted: March 3rd, 2010 | Filed under: Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
jamienotter
Thanks to Ken, Jeff, and Nedra for an excellent first conversation. As I reflect on it, I keep coming back to the point that Ken initially made about courage. One reason we settle for relevance is that the people in our systems collectively and individually lack the courage to go beyond. It strikes me that relevance is fundamentally an intellectual/analytical concept. To be relevant, you calculate needs, you scour the data, you search the web, you produce information.
Going beyond relevance takes courage. You must venture into the unknown, and you must meet needs that cannot be defined (entirely) on a spreadsheet. You MUST take a risk, because that’s where the reward is.
So when the webinar participants asked for examples or concrete advice, I suggested looking in your organization for the conversation where fear comes up. Where are you afraid? What projects or ideas or suggestions make you nervous or scared? Because it is possible that behind that fear lies an opportunity to break past the relevance barrier. It may not, of course. Behind the fear may be an ugly monster that you want to avoid. But you have to look past the fear to determine that.
You can use the fear as a blip on a radar screen that captures your attention. Dig into it and challenge your assumptions about the fear, because then you can design some experiments that will open up the opportunity to move beyond relevance.
Beyond Relevance: Caring For Communities Means Sharing With Them
Posted: February 24th, 2010 | Filed under: Why beyond relevance? | No Comments »
markdrapeau
Why is moving beyond relevance important for associations? People are overloaded with information, and they are not passive vessels waiting for your information to come to them. They need to be engaged.
True engagement is not about building websites, creating Facebook pages, or tweeting. Those are perhaps necessary but definitely not sufficient activities for engagement.
In my view, innovative social engagement is complex. It’s hard work. But at the core, I think a key principle is that “sharing is caring.” By that I mean that proactively sharing remarkable content (literally, people want to remark about it = word of mouth) is the best way to show that you care about your communities of interest. And caring builds trust and authority for you in that communitiy.
It moves beyond relevance.
Relevance is not a content play alone
Posted: February 24th, 2010 | Filed under: Why beyond relevance? | No Comments » kenwolff
I am excited to be a part of this conversation as well. The notion of relevance is of course not an issue for member driven organizations alone, it is at the core of why people seek out, interact, engage and buy things or services from any organization or company.
At our firm, we attempt to identify and suggest ways in which our clients can grow when the obvious seems unable to deliver the results they desire. The perspective I hope to contribute is one of experience from outside the association market with new ideas and potential analogs from other businesses that will stimulate innovation that helps associations thrive.
An important component of this new notion of relevance is that people engage because what they get is not only relevant content, but it is timely as well. I am interested in exploring and dialoguing about how associations can create environments and communities that their members seek out for far more than the content they knew they wanted, but to discover the content and communities that delight and stimulate them even before they realized they were looking for it, just at the right time, and in a way that keeps them coming back for more.
Nails on the blackboard
Posted: February 24th, 2010 | Filed under: Why beyond relevance? | 2 Comments » Jeff De Cagna
To be perfectly honest, in my head, the entire conversation about relevance in associations sounds like nails being dragged down the blackboard: desperately slow…screeching…torment.
It echoes with the same painful discordance as the sometimes shrill arguments around for-profit vs. non-profit tax status, member-driven vs. staff-driven leadership and other pointless distractions from the very real and very serious problems associations must confront today.
It is remarkable to me that we are more interested in re-litigating the same stale debates of the last century than in understanding and capitalizing on the disruptive forces that will make or break the future for our organizations. Do we have the luxury of continuing our investment in these issues?
Relevance-oriented thinking, or ROT, is destroying the unrealized potential of associations from the inside. But while we’re preoccupied with reclaiming our past success, the rest of the world is busy with the critical work of creating what’s next.
It’s time for us to embrace the difficult task of building associations that can thrive in the 21st century, a challenge we will be unable to address generatively by perpetuating the wrongheaded notion that relevance is the Holy Grail of our existence. When it comes to this issue, we need a new leadership point of view, and on February 25, I hope to share more thoughts on what it should be.
Merely Staying Relevant = an Innovation Killer
Posted: February 23rd, 2010 | Filed under: Why beyond relevance? | 3 Comments »
maddiegrant
I’m excited to be part of this webcast series, and I know this is a hot topic that has sparked some great conversations across the blogosphere already.
I’m going to be part of the third installment of the webcast, where we’ll get into more practical issues about what associations can do to be more than just relevant to their members (assuming the conversation goes in that direction). My role here, beyond being one of the commenters in the original debate that caught TMA’s Paul Gannon’s attention, has to do with considering the implications of social media and the digital age to all of this. Google considers relevance to be a new, specific, measurable objective based on marrying search with the “real-time web”.
So here’s the thing. Are associations merely a kind of search engine, striving to provide the most relevant results to what their members are looking for? To me, having the goal of “being relevant” means constantly playing catch-up now that the world is moving much faster and members’ needs are increasingly diversified. This may be partly semantics, but staying relevant, as a goal, means to me that we’re not striving to innovate. We’re not looking at the big picture and thinking ahead of our members. We’re providing services but not pushing our industries forward. We’re content with a “C” average.
I don’t want us to get a C. I want an A+.
Relevance Holds Us Back
Posted: February 23rd, 2010 | Filed under: Why beyond relevance? | 1 Comment » jamienotter
In September 2009 I posted about this topic on my blog. I had been hearing too frequently the word relevance in conversations with associations. Relevance is our goal, people would argue. We have to stay relevant to members. If we become irrelevant, we surely will die.
Okay, I’ll agree with the last statement, but as I pointed out in my original blog post, “not dead” is not a terribly meaningful goal in life. Striving for relevance is setting the bar way too low for associations, and there are a couple of big reasons for this.
First, relevance is inherently retrospective. You don’t create relevance—you maintain it. If you had been irrelevant, they wouldn’t be members in the first place, so the goal tends to be framed as maintaining your original relevance. This often translates into doing the things that got their attention in the first place (hopefully doing them better, of course). But this means that relevance becomes a driver of the “We Have Always Done It That Way” syndrome. It unintentionally prevents associations from doing more and changing and growing. So if all you do is seek relevance, eventually you will die, because the world will have changed so radically and so quickly, you’ll never keep up.
Second, related to that last sentence, the world has seen some massive “relevance inflation” of late. Relevance is cheap and easy. I used to need my association to provide me with knowledge, an opportunity to network, up-to-date information, or to organize events. These days, due in large part to the social web, I can do those things without belonging to an association. Relevance simply used to have more value than it does today.
I think some associations are figuring this out and looking to create much deeper value for members, but as long as we keep using the language of relevance, we will hinder our efforts. This conversation is important because we need to move quickly on this, and that requires shared understanding of what we’re shooting for and clarity about why it matters.