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.