Principled Innovation LLC

Some thoughts on the meaning of innovation

July 7th, 2006

Writing in her Horizons column in this month’s Associations Now, Center CEO Susan Sarfati shares some ideas and insights from a recent gathering of leading thinkers convened by The Center. One of her points, drawn from a conversation that included Seth Godin, Frances Hesselbein, Dan Pink and Meg Wheatley, directly targets the meaning of innovation:

Innovation means doing things that are difficult and that cause a disruptive or uncomfortable environment. However, associations seem to go to great lengths to insulate themselves from uncomfortable situations. In reality, are we avoiding the uncomfortable conversations that enable innovation to happen?

I agree with this perspective. There is no question that innovation challenges us to do difficult things, and perhaps the most challenging of all is giving up old ways of thinking and acting. In order to innovate, however, we must surrender our illusions of control and place considerable trust in others. We have to leverage networks involving a wide variety of stakeholders, including individuals we don’t know particularly well and who we might find it hard to trust at the outset. The work of innovation can and should disrupt old work patterns in favor of new forms of collaboration. Certainly, all of this purposeful motion will result in some discomfort in the workplace.

Reflecting on my years as an association professional, I do believe we have a tendency to go out of our way to avoid conflict. Perhaps this is because we already feel vulnerable working in organizations in which scarcity and constraint thinking are deeply entrenched, so pushing back against it, as well as those who purvey it, seems like a zero-sum game, i.e., the organization wins and we lose. Perhaps we have been chastened by one too many run-ins with myopic volunteers and members who blithely ignore marketplace realities and appear totally content to live in the nostalgic world of yesteryear. Or perhaps we simply don’t want to be made uncomfortable by having the world of our own assumptive design questioned too closely. Whatever the reasons may be, there is an unmistakable preference in associations for steering clear of conversations that will stretch our thinking, test our assumptions and invite us to consider radical ideas. Given this unhappy state of affairs, it is small wonder that innovation suffers.

The distinguished group of observers convened by The Center–people who understand both the important work of associations and the necessity of innovation–has identified a fundamental problem we will need to solve going forward. I sincerely hope that ASAE & The Center will help leaders in our community develop a wide variety of solutions with which we can experiment. In future blog posts, I will propose some as well. After all, there is no reason why we shouldn’t try to innovate even as we try to innovate!

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