Principled Innovation LLC

Dangerous ideas

October 25th, 2006

The focus of last week’s Pop!Tech conference in Maine was “dangerous ideas.” I did not attend the gathering, but the theme captured my imagination and I’ve been thinking about it for the last few days. Here is how the organizers framed it:

What is a “dangerous” idea? It’s one that upends conventions, challenges assumptions and breaks taboos, reordering our sense of the world and our place within it. It’s an idea, as Victor Hugo said, whose time has come.

I have a passion for dangerous ideas, a deep affinity for the new, different and unorthodox that definitely puts me in the minority in the association community. And it goes without saying that associations aren’t exactly hothouses for incubating these ideas. Association leaders tend to prefer proven approaches, tried-and-true techniques and best practices, which is fine if your goal is preserving traditional power relationships and maintaining the organizational status quo. It works less well, however, if you’re trying to build a sustainable business model for the future.

The difficult thing for our leaders today is that many of the still-dangerous ideas transforming how organizations create value–new concepts for creating and sharing knowledge, building networks and communities, and engaging volunteers–deal directly with issues of paramount concern for our community. Can we really afford to ignore the participatory revolution that is taking place on the Web, especially when so many associations struggle with involving a greater number of more diverse contributors in their work? Association leaders need to adjust their thinking about an open collaboration platform (as well as the dangerous ideas it will produce), and adopt a new strategic mindset for maximizing the value it creates.

While the ideas I mention above remain extremely disruptive inside the association world, they aren’t quite as unconventional as they once were outside of associations. So I wonder where we should look for the next set of truly dangerous ideas for the association community. My hope is that at least some of them will emerge from within. The success of the association community for the rest of this decade and beyond depends entirely on the creativity and simplicity of the ideas driving our strategies, as well as the ability of our talented contributors to execute those ideas for the benefit of members, customers and stakeholders. And there should be no doubt that dangerous ideas will be a part of that mix.

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Entry Filed under: Principled Innovation Blog, What's New?, The Principled Innovator Newsletter, Social Media, Innovation, Associations, Extreme Makeover, The Association Innovator, We Have Always Done It That Way