Principled Innovation LLC

Evidence of fear

November 26th, 2006

In last Wednesday’s post, I made the following point:

Fear, in its various forms, is at the heart of far too many decisions in the association community, leaving our organizations poorer as a result. In the short term, it is our members who pay the price, but in the long run, our society suffers most when we are unable to overcome, or at least set aside, the fear of risk and its implications.

As I sorted through my feeds last night, I came across this article, which appears in today’s The Washington Post. The article, written by Laurie David, one of the producers of the film, An Inconvenient Truth, details her effort to donate 50,000 DVDs of the movie to the National Science Teachers Association (NSTA) as a teaching tool for its members. The article lays out the story about the association’s decision to reject David’s offer, but it is this quote from NSTA’s e-mail response that stood out for me:

Accepting the DVDs, they wrote, would place “unnecessary risk upon the [NSTA] capital campaign, especially certain targeted supporters.”

Without knowing additional details, I am disappointed by the association’s decision here. NSTA’s mission is to ” … to promote excellence and innovation in science teaching and learning for all.” Ms. David offered NSTA the opportunity to provide its members with a powerful free teaching tool, one that scientists on both sides of the global climate change debate agree is scientifically accurate. From my perspective, the choice was clear.

Instead, it appears that NSTA opted to place the political sensitivities, as well as the dollars, of the organization’s financial supporters ahead of the association’s stated mission and its broader commitment to “standards-based science education.” This is a very unfortunate course for NSTA to pursue, for three reasons:

1. Compromising deeply-held organizational beliefs in the name of political expedience and fear strips those beliefs of their meaning and makes it much easier to sacrifice them whenever it is convenient.

2. Relying on the “generosity” of others for the association’s long-term financial sustainability undermines the organization’s ability to fulfill its mission with independence and integrity.

3. Allowing fear to drive organizational decision-making makes the association a victim of circumstance and eliminates any possibility for real innovation.

As someone who devotes much time and attention to thinking about how to make associations stronger, I find situations such as this one incredibly frustrating. When the fear of possible consequences overrides the more critical considerations of vision, mission and strategy, member value and the public interest, we all lose.

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