Principled Innovation LLC

The real threat isn’t social media…

May 24th, 2007

Shel Holtz is a great guy, and I like, respect and admire him tremendously. I have been a guest on his podcast, and we are both research fellows of the Society for New Communications Research. Shel genuinely cares about the future of associations because he has been involved with IABC as a member for thirty years, and I think he correctly observes that this is a dangerous time for our organizations. Nevertheless, his post from Monday on the threat that social media pose to associations misses one fundamental point that is central to this discussion:

The threat to the future of associations isn’t social media. The real threat to our future is the way we’re thinking about and leading our organizations today.

This is not a point I make lightly, but we must be clear on what is really holding our organizations and our community back, i.e., our inability or unwillingness to admit that we actually do live in a different time and that we must adjust our ways of thinking and leading accordingly. Consider the following:

• There is ample evidence to suggest that association governance is broken, and yet we are doing nothing to innovate it.
• There is growing agreement that strategic planning is a joke, and yet we’re still wasting valuable time, limited attention and other precious resources on it.
• There is no question that associations need new business models, and yet we’re investing little, if anything, to develop them.

The changes all of us are seeing and experiencing in our daily lives, our organizations and our society are not anything like the challenges of the last three decades, and all retrospective comparisons to that effect simply fall flat. We are living and working in a time when the basic forces of human endeavor–business, communications, culture, demography, economics, education, law, politics, science, technology–are all recalibrating at once and converging to shape an entirely new world right before our eyes. It doesn’t look that different to us just yet, but in a few more years, many of us won’t recognize it. This is neither theory nor unfounded speculation. Without question, this is where we are headed.

The legendary Andy Grove, former CEO and now senior advisor to the Intel Corporation, might describe our current situation as a “strategic inflection point.” According to Grove, “…a strategic inflection point is a time in the life of a business when its fundamentals are about to change. That change can mean an opportunity to rise to new heights. But it may just as likely signal the beginning of the end.” This description certainly resonates with me as I look at what’s going on in the association world. On the one hand, as I wrote above, this is a dangerous time for associations because our “fundamentals” are changing, and some organizations may not survive. On the other hand, this can be a period of growth and renewal for our organizations, but only if we’re willing embrace new ways of doing business.

What are the root causes of strategic inflection points? Grove explains:

Strategic inflection points can be caused by technological change but they are more than technological change. They can be caused by competitors but they are more than just competition. They are full-scale changes in the way business is conducted, so that simply adopting new technology or fighting the competition as you used to may be insufficient. They build up force so insidiously that you may have a hard time even putting a finger on what has changed, yet you know that something has. Let’s not mince words: A strategic inflection point can be deadly when unattended to. Companies that begin a decline as a result of its changes rarely recover their previous greatness.

After reading this paragraph, it isn’t hard to understand why some association leaders may view social media as a threat. These tools don’t simply create new technology options, they fully expose many of our organizations’ most significant shortcomings. We think we’re about community, but we tend to place greater emphasis on the needs of the core group of insiders. We think we’re about collaboration, but we prefer the efficient and timely completion of the agenda. We think we’re about engagement, but we put considerable energy into filling slots in the organizational bureaucracy. Social media enable organic community, authentic collaboration and meaningful engagement with far less effort, and we don’t, and even the accelerated adoption and integration of social technologies in our organizations won’t change that simple fact.

So if technology alone won’t shift the dynamics for our organizations, what will? How can we make this strategic inflection point about our success rather than our decline? To answer that question, take a moment to reflect on the following observation from a recent post by Connecting the Dots blogger Steve Borsch in which he references the new book, Hidden in Plain Sight by Erich Joachimsthaler:

Most organizations focus on adding features, responding to customer demands, delivering competitive advantage, shoring up gross margins through cost cutting and, in short, doing all the right things for the business. In the book Joachimsthaler asks a question that’s the essence of the problem of doing all the right stuff but is one I found to be the most chilling and profound question for any leader in this time of accelerating change: “Are you, in fact, optimizing the status quo?”

There you have it. Associations must stop optimizing the status quo. More specifically, we must stop optimizing the status quo in order to retain that small but vocal minority of members who harbor what can only be described as an illogical anger that it isn’t 1977 (or whatever) anymore. We are not doing them any favors by indulging their denial, nor are we sending the right message about our priorities to the members we want to serve in the years ahead.

With social media/social networking/Web 2.0 technologies, we can build momentum for moving our associations in a new direction, but to sustain the effort and change our organizations at their deepest levels, we must also embrace the ways of thinking that animate these technologies. This means challenging all of our assumptions about what motivates our members to join, how they want to participate and contribute and what kinds of new value we can create with them. In short, all of us who care about the future of our community are now charged with the daunting yet necessary task of inventing new concepts of organizational stewardship for our associations going forward. This is a solemn responsibility, and one we must accept. If we can’t or won’t, we will simply remember the conversation we’re having right now, in the words of Andy Grove, as a signal of the beginning of the end.

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