Principled Innovation LLC

The revolution is very much at hand…

April 18th, 2008

My good buddy and fellow blogger, Maddie, doesn’t think it’s about revolution. Okay, so let’s review for a moment:

+Five years ago, there was no MySpace, Facebook or Twitter, much less any of the myriad tools and applications created to enhance and extend their social networking value.
+Ten years ago, there was no Google or Wikipedia shaping the way the world finds and thinks about information and knowledge.
+Twenty years ago, there was no World Wide Web influencing every aspect of our daily lives.

I don’t know about you, but it feels like alot like revolution to me, and we’re just scratching the surface of what’s transpiring. So while I understand that association leaders prefer to “manage change” incrementally, there’s a problem: it’s a flawed and failing strategy for the 21st century.

The incremental strategy is ineffective because what we’re experiencing today is unlike the tamer forms of change we’ve known before. It is what I have referred to in the past as “profound, intensifying and accelerating disruption and discontinuity,” or paradigm shift. I realize, of course, that the first phrase is a tongue twister and the second phrase has been devalued by years of speaker abuse. But neither of those issues gives us a free pass to ignore what’s going on. For the first time since the early years of the 20th century, paradigm shift actually is happening, and it will continue to unfold in the years ahead whether or not we choose to acknowledge it.

The notion of managing paradigm shift incrementally is a proverbial finger-in-the-dike scenario, i.e., it is both dangerous and unsustainable. Associations will find themselves unable to thrive in this century if all they are prepared to do is aim just high enough to survive, or worse, defensively cope with the present while wishing and hoping for an easier future that will never come. Association leaders need to dial back their conservative instincts, soberly assess what is happening in the world around them and then work to rapidly grow their comfort level with radical ideas and revolutionary approaches. The tables have turned, and we can no longer afford the mounting financial and human cost of our community’s risk aversion for risk aversion’s sake.

If we’re going to harness the forces of paradigm shift and leverage the revolution to our advantage, we must cultivate strategic imagination. Maddie argues that association leaders use strategic imagination everyday. It saddens me to write that my experience has been very much the opposite, to the point that I am genuinely concerned about the lack of capacity for responsible stewardship in organizations of all sizes throughout our community, and I have heard this same concern expressed by other association leaders as well. So after sixteen years of watching associations not deal with the same issues over and over again, rethinking the assumptions that guide the way our organizations create value from the ground up strikes me as precisely the kind of fundamental reinvention that is urgently needed for the association community to have a fighting chance at thriving and growing in the years ahead.

The gale-force winds of paradigm shift are already whipping, and the seeds of future opportunity are being strewn in every direction. Association leaders who claim not to see or understand what’s happening are either in denial or just not paying attention. But make no mistake about it: the revolution is at hand.

(Maddie, thanks for opening up a rich vein of conversation. I hope it will continue, and I invite others to join us!)

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