Principled Innovation LLC

Apathy is not a new paradigm

July 22nd, 2008

On his blog yesterday, my friend and colleague Ben Martin offered a provocative take on the future of associations.  The central premise of Ben’s argument goes as follows:

Here’s my prediction: As long as people don’t really care, associations will survive. We know that, in most cases, a self-forming group is an oxymoron. But now that group forming is ridiculously easy, when people are truly passionate about stuff, they form their own groups and get a lot of stuff done. Shirky demonstrates this. But when people are lukewarm about something, well, that’s where associations will thrive. Associations will take care of problems that most people don’t really care too much about, but that need to be handled.

While I appreciate the value of Ben’s purposeful provocation, regular readers of the P.I. Blog should not be surprised to learn that I strenuously disagree with Ben’s line of thinking.  Indeed, I remain confident that associations can have a brighter future if our community’s leaders are willing to adapt to new realities and embrace new opportunities.

Right from the outset, we should acknowledge that the co-existence of long-standing institutions and self-organizing groups is not only possible, but essential to the creative vibrancy of society, as well as its proper functioning along other dimensions.  This observation does not rule out the idea that some associations eventually will disappear due to unfavorable conditions in the operating environment, leadership incompetence or a combination of the two.  Some associations may well be supplanted by novel entities that model fundamentally different structures for collaborative problem-solving, community-building or innovation.  But it would be wrong for us to assume that the possibilities of passionate engagement are available only to these new and emerging groups.

As our society endures the growing pains that inevitably accompany paradigm shift, so too are associations struggling with defining their appropriate roles in a brand new world.  For decades, associations have operated within a paradigm I have described as “managerial professionalism.”  The long-term outcome of this paradigm is a community of organizations that lives somewhere between the world of business and the non-profit sector.  Despite the rather divided (and possibly schizophrenic) nature of this existence, associations have still managed to create considerable value for their members and stakeholders over many years.

In a Web-enabled world, however, it is increasingly clear that managerial professionalism is running out of steam, creating the need for associations to design a new paradigm that reinvigorates purpose, and integrates deeply-held belief with a sustainable economic model and governing system.  Different organizations will have different approaches to be sure, but I simply cannot agree with Ben that stakeholder apathy is among the options.  On the contrary, we must directly and passionately engage all of our contributors (whether or not they are members) in the process of discovering what’s next.

The strategic imperative for associations is to leverage the growing power of social technologies to support their own “ridiculously easy group forming” around the diverse niche communities they serve today, as well as those they wish to serve going forward.  Now is not the time to fear the new world that is unfolding before our eyes.  Now is the time to fully embrace it.

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