Principled Innovation LLC

Paying the price for the failure to innovate

January 7th, 2011

Several years ago, I attended an innovation master class presented by guru Gary Hamel.  Hamel told us that today’s operational challenges typically begin as strategic challenges 3-5 years before, offering yet another reason for continuous innovation.  After all, why would you allow unsolved problems to damage your core business if you have an opportunity to address them before they become critical?  The recent blogosphere conversation on the value of association membership, inspired by association professional Joe Flowers, is further proof of Hamel’s point and, unfortunately, clear evidence that associations are now paying a price for the failure to innovate more aggressively.

For as long as I have been a part of this community, association leaders have been wringing their hands about the necessity of innovation, and they have made every conceivable excuse for why it cannot be done.  It’s too risky, it’s too expensive, it’s too difficult they say.  But over the last ten days or so, the conversation about association membership has revealed how much riskier, more expensive and more difficult the consensus choice to preserve the status quo has become.  Membership has been, and continues to be, the core business of associations, and it is in peril.  This danger is created not simply because of a more social web, but a more open and social world.  Many of the technologies that amplify connection, cooperation and collaboration online have enter the consciousness of our community over the last 3-5 years, but most have been around in different forms for an even longer time.  Over much of this same period, we dismissed the impact of these tools on our work, inexplicably assuming that what we do is so unique and special it is immune to the powerful forces reshaping the rest of society.  As we have learned, it isn’t.

So what do we do now?  Instead of the reflexive recriminations this conversation has surfaced, what we need is empathic understanding.  As I read through Joe’s original post, the comments and what others have written in the days since, it occurred to me that no one asked him a pretty fundamental question:

If the value you received for your $100 dues payment was insufficient, what kind of value would you pay for?  What really matters to you?

I e-mailed this question to Joe yesterday and he graciously took the time to respond.  I’ll let him decide if he wants to post the specific thoughts he shared with me, but what I took away from Joe’s response was a deep desire for a vibrant professional learning experience grounded in meaningful peer and mentor relationships, something he ultimately discovered by associating with colleagues in online social spaces rather than through his professional association.  This is an important empathic insight that associations can use to rethink the value and business model of the traditional membership offer.  For every Joe out there with the willingness to express dissatisfaction in a public forum, I believe there are many others who feel the same way, but never say anything about it.  We need to access these hidden perspectives to build a more intimate understanding of the kinds of relationships our stakeholders would like to have with us.

This is the time for deep experimentation in every phase of association work.  It’s actually something we should have done years ago, as Gary Hamel suggests, but now that we have arrived at a true inflection point, we can no longer ignore the absolute necessity of undertaking a serious innovation effort that will help our organizations thrive in the years ahead.  Thanks Joe for reminding us why innovation is so important to our future success!

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