Changing The Hole To Fit The Peg: Part 4 - Dealing With The Dull Bits

Do you have a problem with volunteers who are unenthusiastic or unmotivated by work they consider dull, unfulfilling or less than engaging?  I can't see motivational efforts as being of much use. I just don't think you can force anyone to be enthused about what they consider boring no matter how you tout it. For my money, the best solutions are to either get rid of the dull bits or find a way to enhance the experience to compensate. Any work that volunteers say they find dull or unsatisfying needs elimination or restructuring. 

Truth be told, after sitting thorough many hundreds of volunteer events and meetings, I've developed a serious conviction that at least half of the administrative work assigned to volunteers is completely unnecessary.  It exists because it always has or because nobody bothered to look for another way.  So my first instinct is to hunt down the unnecessary and kill it.  In governance audits it never ceases to amaze me how many things smart people can find to stop doing.

Some things, however, just have to be.  I've encountered numerous volunteers who think planning discussions are boring - clearly something that remains necessary however dull they find it.  When the dull is indeed necessary, my preference is to reinvent it.

One option is to reassign to staff the work the volunteers don't like or don't want to do. That presumes you have staff resources to pull it off - a condition many associations and association chapters don't enjoy.  And sometimes staff just doesn't have the skill set or experience essential to get the work done. 

Another possibility is to more carefully match the volunteers with the roles they will play.  Not everyone has the same take on what is boring.  People with highly creative jobs in their professional life are more likely to embrace creative association volunteer work.  Dreamers and visionaries are far less likely to rhapsodize over budgets than folks who are by profession financial managers. And there are those souls who actually enjoy highly detailed work like writing bylaws amendments.  It's a matter of giving people work that suits them.

For meeting agendas where the dull can't be eliminated, it can at least be alleviated by interspersing the boring bits among the more interesting ones; always starting and ending with an interesting one.

Another trend on the upswing is to select and groom chairs who have the personality to lift people's spirits and fully engage colleagues regardless of what kind of work is at hand.  That requires an organizational culture that sees chairs not just as agenda managers but as people managers, recruiting and appointing accordingly.

Yet another approach is to lighten up volunteer gatherings by coupling them with some fun.  That takes some real creativity but can have huge payoffs.  One of my clients uses short, entertaining games and contests as starter exercises to put some life into committee meetings.  A meeting I recently observed was preceded with 15 minutes of 'Committee Jeopardy' where questions and answers were worded humorously but dealt with topical areas on the committee's agenda.  The volunteers laughed their way through it, and it engaged them in ways other than the boring agenda approach.

Some associations include some form of personal or professional development activity that either precedes or follows volunteer engagements, adding value to offset the less than inspiring work.

An association chapter I recently visited couples volunteer business meetings with community service events.  Tricky, but they made it work and the business meetings are offset by something the volunteers find more satisfying than the business meeting alone would have been.

The solutions are as unlimited as the will you have to eliminate the unnecessary and the creativity you can muster to jazz things up.  I'd love to hear about ways other associations have done either or both.

Changing the Hole to Fit the Peg: Part 3 - The Tick-Tock Thing

21st century volunteers prefer short waits for choice roles, short terms of office, short duration work assignments, short pre-meeting preparation materials and short meetings.  Minimal time commitments are big volunteer satisfiers and raise-your-hand motivators.  Apparently today's volunteers want us to understand that, although we may not, they have another life.  Deep down we do know that, but perhaps we aren’t sufficiently moved by that knowledge.  Over time, especially with dedicated volunteers who give much, it is easy to lose sensitivity to the time we take from them.

As I watch the evolution of volunteerism I’m convinced that we will continue to see shrinkage in available volunteer time regardless of what we do, leaving us two possible strategies.  One option is to rely less on volunteers; a viable choice for some, but impractical or cost prohibitive for many associations.  A better bet might be to attract a many players in more but smaller, less time-intensive roles. There's a push-back against that because it requires major changes to deploy and manage larger numbers of people in continuously fluxing roles.  So the question becomes this: is the need strong enough to justify the effort?

I recently worked with an national association that had a huge governance system with several hundred volunteer roles.  Filling a large number of vacancies was becoming difficult to achieve.  The first year they offered the ad hoc roles like consulting expert called on as needed, their annual call for volunteers produced a 200% increase in new applicants.  And the vast majority of those opted for the ad hoc roles.  The results certainly justified the enormous effort.  And getting there was cause for not a little angst in having to rethink and reinvent their volunteer workforce deployment.  The members loved it.  But here's the rub…the staff, who thought they would love it, actually hated it at first.  Turns out they'd had to rethink and relearn much of what they knew about structuring volunteer efforts.  For some that meant changing a lifetime of work habits in ways they never imagined at the start of the change they had so strongly supported.  It was an uphill slog, and took a couple of years, but they were ultimately successful.  They now have not only enough volunteers each year, but they are developing a huge back-bench of people they can bring in for short stints, testing for fit and preparing them for succession to bigger roles.

It'd certainly be a game changer, but if your association governance or program execution is volunteer dependent, retooling volunteer deployment and management may become a necessity.  For all its difficulties, the effort itself will be temporary and we'll all grow professionally as we get used to managing differently.

In Part 4 next week I'll talk about dealing with the dull work we sometimes ask of our volunteers. 

Changing the Hole to Fit the Peg: Part 2 - Eliminate The YUCK Element

When it comes to assessing satisfaction with the way volunteer units operate, volunteers express themselves from an inverse view.  Instead of what they find satisfying, they tend to talk about what turns them off and diminishes their enthusiasm for the work.  Most of their negative input is operationally and behaviorally focused, citing these examples:

·      Tilting at windmills syndrome – where the association has the same issues on the agenda year in and year out with little or no real progress or resolution.

·      Fuzzy bottom lines – No clear understanding of desired outcomes or value to be gained from the work.

·       Skilled incompetence – everybody workes hard, executes well, little is accomplished. (Often a symptom of windmill tilting and fuzzy bottom lines)

·      Buck-passing and second-guessing hierarchies.  Being on a committee is seen as a waste of time when a higher level governing unit ignores, expresses dissatisfaction with or even redoes the work themselves.

·      Snail’s pace crawl from idea to end result.  As one volunteer told me, "Most of us would like to see our ideas come to fruition in our own lifetimes."

·      Senior/junior inequity – new participants are sidelined; expected to keep quiet and follow their seniors’ more experienced lead.  The volunteer experiences for those new to the game (not to mention depth of discussion) are diminished when 'watch and learn' is valued more than 'think and contribute'.

·      Be/think like us attitudes – incumbent leaders exhibit condescension or intolerance of new player viewpoints.  Even more frequent is a failure by experienced volunteers to accommodate work style, work tool and communication preferences of new players.

·      Newbie lockout – veteran volunteers hang together socially; newcomers feel ignored or excluded.

Not all associations suffer all of these operational ills, but for those that do it will likely take more than a passing effort to affect a cure.  While the cures are fairly obvious - eliminate the negative behaviors - for some associations that may mean reinventing the entire operating culture.  Would it be worth all the effort and upheaval?  If you depend on volunteers, and expect to keep up a steady flow of new ones, I'd think so.

Next week:  Part 3 - The Tick Tock Thing.  And a reader comment suggested a Part 4 to follow - Dealing With The Dull Bits.

Changing The Hole to Fit The Peg

For ages it worked great.  We had volunteers…happy, productive and in pretty good supply.  The pegs fit the hole just fine, and for long enough to really solidify the shape of that hole.  That solid form is now showing its age as slowly the pegs have begun to change shape and the fit tighten.  Pushing those pegs into that too-tight hole now frustrates many of us and, I suspect, annoys the pegs.

Listening closely to feedback from volunteers in dozens of associations, I've concluded that the way we conduct business may be turning off new volunteers, or at least failing to turn them on.  Even long-time volunteers are feeling a little impatient with the fact that we've not kept pace with the doing-business shifts they've experienced in every other facet of their careers.  We’ve been very slow to do anything substantive about it because redesigning the hole to fit the peg cuts deep into our governance psyche. 

So how do we redesign the association to fit these reshaped volunteers?  I took the issue to a group of member volunteers from a variety of professional societies and trade associations.  What they told me validated what I found from an array of association polls, surveys and other volunteer feedback loops.  It all boils down to three things: 

1.     Guarantee the WOW Factor

2.     Avoid the YUCK Element

3.     Accommodate the Tick Tock Thing

In this post I'll talk about wow, with future posts on the yuck and the tick tock.

Changing the Hole to Fit the Peg: Part 1 - The WOW Factor

The top satisfier for volunteers (like pretty much everything else in this world today) is a compelling volunteer experience.  In this post I'm focused on the fact that, volunteers increasingly want experiences that make a difference.  I talked with some young dental professionals, for example, who told me that they'd much rather donate their time to patients at a free clinic or the dental society's Mission of Mercy program than sit on a committee talking about access to care.  That's the kind of thinking that has shifted associations' ranking when compared to other volunteer opportunities.  National statistics clearly demonstrate that social/community oriented volunteerism is by far the preferred choice, while business and professional associations are experiencing a shrinking share of the nation's volunteer pool.  For a more comprehensive view of WOW factors, see my previous blog post http://www.associationmusings.com/2011/10/volunteerism-is-all-about-experience.html.

Next week I'll cover avoiding the Yuck factor.

The long and the short of it.

Is shorter, faster communication always better?  I'm a big fan of instant messaging.  I use it a lot with family and friends.  But (there's always a But, isn't there) I'm starting to get texts from clients and find myself torn over reply options since a quick text reply isn't usually enough to convey my full-thought response.  Will they value text-reply brevity over a longer but more thorough email?  And I'm just a tad worried about thought undercurrents that are likely to be lost in short-burst messaging.  Perhaps I'm just missing the mental stimulation and confidence in the communication outcome that language-rich communication provides.

The language of icons and pictograms are taking on more of our quick communication chores.  Works for me - until I have to stop and figure one out because I hadn't yet seen it.  If you travel, especially outside the U.S., you know what I mean.  And all those icons on my smartphone!  Some are easily recognized, but for others the designers certainly went for artsy over meaningful.  It's one thing when your brand is well known; quite another when searching through a bunch of unfamiliar images.

Then there's the process of shifting from language to acronyms as a means of thought conveyance.  There are definite advantages to acronym communication.  It is faster to send and, assuming the reader doesn't need an extra minute or two to translate the mishmash of text, faster to read.  WRUD?  ROLTF, but not always; sometimes more like ROLTM (mourning) the lost richness of thought that only full words can convey.  And there are days when the electrons form themselves into something that takes me actual time to translate before I get it.  Occasionally my reply has to be "WTHDTM?"  ("What The Hell Does That Mean").

There's another side of the coin though.  Longer isn't always better as anyone who has read background material for a board meeting will testify.  Much of the effort preparing long, wordy reports and page after page of numbers is wasted.  Many board and committee members skim, scan or skip them entirely.  They come unprepared because it would take them too much time to sift through it all.  Shorter and condensed bullet points, charts and graphs for fast intake get more attention than long narrative reports and pages of numbers.

Then there's the matter of big versus small words.  For example, why 'utilize'; why not just 'use'?  What's with that extra 'ta' people insist on adding to the word preventive?  What does preventative convey that preventive doesn't?  I wonder, in a world where we now tweet and condense thought into minimal characters for texting, will people go back to 'using' for clarity instead of 'utilizing' for erudition?  Will the shorter 'me' and 'I' come back into fashion instead of the longer grammar-lazy copout 'myself'?

I'm ready to use any and all means to get through to people and they to me.  I'd just like to be sure and hold on to enough language and grammar to stimulate the little gray cells so we don't entirely lose our capacity for deeper thought.

Empowerment...the best management experience I ever had

It happened early in my career (many more years ago than I’d care to admit).  Our association’s CEO had been a hard-line, line-of-sight manager who gave explicit orders, expected them to be carried out to the letter, and watched like a hawk to pounce when she saw any deviation.  She was all about command and control which, by the way, suited our board because that was the management style they most often used in their own businesses, and the one they used on her.  Upon her retirement, in came a brash young man with a very different take.  He believed in empowering people to do all they could.  He asked me (I was at the time a director of administration which included the HR function) to put together a series of training events that would reinvent the way we did business.  I’d train the staff – he’d train the board.  Here were the messages to staff:

·       Managers were to stop directing and switch to coaching.

·       Employees were to stop waiting for orders and self-initiate.

·       Bosses were to define results, not methods; employees were free to devise their own methods within clearly defined but far more relaxed parameters.

·       People were to be encouraged to try new things and different/better methods. Managers were to coach them through uncertainties and problems, but emphasize do-it-yourself, with strong encouragement for efforts made.

·       Mistakes were to be treated as learning experiences, not punishable offences.

·       People who achieved would be rewarded; and perhaps even more importantly, those who did not wouldn't.

What a huge struggle it was, transitioning to that new culture.  To my surprise as I worked my way through the staff issues, I discovered that support staff took to it like ducks to water while managers, especially those who had been at it a while, struggled mightily – in fact, they hated it.  In management meetings, as we talked through the “problems” with this new approach, it became apparent that the real impediment was a lifetime of old habits.  Many couldn’t see the benefits of a different style; as far as they were concerned, what they’d been doing for years worked just fine.  They were comfortable with it, and most significantly, they knew HOW to do it their way. The new way required rethinking, relearning – and hardest of all – breaking the habits of an entire career. I’d had to undertake extra coaching for the management staff – far more than was needed for the support staff.

For a long while we lived with a difficult blend of the old and new styles as some adapted and others continued to struggle. That lasted about 3 years, until the old guard managers eventually got with the program or left.  As they faded away, the difficulties did too.  One morning, the CEO and I were standing in the hallway talking, and a support staffer came up to us.  I remember her exact words. “I just wanted to thank you. You’ve changed my life.” And she quietly walked away.  She’d just been promoted because her manager had been taught how to let people be all they could be.  Under the old management style she’d been a “good” employee.  She came in every day, did what she was told and went home.  Under the new style she’d become an exceptional employee.  She’d begun not just doing, but critically and creatively thinking about her work.  Once she started that, it was Katie bar the door.  She invented new methods, found efficiencies, and produced better results because she was empowered and encouraged to do so.  She’d even developed the self-confidence to spontaneously form teams of other support staff to share ideas and solve shared problems, which had an exponential effect on productivity enhancements and a corresponding impact on member service levels.  She’d done it all without permission, direction or management intervention.  What her manager discovered was that, allowed to shine, she did.  Her promotion was inevitable, because she worked in an environment that actually facilitated it.

I learned some key lessons from that experience, and they’ve worked for me for more than 40 years:

• Empower and coach beats the heck out of command and control.  People will give you more, do better, and love working with you.
• Work is a fun place to be when people are allowed to be creative and to find ways that work best for them, not some higher-up who doesn’t actually have to do the work.
• The key to keeping it under control isn’t controlling it.  It is clear definition of desired outcomes and boundaries.
• Changing a person’s management style can be a long and difficult process because it requires not only learning new methods, but overcoming the old habits acquired over the length of their career.
• You will absolutely fail to change a person’s management style unless you demonstratively reward and structure compensation around embodying the new, and demonstratively NOT reward or compensate the old behavior.

I've had some horrific and some wondrous management experiences since, but none so personally transformational.

Lucky are those who manage through empowerment and coaching.  Luckier still are those who work for them.

Volunteerism is all about the experience

Turn ons.  I work with hundreds of volunteers.  What they tell me is this:

Though busy, they will make time to volunteer - for reasons bigger than themselves and for self-actualizing reasons too.  But it's the experience that counts most.  Volunteers want experiences that do all, not just one or two of these:

1.   Produce good and valued outcomes

2.   Relate to their personal interests and passions

3.   Make them feel good about making a contribution

4.   Offer enjoyable experiences; work that's fun or some fun mixed in with the work

5.   Are structured for small, short burst time commitments on flexible schedules; ad hoc is preferred over ongoing or long term

There's a definite decline in leader-volunteerism in associations.  I think that's because those experiences just aren't measuring up to the more 'satisfying' volunteer experience options.

When it comes to generational issues, there aren't as many as doomsayers would have you believe.  The personal time deficit knows no age boundaries.  Tolerance for unfulfilling work is low across all generations.  Desire for meaningful, rewarding experiences is ageless. Caring is not age-specific; it is values-specific.  The generational differences among our volunteers are not so much in values or dedication but very much so in work style preferences and expectations about the volunteer experience.

One of the answers is, I think, a need to blend work styles for multi-generational volunteer workforces.  Either/or doesn't cut it.  Blending means catering to the whole spectrum of generational preferences; personally selectable:

·       Communication methods - high-tech and low-tech

·        Information intake modes - layered information, accessible 24/7/365

·       Collaboration modes and venues - face-to-face and social media

Recruiting?  Statistically, here's what the prospects look like based on the most recent statistics on volunteerism from the U.S. Department of Labor Statistics based on volunteer activities in 2010.

The most likely to volunteer were those in the 35-to-44 age group.  Young people in their early 20s were least likely to volunteer.  While whites continue to volunteer at a higher rate than other ethnic groups, the rate of volunteering among whites and blacks dropped slightly, while the rate among Hispanics and Latinos remained static.

Married people volunteered more than divorced and never-marrieds, although as would be expected, volunteerism among parents with young children volunteer less often, and when they do they give less time.

In the 25 and over group, 42.3 percent of college graduates volunteered, compared with 17.9 percent of high school graduates and 8.8 percent of those with less than a high school diploma.

The median for annual hours volunteered was about 52; ranging from a high of 96 hours for those in the 65+ age group to a low of 40 hours for those in the 16-24 year age group.

Most volunteers were involved with either one or two organizations. The main organization where they worked the most hours was most frequently religious, followed by educational or youth services where parents with young children volunteer most heavily, then by social or community services.  And a trend I find most disturbing is that among the lowest levels of volunteerism were for professional associations and societies, civic and political organizations.  I'm thinking that these types of organizations may not be providing a satisfying  volunteer experience, especially in terms of the five turn-ons noted above.

Targeting the most likely volunteers can certainly guide recruiting.  It's my bet, however, that recruiting will become exponentially easier with each inroad we make to enhance the volunteer experience.

Social Media That Draws People In

I've been thinking about ways associations draw people to their social media content.  And content, I believe, is the operative word.  Other than board and committee members, association members aren't as drawn to association related social media as they are to career/work related social media. I'm pretty sure people are ready and willing to 'electronically congregate' where they get contacts and information they can use in their day to day work lives. The smart focus for social media content, then, would: 1) make my job easier, 2) link me to people who will make my job easier or help me find a better one, 3) provide me with up-to-the-minute resources, and 4) make me feel good about myself and my place in the association's social community.

It seems to me that associations should treat social media much the same way we do other programs and services.  Top names leading hot topic discussions, for example, is as big a social media draw as great speakers and hot topics are to in-person meeting attendance. What drew me to my most-used social media site was the fact that they recruited people who are highly respected opinion and thought leaders in my work world to start discussions that I consider must-follow because they give me one or more of those 4 things noted above. I also regularly visit social media sites that include a continually evolving collection of resource documents and/or links to additional resources on topics being discussed.

And like any member program, social media content needs the same level of marketing we'd use for in-person member experiences.  Some of the associations I belong to don't market their social media at all...a big mistake, I think, assuming that if you build it they will come.  I need to be kept informed about what's there that's of value to me before I make the time to make the trip.

I'd like to hear about content that associations have found to be a really big social media draw.

What I Know About Change…

Change is a good thing.  Embracing it is key to survival.  As Charles Darwin said:  “It’s not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.”

Change is often hard, but not impossible to achieve.  Lessons I've learned...

·    Don’t call it change.  People automatically recoil when they hear the word.  Give it another name – one that connotes opportunity and possibilities.

·    In the change conversation, learn to engage people from where THEY are in their thinking.  Since they haven't been along with you on your own thought journey, they usually need help getting from where they are to where you are.

·    People are more likely to embrace change if you tell them a compelling story of the future.  Get them jazzed by focusing on possibilities.  Don’t describe the change, describe the great outcomes we’ll experience.

·    Great leaps forward are scary; continuums less so.  Our future story needs links to the past and present in a continuum people can flow along.  Our story should honor the past by illustrating how it evolved into our present, and that our present is just a step along the continuous path to our future.

·    Describe a place in your future story for everyone in the organization.  People feel lost in, fear and instinctively fight a future where they can't clearly see themselves.

·    It’s not hard to get new ideas into people's heads.  The problem is getting the old ones out.  People react and act on what they think they know.  Telling people they are wrong just puts them into fight mode.  Instead, create chapters in your story to illustrate how and why what they know may no longer be so, or perhaps not quite as true as it once was.

·    Happy and exciting stories are preferred.  Scary stories aren't, but sometimes fear is a valid acceptance motivator.  If scary is a necessary element of the story, balance it with exciting bits about possibilities and happy bits about outcomes.

·    Affecting change has a lot to do with creating storied answers.

·  Asking "How do we fix the problem?" wastes time focusing on the problem instead of the solution.  Instead, tell a story about what we could create instead of the problem.

·  When asked "How much will it cost?", tell a story about how it will be worth the price.

·   If they want to know "How long will it take?", tell a story that illustrates commitment to staying the course, however long it takes.

·   When they ask "How are other people doing it?", use others' success stories to illustrate possibilities, but be sure to tell the stories in the context of how we can successfully create what we want for ourselves, not just copy what others have done.

·    Incremental change is easier than all-at-once, especially for complex change.  Give it sufficient time but be sure it's got a recognizable finish line and a timeframe for getting there.

·    The measure of successful change is a state of 'vuja de' – finding yourself where you know you’ve never been before.  My personal vuja de and favorite change story is the space race of the 1960s.

In his inaugural address, President John F. Kennedy told the story of an American future where we would lead humanity into outer space.

He talked about our nation's adventurous history, linking our past to the future he was asking us to embrace. His future story was of a great journey, to be undertaken by a great people, which had the effect of putting each and every one of us into that story. He chose a manned space program because putting humans in our space ships gave us heroes from among ourselves, solidifying our collective place in the adventure and giving us a personal, almost visceral stake in its outcome

And what an outcome his story promised; manned space flight and moon landings were, at the time, breathtakingly compelling stuff.  The President's story also acknowledged that the journey to our future in space would be hard, but assured us that we were up to the challenge and could be confident of success.

Kennedy used the Russian space program as leverage, to illustrate that space travel indeed had to be part of our future story.  But in our story's ending we would transcend what the Russians had done; our future in space would be uniquely of our own creation.

And finally, the President gave the nation a decade to do the job, allowing for incremental steps in a complex evolution to the future, but with a definite finish line for achieving the outcome.

Kennedy's story had the elements that facilitate change.  Because of that, we bought into his story, made it our own, and made it come true.

I truly believe that the real power in this world goes to the people who direct change, and the people who direct change best are those who tell the best stories.

Strategic Planning, UGH! Strategic thinking, YEAH!

At last count I’ve been through strategic planning with 75 associations, most of them multiple times.  After all that, here’s my big takeaway.  Strategic “planning” is a misguiding misnomer, especially given the outcomes it is intended to produce.  So...Free your association's organizational mind and nourish its soul.  Stop strategic planning and create a culture of strategic thinking fed by an evolving image of an ever-changing environment.

Flawed Purpose:  Associations tend to mix strategic planning with business planning.  The two are very different things, one flowing from the other.  The desired outcome, forward progress, is best achieved when embodied not as a planning process but as a thinking exercise.  Strategic thinking is an exploration of possibilities, weighing the pros and cons of likely outcomes and making choices about direction – and that’s all it should be.  As an exploration of possibilities it should as unfettered by structure, process and its traditional terminologies as we can make it.  Business planning is the structured, procedural methodology to implement directional decisions that flow from strategic thinking.  Business plans direct and, if properly structured to do so, actually form the operating plan and budget.

Outmoded Process:

I'm over-weary of the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats (SWOT) assessment as a task during strategic planning (or any) meetings.  Truth be told, it is an incredibly boring, time consuming exercise.  And too often it is used as information as thinking, not for thinking.  I wholeheartedly agree that SWOT data can be useful in creating a shared context for strategic thinking.  But SWOT alone is too limited in scope, and it should not be a discussion focus at thinking sessions.  'What is' dilutes and often inhibits creative thought and talk about what 'could be'.

There are plenty of ways to gather useful data and array it for decision makers, not as a static snapshot but as a continuously evolving image from which strategic thoughts evolve.  SWOT assessment should be relegated to a supporting role in a more broadly based scope of ongoing research, the results of which are continuously updated and made available 24/7/365 to everyone in the association.  Beyond SWOT topics it should include all of the 'what is' information necessary to make it a daily-use tool that facilitates strategic thinking by everyone, all the time.  And when the association conducts a formal strategic planning event, the participants should have already absorbed the relevant 'what is' context information so that all of their face-time is spent strategizing for what 'will be'.

Inadequate Depth of Players:  I wholeheartedly agree with those who say we need to broaden the base of strategic-thought players beyond committees and the board.  If you buy into strategic thinking instead of event-centric planning, you can engage huge numbers of people in exploration, ideation, outcomes visioning and impact assessments.  Frequently deployed, properly focused questionnaires, surveys and straw polls, town hall meetings and governance assemblies engage people from all association audiences and perspectives in strategic thinking.  Arraying the results and making them available – to everyone, all the time – feeds the 'what is' database, keeps the creative juices flowing and informs the choices/decisions not just at strategic thinking events but as a matter of course in the day to day decision making process.

Document-Centric Strategic Management:  Dump the (expletive deleted) strategic plan document.  Changes like those I’ve suggested would make obsolete the albatross that either sits on a shelf ignored, or consumes huge amounts of energy to monitor and update.

Instead multiple players would, informed by all that thought sharing be engaged in ongoing strategic thinking, interspersed with frequently revisited directional choices and decisions.  The results of all that direct adjustments to business/operating plans where documents have a bigger role.  And that's a subject for another day.