Golden's Rules for Associations

Open or closed?

17 May 2011 Leave a comment

The online world is divided into two camps over that one.

One camp thinks there should be no restrictions or guidelines around who participates in online communities. Everything should be open to everybody. If someone with a completely different set of experiences shocks you with an idea or perspective that never would have occurred to you, that’s precisely what makes social media such a vibrant and empowering place to live, learn and grow.

Then there is the group that says being part of a boundary-less and restriction-free community is fine, but who also like gated communities, where they can gather with people who share the same expertise, face the same professional challenges, and operate in the same environments that they do.

Both viewpoints have their merits. It would be nice to be able to say “to each their own” and leave it to personal preference, but often the two world views collide in the same, online space. And if it is the association who is providing the platform, that can put you in the crossfire.

Not too long ago, a member with a long and distinguished career in the profession, but who was no longer involved in day-to-day management, expressed frustration that she was no longer eligible to participate on the association’s managers’ listserv. It isn’t like all her wealth of knowledge and experience got erased just because she was no longer working in a management capacity.

She also observed there is a danger in engaging in artificially defined exclusivity. It can lead to insular thinking and moribund elites. It assumes that no one outside our self-defined group has anything useful to say (or critical for us to know) about our world. To thrive (or even just survive), this member argued, members need to be open to what is going on around them, not just to the prevailing views and orthodoxy of people who see the world and think just like they do. And she has a point.

But on the flip side, I understand the preferences of other members who want access to communities of interest limited to those who actually fit that community’s definitions. They observe (correctly) that the association does have forums that are open to all comers. Whether you are a member or non-member, whatever segment of the profession you operate in, whether you are a student, new professional, veteran or retired … it’s all the same.

They just want somewhere else they can go to as well, where they don’t have to filter and guess whether a post offering advice on their workplace problem comes from a well-intentioned member who is operating in an entirely different environment and who knows nothing about the day-to-day reality facing someone in their industry sector.

Open or closed, the debate will continue. And with the technologies evolving and changing even as we experiment with these new communication modalities, the debate over how we debate is likely to persist even as we conduct the debate itself over what it is we started the conversation about in the first place.

Filed under Social Media & Associations Tagged with Social Media & Associations

Paradigms

10 May 2011 Leave a comment

I recently suffered a very sudden and very significant loss of vision. Happily, the condition was fully correctible. Nonetheless, during the period of impairment I learned some very interesting things about how the brain works and we perceive the world.

I discovered that when I was in familiar surroundings, my brain could reach back to stored memories of how things were supposed to look. In the familiar confines of my office or home, I hardly noticed the lack of clarity in my vision. My brain was able to easily recognize the settings and the people I encountered and adjusted things to make it feel like I could see better than I actually did.

When I went on a period of extended travel, however, and found myself in unfamiliar surroundings, the visual impairment felt like it became more severe. Everything was a total blur. I felt disoriented and at a loss.

Scientists talk about the concept of paradigms: the frame of reference that causes the human brain to routinely “fill in the blanks” and add information to what we are actually, sensually perceiving. When that additional information is accurate, it actually improves our grasp of reality, as was the case when I was navigating my office and home with my fading eyesight.

But sometimes the information that our governing paradigms add to our perceptive abilities can be misleading. We can essentially see what we are expecting to see, not what is actually before us.

And paradigms don’t just have the power to change — and distort — visual perceptions. I have seen paradigms at work within human interactions as well.

When that happens, at a board meeting, or a staff meeting, or a legislative meeting, it can start an argument where there is no disagreement. The conversation never gets to the available, mutually beneficial solution because the parties are too distracted arguing over perceived differences that exist only in their conflicting paradigms.

Or, put another way, if we remain at loggerheads, locked inflexibly into opposing positions even where there is no real impediment to a satisfactory solution, we will never get to a position of strength, from which we can successfully negotiate an acceptable outcome on the issues that truly do matter to us.

Sometimes, you just have to let go of your paradigm.

Filed under Association Advocacy Tagged with Association Advocacy, The Way We Are

Inquiry or advocacy?

29 April 2011 Leave a comment

There are two kinds of public policy research: there is inquiry and there is advocacy. In the case of advocacy, you start with an answer and go in search of the facts that will bolster and support your position. In the case of inquiry, you start with a question and let the facts lead you where they may.

It is important to understand the difference. I have seen too many cases where association lobbying efforts have gone horribly wrong because someone got so excited about the case it was possible to make for their desired outcome by carefully selecting their facts that they ignored even the most obvious data that could be used against it. And their beautiful, fact-based strategy collapsed the first time it was challenged.

Effective association advocacy requires both forms of research. Before the association begins to craft its legislative or regulatory strategy, it needs a good, clear headed and pragmatic understanding of what the facts of the situation actually are. It is like the intelligence gathering that gets done before you plan a military campaign. Just because naval warfare is your particular strength, you can’t start planning a water-based assault on your enemy without first checking into whether key targets are accessible by water.

If the inquiry is open and honest, you sometimes learn something unpleasant that you won’t like hearing. But that can be even more important than getting the answer you wanted. If naval warfare is your particular strength, but the rivers are too shallow for your ships, that is a setback. But you’re better off knowing it before you’ve committed your navy.

Sometimes the research merely confirms what you already knew. Understandably, that kind of research often gets criticized by members as a waste of time and resources. But if the stakes are high enough, if the issue is of life and death importance, it doesn’t hurt to verify and confirm the reliability of the assumptions you are betting the industry’s future on. To further torture the naval warfare metaphor, it might be “obvious” that the city you need to capture is accessible by the river. “We don’t need some high price mapmaker to point that out.” But before putting your military personnel’s lives on the line, it would be nice to know for sure and to have maps with the river depths precisely charted for your ships to follow.

Both forms of research require intellectual honesty. Spinning the facts to serve your purpose to such an extent that you distort reality is not an example of either inquiry or advocacy research. In fact, it isn’t even research at all. It is
dishonest salesmanship masquerading as research. And the only mark you are duping with the deceptive sales pitch is yourself.

Filed under Association Advocacy Tagged with Association Advocacy

Basso continuo

18 April 2011 Leave a comment

Johannes Kepler described music as one of the four harmonies that hold the universe together. (Geometry, Astrology and Astronomy are the other three, if anyone cares.)

And yes, this really does have something to do with associations.

I recently moderated a panel on Hegel. Brown and Davison’s The Power of Pull. The book contrasts traditional “push” systems (top down, strictly managed and closed production systems, engineered to exploit efficiencies in order to achieve economies of scope and scale) with emerging “pull” systems (more free formed, decentralized, nimble, modular and transitory). The topic was to what extent associations were or should be pull platforms.

And the musical concept of the “continuo” came into my mind. In renaissance music, it is the droning bass line that supports the melody. In baroque music, it is usually a low string instrument, like the cello, that provides the harmonic structure that holds the music together and keeps it moving forward while the melody and development occurs elsewhere in the ensemble in a more free form and unconstrained manner. (You can’t help but hear it in a piece like Pachelbel’s Canon, and believe me, you HAVE heard that piece, at a wedding or in a doctor’s office or in an elevator.) In jazz, this role is usually taken up in the rhythm section (piano, guitar and drums), offering a solid foundation for the wildest and most free form improvisations going on elsewhere in the band. There is probably a modern equivalent of basso continuo in rock and rap.

And what does this all have to do with associations? Well my personal conclusion is that associations are the very essence of pull systems. The voluntary nature of the enterprise, the need for collaboration based on something more than position authority, the networking and community that are central to the association’s nature, the association world’s embrace of social networking …. all of this screams “pull platform.”

But associations also serve as the basso continuo: the strictly structured, sustaining bass line of activity for the trade or profession that holds up and enables the inventiveness, creativity and innovation. It isn’t always glamorous. It isn’t the part of the tune that sticks in your head. But without these mundane, push features, the melody and improvisation would fall apart and come tumbling down.

(Still hung up on the reference to Kepler? He was a German mathematician, astronomer and astrologer and a key figure in the 17th century scientific revolution whose name is still attached to fundamental principles of planetary motion.)

Filed under The Nature of Associations Tagged with The Nature of Associations

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