Acronym

I think we really have to get away from traditional thinking about empowering volunteers. I find a much more powerful question to be: What are the tools and support our members need to create and act on what they most care about? As Meg Wheatley has said so profoundly, in self-organizing efforts people do for themselves that which has previously been done to (for) them. Founders have to do it for themselves because no one else is around to do it. Small staffs often reply much more on volunteers or else they couldn't get many things done.

Empowerment implies that association staff have the power and they are going to share it with volunteers. I think much more is possible if we believe volunteers and members have the power and staff are there to facilitate their productive use of it. It's not just a shift in semantics, it's a shift in roles. And it is one I think needs to happen muuch sooner rather than later when we are about to be flooded with a generation of individuals who have grown up creating content.

It's interesting you say that, because my experience has been very much the opposite--members/volunteers have been the authority who shared power with staff, instead of the other way around. I think there are definite advantages to the volunteers-lead, staff-follows model, but there are also areas of an association's business activities where volunteers aren't going to take the lead and probably don't have the time or interest to do so, either.

I personally think there needs to be a balance between the empowerment of volunteers and that of staff, so that both are empowered within their scopes to move the mission of the association forward. But that's an ideal that can often be difficult to achieve in the real world ...

In a world where the shift of roles that you describe has happened, do you think staff would be innovating at all? Or would they be implementing the ideas that volunteers come up with?

I think you definitely see volunteers in gerater control of some aspects of operations in scientifical and technical groups, as well as societies for the major professions (law, medicine, etc.). It reflects the nature of those disciplines.

What I was getting at a bit more was the fact that we haven't really created good systems and processes that allow both staff and volunteers to contribute to organizational efforts as their time and interests allow. If I had an idea right now for ASAE that was consistent with the strategic plan and would require no resources other than my own effort, it would still require having some staffer or section review it and determine whether or not it was OK ... if I could even get someone's attention. We have to find ways that better leverage the caring that a lot of members have for their professions and associations. Too much talent is being wasted because of limited and controlled opportunities through fairly traditional pathways and structures.

Jeff says: "Too much talent is being wasted because of limited and controlled opportunities through fairly traditional pathways and structures."

That's such a great point. In a lot of associations (organizations in general, too) structures arise over time that worked when they first were established ... but then they calcify, and new ideas don't always fit into the pre-existing slots.

My last association revamped their scientific/technical committee structure to focus on ad hoc project teams. To be part of a committee, you had to be part of a project team; and each project team had to be working on a project (there weren't supposed to be any standing, inactive projects). And the system made project teams fairly easy to form, both within a committee and across committees.

I really liked this structure (and I had nothing to do with designing it, so I can say that without patting myself on the back at all). It allowed members with limited time to come in, accomplish something useful and concrete, and then phase out once the project was over. It allowed members who hadn't been part of a committee before to easily become part of a project that interested them. And it was flexible enough to provide room for those great ideas that you're talking about.