Acronym

1. Approximately 6 months before the fiscal year ends, we turn in our first crack at the budget. If we happen to have an interesting idea that is likely to cost money after that -- say 2 months into the fiscal year -- then anyone in the chain of command can basically kill it with the words "we didn't budget for it." To overcome that, it had better be a whopper of an idea.

2. We don't have time. Middle- and lower-level staff are swamped executing the plan (I love the double meaning of the word execute -- you be the judge of what's happening in your organization); senior staff spends gobs of time as personnel managers -- both for staff and committee/council/task force volunteers; and CEOs are mired in board and component and funding traps. Thinking about the future, if it happens at all, comes in tiny, disjointed bursts.

3. We've built an entire culture around painfully slow-to-change organizations. A group of consultants likely well known to readers of this blog even wrote a book about it: We Have Always Done It That Way: 101 Things About Associations We Must Change. We've made making big decisions extremely hard. Maybe that's livable, but we've made making small decisions extremely hard, too, and that leads to stagnation.

So what can you do about it?

Well, you could come with an alternative to the annual budget cycle (here's a previous rant on that). Something less radical, but just as hard: set aside 5 percent of the budget for unbudgeted ideas -- and develop a process to ensure the money gets used and is not cut the first time financials start to look a little iffy. (That should handle part of the time issue, too.)

As far as time and culture -- if you're a CEO you have tremendous power to affect your organization's culture. Start now as it will take time – years – for a change to take hold. Other staff people can still have major effects on culture, though without support from the CEO, you may be pushing boulders uphill. To steal from Jim Collins and use what has become a cliché, I think it comes down to having the right people on the bus. Set up structures and procedures that force future thinking, and use the hire-and-fire authority to get the right people thinking for you.

And then there's the volunteers. Sometimes it's the board or members whose collective inertia are the real culprits. CEOs have to convince them that the best interests of the organization (and industry/profession/interest) necessitate looking beyond what the organizations is doing and asking "what if...".

I know all of this is more easily said than done, but we have to try, don't we?