Acronym

I was invited to attend a breakfast discussion this morning on The Association of The Future. Led by Rohit Talwar, CEO of Fast Future Ventures, we were asked,

1) how do you currently consider the way in which future trends (e.g. demographic, economic, and competitive) might impact your organization?
2) How can we [ASAE] make our futures trend information intellectually and practically accessible to you and your organization?
3) How can we balance online delivery with other possible delivery methods?

Among other things, we discussed “ROE” – return on engagement – namely, how do you measure, or develop metrics for, or just pay attention to how your members are engaged, beyond just the traditional ROI? Could ASAE provide more benchmarking tools so we could measure our own associations against similar others?

I think everyone should be thinking about these questions and telling ASAE what you think, so they can deliver the best data, training, networking opportunities, etc. for us. I am glad they are asking.

We also discussed how to enable strategic thinking and strategic discussion throughout all levels of an organization. The reason I want to mention this, in particular, is that I experienced an example of how this is NOT happening right now.

After breakfast, Jamie Notter, Dave Sabol and I headed over to the session on The Speed of Trust: The One Thing That Changes Everything. In the schedule, this was highlighted, and I was very interested in hearing about Stephen Covey’s concept of ‘trust theory” as laid out in his book The Speed of Trust. But, five minutes into it, the three of us got kicked out because we are not CEO’s. So annoyed. Isn’t the speed of trust about trust between CEO’s and staff???

Let me tell you something. Having CEO-only sessions is fine. I have no problem with that, and once I am one (!) I am sure I will enjoy hanging out with other CEO's and sharing issues. They should be appropriately marked as such, in the schedule, duh. However – here's the clincher - this stuff does NOT trickle down to those of us actually doing the work of the association. Staff at all levels of the organization should be enabled and supported to be the strategic thinkers that we already are. Great ideas generally do NOT come from the Board or CEO – they approve, ratify, approve budgets for great ideas to happen, but I can pretty much guarantee that most great ideas come from mid-level staff. Enable strategic thinking! Don’t shut us out.