Bookblogging: Creativity or Stewardship?
"Having just the vision's no solution
Everything depends on execution
The art of making art
Is putting it together."
Stephen Sondheim, Sunday in the Park with George
While we all can probably enhance our ability to generate great ideas and being more creative, innovation requires us to not only have the idea, but also to successfully implement it so that our members and stakeholders experience enhanced value.
And for some great insights on how to execute and implement creative possibilities, I'll be sharing ideas and commentary throughout December from the book, Making Ideas Happen, by Scott Belsky, founder and CEO of Behance. The Behance Network offers the Action Method set of resources for project planning, and I follow their Tweets and blog posts (published as The 99 Percent) for their valuable tips.
Insight #1: "The ideas that move industries forward are not the result of tremendous creative insight but rather of masterful stewardship."
Really? So often we seem to be looking for the breakthrough idea that will transform our organization or lamenting our seeming inability to be more innovative.
But stop for a second and think about you. Think about your organization. Are you really short on ideas? Is the association community really running on low on creative thinking, new insights, alternative approaches? Every day my RSS feed and Twitter screen is filled with dozens more ideas than I can possibly process. My bookshelves heave with environmental scans, research reports, and other publications from ASAE and a myriad of other organizations, each one containing more ideas for me to consider.
Yet, so often, the practices of association management don't seem to be changing. The questions we explore at conferences are often the same questions discussed a decade ago, and it often is evident that the answers identified then have yet to be implemented.
So while we may indeed need fresh answers for certain questions, perhaps what we need is more masterful stewardship of the ones we have ... just as Belsky suggests.
What do you think? Are we lacking ideas or falling short on execution? And why?
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Comments
Jeffrey, you've hit the nail on the head. I think if many of us took a good look at ourselves and how we managed initiating change or how we supported good practices, we'd see many areas for improvement.
Although I love discussing new ideas, sometimes I think brainstorming is just another way to put off the hard work of doing what we need to do.
Posted by: KiKi L'Italien | December 6, 2010 2:42 PM
Greetings everyone! Kiki -- what's the difference between how you're using "stewardship" and plain old project management?
Posted by: Tom McClintock | December 6, 2010 4:01 PM
Tom: I'm not sure how Kiki is using stewardship, but in the context of this book Tom, it does indeed encompass project management and whatever else it takes to bring an idea to fruition.
I'd also add though that I think it somewhat reflects how Peter Block defines the concept in his wonderful book Stewardship: "the willingness to be held accountable for the well-being of the larger organization by operating in service, rather than control, of those around us." For me this has direct implications for how we work with volunteers.
Posted by: Jeffrey Cufaude | December 7, 2010 10:42 AM
I definitely don’t think there’s a lack of creativity in the association community. But in my experience the time has to be right to implement new ideas. And oftentimes that means there needs to be a change in the existing regime. I think the same can be said for many corporations as well.
Posted by: Karen Addis, APR | December 9, 2010 3:01 PM