Acronym

"The easiest and most seductive escape from the project plateau is the most dangerous one: a new idea. New ideas offer a quick return to the high energy and commitment zone, but they also cause us to lose focus. As the new star rises, our execution efforts for the original idea start to fall off. The end result? A plateau filled with the skeleton of abandoned ideas."

Making Ideas Happen, p. 71.

Guilty. As. Charged.

It's certainly not unusual in associations to find a graveyard of ideas abandoned before their complete execution. As volunteers move into leadership positions, they often want to start fresh with their own ideas rather than finish implementing the ideas of their predecessors. As a result, resources are often wasted, staff morale sometimes suffers (here we go again), and potentially great ideas wither from lack of sufficient attention and cultivation.

We can try to manage this recurring phenomenon by:

• Asking boards to make multi-year resource commitments for new initiatives and specify appropriate milestones and results for each year's efforts.
• Ensuring part of leadership transition involves discussing works-in-progress and what attention they will require from the new team.
• Ask new leaders how they plan on continuing the implementation of heir predecessor's good ideas.
• Managing the initial high that comes during the creative process by exploring the commitments successful implementation of ideas will require.
• Making it easier to move from ideas to action, accelerating the implementation stage by removing administrative barriers to getting things done.
• Getting those in major leadership positions to facilitate focus and discipline during the implementation stages.
• Creating parallel paths for individual contributions based on their strengths: (1) an incubator/think tank path for those who like to generate ideas, and an (2) implementer/executor path whose gifts align most with refining others' ideas and seeing them successfully operationalized.

Progress begets progress is an important mantra for making ideas happen. It's why we like to pass cars on the highway even if going so really doesn't get us to our destination much sooner.

If we don't want to produce more skeletons of abandoned ideas, we need to carefully revise our processes and procedures and make it easier for big ideas to have a presence beyond an individual's term of office; small wins to be achieved, celebrated, and experienced; and opportunities to contribute to the next series of action steps to happen.

How else would you suggest we do that?