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In Monday's Idea Lab "Managing Resistance to Change," Chris Clarke-Epstein, CSP, said "mostly, people are people" in response to a question on the need for cultural awareness when managing change in international organizations.

Meanwhile, attendees identified stakeholders critical to change and evaluated and planned approaches based upon the Support for Change questionnaire (which I highly recommend downloading.) Other Great Ideas sessions on Monday included discussions on:

• Recruit young professionals to the boards of directors;
• Whether associations should enhance programming for the top one percent of contributors in order to keep high-value members;
• Going beyond personalized member outreach;
• Building relationships with unofficial leaders in your organization.

These sessions point to the perspective that members ≠ members. In other words, not every member is the same. We customize marketing campaigns, target nominations toward experienced leaders, support special interest groups, and so on. We constantly tweak our approach to target the ideal member.

What I've mulled over the past day is whether associations do this too much. At what point does customization become detrimental to our organizations?

Past work with database experts prompted this idea, as the bane of their existence during an upgrade was all of the unique customizations they were asked to make. They agreed some were necessary but often disagreed with the amount of customization. Come time to change governance structure in our associations, don't we feel this same angst? That concession made to a specific group or support of a specific area suddenly feels like a burden as opposed to a strategic priority.

Could we learn from our database experts' approach of envisioning the upgrade to reduce future angst? Is this possible with the people-focused side of the business? After all, it's common knowledge that it's best to keep to "off the shelf" functionality for the inevitable future upgrade. The people-side is more difficult, as I'm unsure if "off the shelf" exists or if we understand what the next upgrade will be.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on this, as I haven't found a satisfactory conclusion myself. Do you think we over-customize? Should we move more toward a "members = members" approach?