Resolved: Embrace Your Messes
It's four days into the new year, and with any luck you're still sticking to your resolutions to be healthier, kinder, more creative, more organized, and so on. All good things. But I hope you'll forgive me for handing you this double-fudge sundae of a resolution-wrecker: Maybe this is the year you stop trying so hard to apply order to things and instead spend more time acknowledging life's inherent messiness.
I say this after spending some time over the holidays reading the transcript of a talk that economist Tyler Cowen gave at the TedxMidAtlantic conference. (The talk—in the video above—was in 2009, but the transcript appeared late last month.) Cowen's talk is about stories—more specifically, our human instinct to organize our lives as stories. Cowen understands that storytelling is baked into our nature, but he's concerned that our need to describe our lives in terms of conflicts and beginnings, middles, and ends oversimplifies things. "Every time you're telling a good-versus-evil story, you're basically lowering your IQ by ten points or more," Cowen says. Good-versus-evil stories deflect nuance and complication, and it's often the subtle things you need to be the most concerned about.
The line that really hit home for me—and that got me thinking about associations—is Cowen's suggestion about what you should do when a story feels a little too enchanting to you:
Pull back and say, "What are the messages, and what are the stories that no one has an incentive to tell?" and start telling yourself those, and see if any of your decisions change.
Associations, of course, tell stories about themselves all the time: In the annual report, in the board minutes, in the marketing programs, in their internal messages. Those messages can be as simple as "We've supported our industry for decades." But what if the industry isn't the same as it was all those decades back? The decades make for a nice story, but they're not what matters—and, as Cowen implies, leaning on that story isn't going to drive you to make changes in what you do.
So here's the question for the new year (and please do weigh in with your answers in the comments if you're willing): What are the stories you've seen associations unwilling to tell themselves? And a bonus question: Where does that lack of incentive come from?
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Comments
Cowen is a smart egg. One story I think many associations are having a hard time telling themselves/accepting is that they no longer are indispensable to members (if they ever were) and they are unlike to be able to become that way, despite it being in their vision statement.
We won't like to tell ourselves this story for a variety of reasons: (1) it means acknowledging perceived vulnerability in that we don't have a guaranteed hook to shackle members to the organization, (2) because we're not sure how to answer the critical question, "Uh, so now what?" and (3) some see it as being too defeatist.
But it actually can be freeing as it now gives us the permission (and acknowledges the real need) to enter into a new relationship dynamic with each other, one based more on collaboration and co-creation. The association is more of a platform for its communities, enabling their interests, aspirations, and ideas, and amplifying their learnings and resources.
Posted by: Jeffrey Cufaude | January 4, 2012 10:31 AM
Jeff hits the nail on one. The other is a 2-parter that can be summed up with "volunteer program" isn't a core business and so (1) we don't need to fund/resource it with the same thought and planning as our real businesses (you know the conference, IT...) and (2) we don't need to update it.
Lack of incentive on this one is largely that volunteers (with possible exception of the "board" are no-cost and so don't require the attention and rigorous planning & management.
Maybe another overall incentive drain is that the common story we tell ourselves is that we can't make big changes. I loved how it was put in the Assn Now leadership issue in the collaborate piece - if the ability to adopt change was plotted on a scale of 1-10 (ten is full embrace), many are hovering around 4.
Posted by: Peggy Hoffman | January 4, 2012 1:32 PM
Amen! This whole thing gets at what I wrote about in Associations Now in 2010 about Truth. Truth is not simple and one-sided, yet many of the stories we tell about our organizations are just that--simple and one-sided. Valuing and embracing the messy truth is a critical leadership capacity these days, and one that seems to be in short supply.
Posted by: Jamie Notter | January 5, 2012 11:39 AM
Thanks for your thoughts, Jeffrey, Peggy, and Jamie. One thing that seems a little clearer to me in terms of why associations avoid acknowledging their messes is that doing so risks projecting vulnerability. Associations are designed to project strength---they stand as leaders for their industry among members, in legislatures, and around the world, and saying that you've got chaos when it comes to volunteers and members doesn't support that image. But I don't think it has to be that way. You can just commit to casting the story differently: "We're an organization that acknowledges our faults and failures and invites our members to talk with us about them, because we understand that our survival depends on it." Still a story, but perhaps one with a little more integrity.
Posted by: Mark Athitakis | January 6, 2012 11:23 AM