Next week is ASAE’s Great Ideas Conference, and Maddie and I are doing a “deep dive” session on Humanize on Sunday afternoon (after the opening General Session). A “deep dive” is a three-hour session, and I’m glad ASAE has started adding them to their lineup at their conferences. I enjoy attending and delivering the 75-minute sessions, but having three hours to work with makes it much easier to get into actually applying concepts to the real world, rather than just providing some insight or clarity.

So, are you ready to start applying Humanize to your association? The session will go over the basic ideas in the book, including the four human elements of open, trustworthy, generative, and courageous. And then we will dig more deeply into how that shows up in your organization at the behavior, process, and culture levels. We’ll start with behavior, where you’ll do a quick assessment regarding how individual behavior really stacks up in your organization, across all four of the human elements. It’s critical to start with what is–the visible behavior in your organization. In part 2, you’ll get to choose one of those four elements and explore in more detail how that element shows up in terms of  process and structure, through small-group discussion with your peers. And in the third part we’ll have a large-group conversation about the culture level. Here we’ll all focus on how to build a more decentralized culture, which is part of becoming more Open.

You’ll be doing a lot of the work in this session. We’re going old school and actually providing PAPER hand-outs, because they’ll have questionnaires and places for you to write down what you’re going to do when you get back to the office. You won’t need the book at the session, but feel free to bring it so Maddie and I can sign it (and the on-site bookstore will have copies too). Much of the session, by the way, will be drawing from the materials that we include in the free, downloadable worksheets that accompany the book.

I’ve said this before (and will again): Maddie and I are activists. We love it when you read the book, but (like the picture above), we love it even more when you USE the book. Fold down the pages. Make notes. Start implementing. We’re excited to have the opportunity to help you do that in Colorado Springs!