Last Monday I suggested that strategic planning is skewed (in an unhealthy way) towards relevance. On Wednesday, I made the case that social media has some lessons for us in this area–the way social media uses continuous listening reveals a missing link in strategy work. Even as we generate new processes for strategy work (declaring strategic planning dead), we're still missing this generative piece.

 So at CalSAE, Maddie and I started the conversation about what that missing link might be in our Relevance Is Not Enough session. We know that "listening" goes in the middle of this diagram for social media, but what would go there to make strategy work–to make strategy as nimble and alive as social media? When you strip strategy work down, you get the cycle understand, choose, do, and learn, but what goes in the middle?

My first guess is that the association world would want to put "MISSION" in the middle. I can hear it now… The mission guides everything we do. It's the link that connects the work we do to understand our system and make choices and learn. We are mission driven!

That might be true–if our mission statements didn't suck. I'm sorry, I know your mission statement means a lot to you, but seriously, how does being the "preeminent source for education, networking, and public awareness" really narrow your choices? And we wouldn't dare change a mission statement, even though we know we need to make strategic shifts all the time. So mission doesn't cut it. It's definitely an important part of the equation, but it's not the missing link.

Eric Lanke suggested, in a comment to my last post, that maybe the missing link is the same as it is for social media: listening. He said:

Too often we keep the define-launch-nurture-evaluate wheel spinning with just the power of our own bureaucracies. We need to find out what our members are actually saying about our programs and services–and to do that we need to find ways to talk to them in their spaces, not ours.

Okay, I agree with those statements, Eric, but I'm not convinced it's truly the missing link. Yes, I do agree that we need to do more listening rather than guessing, but that's the same argument that the data-driven strategic planners give. The way we do listening as a community is fairly standard: we survey, we focus group, we invest in the programs that get 4.1 and not the ones that get 3.6. Listening is good, but it's not enough. Though I suspect your point about talking to them "in their spaces, not ours" starts to go in the direction I'm going.

There were actually two key lessons from social media for strategy, and only one of them was listening. The other was that social media is not afraid to die. It has experimentation infused in its DNA. It tries new things, allows them to morph into things that weren't originally conceived, and it kills things without drama or lengthy debates led by people who want to keep their pet projects. Social media is powerful because of it's ability to quickly turn into things that are valuable BEFORE the central authority actually knows they are valuable.

That's what association strategy processes are lacking. We put into our plans what we KNOW to be valuable (or at least what we think we know), but we are unable to grow valuable things at the same time. What strategy work needs is a component that integrates the two lessons from social media–interactive listening plus constant, generative experimentation. The word that Maddie and I came up with was cultivation. 

What is your association doing to constantly be cultivating its strategy (and its mission for that matter)?Turning over the soil, planting seeds, pulling weeds–constantly supporting the growth of new value across the system that will impact how you do the strategy work of understand, choose, do, and learn. How do you support value EVOLUTION in your system, rather than just figuring out what value you as the association can create by spending your budget each year?

One of the participants suggested the word "stimulate" would be better than cultivate. Strategy includes not just the direction you are headed in, but your efforts to inject some energy into different parts of the system in order to see what they come up with, and feeding those results back into your strategy.

Think about our own associations. We have data on member needs and desires. How could we put some resources into allowing THEM to develop those further, without it being (immediately) a big program that we have to fund, implement, and evaluate? I think we would have to really change the relationship the association has with volunteers, as more members would be doing important strategy work in small doses. Strategic value would be a much more frequent topic in volunteer conversations, and attention could not only be limited to pieces that the association "owns." The ability to connect the threads from a larger number of value producing activities would be the key to growth for the enterprise. The idea of budgets as we know them would probably need to be blown up. The same with committees.

But that's as far as I've gotten with these ideas. Should I keep going? Will you help?