Step Four: Discussing the Strategic Implications, Part 6

Four weeks ago, in Step Four: Discussing the Strategic Implications, Part 5, I continued a description of a Scenario Planning exercise my Board chair and I decided to conduct at our two most recently completed Board meetings. I ended the previous post with a comment that, in the process of defining the external factors that will most dramatically affect the course of our industry, and of identifying the strategies and tactics that our association should employ in order to help those things happen, we sometimes discovered factors that were clearly going to affect our industry's future but for which, given the association's resource pool and existing strategic focus, we had a difficult time defining strategies or tactics for our organization to productively employ.

This will likely be the last post in this series. If you've read this far, then you've seen me describe one attempt to bring a disciplined process to our Board discussions, and the frequent and necessary adjustments that we had to make to the process, typically in the name of either expediency or engagement. Scripted processes are often like that. What worked for one association in one situation is not necessarily going to work for another association in another situation. Sticking unreasonably to a process for the sake of the process puts the emphasis in the wrong place, and risks serving a set of interests different from those that typically brings Boards together for effective action.

And this, clearly, was one of those situations. Forcing the issue -- in other words saying, no, it doesn't matter that none of us can see an honest and realistic tactic here for our association to pursue, we still have to write something down in this box, we have to complete this process -- was likely to jeopardize support for all the work and discussion that had come before. It risked turning forward-thinking strategy development into a make-work exercise.

So what did we do? I mean, after all, here we were, at the end of several months of discussion, something that had taken up the majority of two Board meetings. We had identified the megatrends that are shaping the future of our industry, defined a future scenario that we wanted to help our industry move towards, and were now trying to identify the strategies that would get us there. Were we supposed to back away now? Were we supposed to admit defeat and say that there were some things that our association was simply not well positioned or resourced to achieve?

Yes. Because, that's exactly what we did.

But I'm loathe, of course, to call it a defeat. Someone once said that the hardest part of strategy development was not deciding what TO do, it was deciding what NOT to do. I view the situation we found ourselves in as a place where my association and its leadership were put to that very test. Can our association do everything? No, obviously it can't. So, instead of adding ten impossible things to our list, let's instead find five that, because of our position and our resources, we are most likely to tackle and achieve successfully.

If that's not leadership, I don't know what is.

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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

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