Anticipating Trends Across Industries: A Case Study
Many years of working in the association space, and two very different industries within it, have taught me a thing or two about using foresight to an association’s advantage. Now, with ASAE’s ForesightWorks, all of us have access to the resources we need to scan for trends and anticipate changes before they happen. What kind of impact […]
The Future of Work for Associations
Over the next few years, staff structure at associations will undergo huge changes that will present opportunities for more efficient and nimble operations. This is made clear by several Social, Technological Economical, Environmental and Political (STEEP) factors, listed below. (The #CAEProud crowd will remember the acronym!) MORE WITH LESS Lessons learned from the Great Recession have […]
Political Black Swans: Ignore Them at Your Association’s Peril
In 2003, widespread protest broke out around me in Azerbaijan, a country formerly part of the Soviet Union.Violence erupted just a few blocks from my office with clashes between protesters and the police, the torching of cars and mass arrests. The country’s capital was brought to a standstill, and the work of our organization was […]
Virtual Conferences: Knowledge Co-Created in Real Time
The virtual conference that AssociationSuccess.org held for the first time in November shared the same characteristic of pretty much anything we’ve ever done: it was an experiment. We had no idea what was going to happen (something I am far more willing to admit after the fact, as the ol’ fake it till you make it adage rings a […]
Association Culture: What Not To Do
What does a healthy workplace culture look like? It can be hard to picture your ideal working world. But I bet we can all think of what we don’t want in a workplace. I’m going to relay my experience of working for an organization that got culture wrong, in the hope that we can all learn […]
How to Prepare for Future Generations of Association Membership
For better or worse, millennials are a hot topic among associations right now. As a millennial myself, I’m always wary of these discussions. About half the time it’s people of other generations complaining about millennials, and the rest of the time it’s a feeble discussion about how to prepare for millennials who will be entering your […]
Women in Tech Survey: Foresight in Action
The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) is the largest technical association in the world, with over 400,000 members in over 160 countries. Our members come from a huge variety of backgrounds. They are in electrical and electronics engineering, computing, communications, robotics, and automation, and much more. They work in academia, private industry, and government. […]
Leading by Example: How Passion Can Drive Technological Change
Changing people’s minds has both an intellectual and an emotional aspect. Intellectually speaking, it is of course important to present people with facts, figures and data to encourage them to commit to a transformative project. On an emotional level however, when it comes to implementing cultural change, your own passion can play an enormous role. If […]
What’s Next? Free Membership and For-Profit Associations
I started the Association of Association Executives 10 years ago as a network and information resource, and a for-profit organisation. Coming from a business information background where I partnered with associations, I saw the lack of information and education available to them and wanted to make a change for the association community. Four years in, we expanded our […]
Distributing IT Decision-making Across Departments
In most modern organizations, we’re seeing a distributed technology decision-making model. The IT department is no longer the only place where technical decisions are being made, and we are not going to regain full control (nor should we want full control). This can be a good thing. When technology infuses every corner of an association, employees […]