Creative Thinking

KNOWLEDGE CENTRE

The best form of communication is and will always be face-to-face, one-on-one direct contact. However the speed and complexity of modern life makes this virtually impossible on a regular basis. The switch of communications over our lifetime from conversation, to letter-writing, to telephone, to faxes, to emails and now mobile and wireless technology has been brought about partially due to the frenetic pace of decision-making and the need for immediate answers to complex issues. Who knows what will come next!

There are some signs of a move back towards conversation as the most effective way to reach decisions – however, many are now uncomfortable with having to argue their views personally, and often in public, with peers or opponents.

Often issues are so complex and multifaceted that it is difficult to describe, let alone understand them, in detail. This lack of appreciation of the whole can lead to some disastrous unintended consequences as international political events demonstrate.

This is where creative thinking methodologies are able to assist in distilling issues into manageable concepts leading to workable solutions. Techniques include:

Mind Mapping
SWOT Analysis
Hexagon Mapping
Decision Trees
Systems Thinking
Causal loops
2X2 Matrices

Very few organisations could claim that they have never had members asking:

What do I get for my subscription?
How does it help me?
Those at H.Q. are out of touch with the members.
We go in too hard on issues.
We don't go in hard enough!

In my own 36 years of industry/professional association work, I have heard them all - and in each organisation I worked in! This has caused me to think about what are the key measures of an organisation's health - and how often are they checked, analysed and calibrated?

What are the symptoms of an ailing association? Some danger signs clearly are:

falling membership;
ageing membership;
loss of influence;
lack of competition for elected positions;
rapid changeover of senior staff
loss of corporate memory
a sense of treading water rather than moving forward;
no direction, no vision; and
the emergence of competitors.

This is the tip of the iceberg. Like a disease, there is not much benefit from simply treating the symptoms if at the same time you don't determine the root cause and implement major change. It is always easier to fill in the potholes rather than resurface the road, but the road will get progressively weaker through this process. (Now that's a three metaphor paragraph!)

In answer to this, Client Solutions has developed a range of services which will allow groups to know more about themselves and to improve the way they operate. It's called Association Analytics and will cover a range of analyses, diagnostics and recalibration in areas such as:

Internal Analysis/Review
Membership Analysis/Review
Outputs Analysis/Review
Environmental Analysis/Review