My good friend and brilliant attorney Brian Larson recently posted an interesting blog entry on Tesseract, “Emancipating innovation from the ‘legacy customer”. Brian was writing about why legacy companies such as MLS vendors are slow to innovate. Most, he says, blame their customers: “as vendors we have to meet the needs of our customers by giving them what they want and are used to. We are not able to innovate because we don’t want to antagonize them and/or lose our reputation as a solid rock in times of change.”
One of my clients, a Realtor association, is also concerned about innovation. “We’ve got to be cutting edge,” the AE told me. “If we don’t move toward change, we are doomed as an association.”
I thought “doomed” might be a bit dramatic a prediction, but after I met with the association leadership I discovered a low percentage of association participation, a concerted effort on the part of the leadership to clone future leaders as themselves, and a sweeping ignorance of the profile and presence of younger members. Yep, “doomed” might be more appropriate than I originally thought.
Brian’s article came to mind: often we as AEs have legacy leadership, and those folks behave like Brian's legacy companies do. The Legacy Leader says:
“Yep: lotsa nice bells and whistles with that new MLS system. But OUR members don’t have a clue about technology. It won’t work here.” (Denial, Brian calls it.)
“Well, who can fund a technology strategic plan? We have enough problems running the association on the members’ dues dollars. If we have any extra, we should give it back to them. These are hard times. Who ever heard of Research and Development anyway?” (Funding Challenges.)
“Our members are salespeople. They won’t learn new stuff: they haven’t got time.” (Legacy technologies.)
“Of course the association next door has listings in our area, and we have some in theirs. But if those brokers want to get access, they can join both MLSs. We don’t do business like they do so we couldn’t fit together in any way. And they’d just come here and try to sell our listings anyway.” (Resistance to partnering—ever heard of it?)
“We’re here for our members. We gotta do what they tell us or there will really be an uproar.” (We couldn’t do anything different if we wanted to. It’s not our mission.)
As associations we have legacy customers. Many have spent years immersed in tradition: lots of committees, regular face-to-face meetings, a surplus of disposable time to be an association groupie, a governance hierarchy that is stiff and unbending. Add to that the phenomenon of the “Compliance Command”: simply stated the Compliance Command is to obey national association policy, or else….
(The Compliance Command, by the way, is for many a great excuse for not taking action—certainly not the intention of NAR, which uses policy compliance as a risk management tool, not as an avoidance of strategic inquiry.)
The question then is, how do AEs assist their associations in creating what Larson calls “a culture of innovation”? Is “association innovation” a contradiction in terms?
Another association thinker whom I regularly follow is Jeff De Cagna, of Principled Innovation. Jeff says: “Innovation is a social process that depends on people working collaboratively to identify, develop and nurture creative ideas”, and he suggests forming a “hot group” of members who act as a think tank and advisory group to the board of directors, and focus the group on solving current member problems, challenging them for new (and even dangerous) solutions. Recognize that solutions need not be costly: limit the group to a budget of, say, $1000 for an initial prototype or test. De Cagna says, “This is an example of a ‘generative constraint’ that can act as a catalyst for innovation.”
There’s nothing inherently wrong with legacy, of course, particularly if preservation is important to your business. However, I’m of the opinion that preservation isn’t a mission for MLS vendors and other technology companies, or for real estate trade associations. As association managers, it’s a good idea to recognize your legacy customers and find a way to balance their impact on your organization as you build a culture of innovation.
Thanks Judith. I rarely respond to blogs but this one really is very relevent. Innovation is always a tough approach to take in any field that is steeped in layers of policy and procedure. As you point out staying inside the boundaries often creates the path of least resisitance which many individuals view as the right path. Technology changes everything. We found this out in the manufacturing economy, the information economy and now many are having to deal with it in the knowledge economy. As Bob Dylan so eloquently sang it, "Oh, the times they are a-changin."
A behind the scenes look at organized real estate--what works in an association, what doesn't, and what a long time AE sees as challenges facing the industry from the viewpoint of its professional organization.
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