Change, Complexity and a Desert Island

By Susan E. Sedory Holzer, MA, CAE

SIR Executive Director

As part of my professional development each spring, I attend DigitalNow, one of the association community’s top events for technology, innovation and leadership. While thinking about the challenges we face in shepherding SIR staff and resources on your behalf, I was struck by three ideas—change, complexity and a desert island. I gained insight about each from three leading experts at this year’s meeting.

DigitalNow Panel 

Change: We all are facing an increasing rate of uncertain change in our workloads, evolving business and payment models and fast-paced personal lives. Your natural reaction should be to ask: How will SIR provide solutions to your issues today—and a year from today? My answer is to exercise our ability to change. SIR needs to be innovative and stay technologically relevant—whether it’s engaging in social networking, mobile opportunities, cloud-based collaboration or on-demand learning. But gravity draws us backward, even to things we want to change (think e-mails, landlines, attached files and classrooms). How do leaders escape this pull of the past? By constantly analyzing, changing and aligning, says Geoffrey Moore, a leading high tech strategist and the author of “Crossing the Chasm” and “Escape Velocity: Free Your Company's Future From the Pull of the Past.” Societies, like SIR, are in a unique position to mobilize their “power gears” (meaning, our members and others we enlist with our passion) to propel us forward. In short, we need to be the place where our bold innovators—the ones who start out “dancing” alone—meet with support and a willingness to join in and change.

Complexity: Rita McGrath, a Columbia Business School professor and leading expert on strategy in highly uncertain and volatile environments, worries that many are trying to solve today’s complex problems with outdated methods. She recommended that society leaders forecast differently. More time should be spent examining leading—not lagging—indicators and watching growth “outliers” who defy the odds by thinking and doing things differently. She urged society leaders to mitigate risks differently: Stop investing in prevention to keep bad things from happening and instead commit to learning from “intelligent” failures. And, she reminded society leaders to allocate resources through “disengagement” (or discovering what SIR should stop doing) and investment of time and resources on innovation.

Desert island: I’m sure you’re wondering what a desert island has to do with addressing change and complexity. Another speaker posed this question: If your members were stranded on a desert island, and they could only bring one information source with them, would it be you? Steven Rosenbaum, a U.S. television producer and author of “Curation Nation,” stressed that members should look to their professional society as a filter and funnel, a curator who handpicks what’s crucial for members from the mass of information that we’re bombarded with daily. From the dawn of civilization until 2003, five exabytes (one quintillion bytes) of information was created. “Now, that much information is created every two days,” said Rosenbaum.

SIR embraced its responsibility to be your trusted IR authority. In the months and years to come—and with your help—we will curate (continue to gather and organize relevant IR information and store it for your use), clarify content (validate info by separating signal from noise), provide context (what is relevant and necessary), bundle quality information for you (facts, links, images, etc.) and give a point of view (to help predict the near future for you).

Undergoing positive change, battling complexity with innovative efforts and serving as your IR source, we will ensure that your needs are met—and exceeded. SIR wants to be with you on that desert island.

Question

We hope you say “SIR”; however, if you were stranded on a desert island today, and you could only bring one information source with you, what would it be?

Originally published in SIR's July/August IR News