The Hard Work of Clarity

Last Friday I had the extreme pleasure to present a session with Lindy Dreyer and Maddie Grant of SocialFish at ASAE’s first ever Social Media Workshop. The title of our session is "What Social Media Means for the Way We Work." Maddie has already completely summarized our session (perfectly!), along with the slides, so check that out first if you haven’t seen it yet.

What I want to write about is the part of the session that no one saw—where Maddie and I went back and forth at the bar about one piece of our session (come on! I thought you knew the best sessions always happened at the bar!). She told me that she wanted to push back on one of my points. The main conclusion that we presented was to put clarity over control, and in that context I made the point that achieving clarity is hard work.

She pushed back, saying that all associations have a mission or vision or something where they can get started. She didn't want me to scare people into doing nothing simply because they didn't have perfect clarity.

Okay, agreed. As Elizabeth pointed out in a recap to her session, the easy answer is always to do nothing, and I feel we rarely have that luxury any more, so I'm a fan of action. You don't have to wait for your clarity to be absolutely perfect before you start doing some social media (and, by the way, starting to do it can help develop your clarity).

But as I told Maddie at the Bar, I would have pushed back against her push back, because I think most associations operate with very little strategic/mission clarity. They are very clear about the highest level of mission: being the preeminent voice of the industry providing networking, education, and community, blah blah blah. This is too high level. Too often you could swap the name of the association, but the mission statements would still make sense.

That's not clear enough to guide social media, where the power is dispersed. We had the luxury of creating high level mission statements in the past BECAUSE we concentrated the power at the top. I don't need to know the intricacies of how our association really fits into the lives of our members, because mostly I need to do what my boss tells me to do.

Social media pushes power and responsibility down, so we need more clarity than we used to. I personally think we need it regardless of social media. that's why I have been arguing for "middle level thinking" in strategy for a while now. You need to be able to articulate a level of clarity that is below the platitudes and above the nitty gritty details. It's hard work and often involves some conversations that take time and might even go in circles for a bit, but the companies that have the discipline to do it will generate the kind of clarity that will help them generate social media policies that employees and other stakeholders actually understand and use. Middle level clarity is hard work, but who ever said leadership was easy?

Comments

[Maggie McGary]

TOTALLY right on. What association doesn't have as part of their vision "be the best...", "be seen as the go-to hub...", "be the most trusted source of....", etc? Love the concept of middle level thinking!

[Betsy]

I agree- achieving clarity is hard work. I think of board members, and staff members, who all think they are clear (and under control)... when really they all have a different view. (And different views of social media!) It's hard work.