We thought it was a good idea at the time.

Then again over the past five years we’ve thought more than a few ideas were good ideas but were just not responded to enthusiastically by club members.

The following process is pretty standard for us now.

1. The club leadership gets an idea (or learns of a member’s idea) that we think is good and would benefit the club.

2. We add the idea’s concept to our club website and build a poster – promoting the idea in our monthly newsletter and on our Facebook page.

3. Over a period of time we gauge the response from the membership based on their willingness to participate.

4. If the response is strongly positive (as was recently the case with our long-term care initiative)*, we move forward with those enthused by the project.

5. If the response is weak (as was the case with our competition idea described in the accompanying poster), we announce it’s cancellation for lack of interest (for now) and remove mention of it from our website and Facebook page.

We have found this approach to be the most accurate approach to ascertaining the memberships’ true level of commitment to what might have seemed like a good idea on its first hearing.

This process has become an integral part of our club culture (i.e. not afraid to float new ideas and equally unafraid to stop ideas lacking the enthusiastic commitment of enough members).

You might notice that the word “failure” isn’t used in this blog post. As a club, fear of failure usually doesn’t hold us back from dreaming bigger than we would otherwise.

At least in part that’s because we don’t see any of these experiments in programming through the lens of failure. We prefer to think of the process as the energizing practice of just consistently trying new ideas.

*Please note: You may read more about our Long-Term Care Initiative in the next post.

Categories: Governance, Uncategorized

Tags: Governance