Leading Change Without Losing What Matters

You've mentioned kind of taking a fresh look at things.

So the Academy's publications and asking those fundamental questions, you know, who does each publication serve? What should it accomplish? What's valuable to members? I love that I heard that in what you said.

It's, you know, we have to think about what matters for members.

What do they want from us? But I'd love to know when you inherit something that's, it's been done this way for a long time, how do you go about determining what needs to change and what's worth preserving?

Yeah.

And I speak about this, you know, from the lens of my previous jobs as well, in my previous roles as well.

And I think I really start from, you know, what's helped me really is understand something before you start changing it.

right so when you inherit something that's been done a certain way for a long long time you really have to understand its history its purpose and its evolution right so i don't start with the assumption that say for a publication it needs a redesign just because it's been around for It's had the same look, feel, content for the last five years.

I think I start with approaching more fundamental questions like, who is this for? What should this publication actually do for a member? And how is it different from other publications? And what information really belongs here and what doesn't, right? That to me is a starting point.

That's a good starting point to figure out what's worth preserving from just what's familiar, right? And absolutely there are things that are worth holding on to.

I also think institutional knowledge is really important, right? People build relationships and processes around these publications.

But, you know, tradition by itself isn't a good enough reason to keep doing the same thing.

That's what I feel.

And at the same time, I don't think change should be changed for the sake of change.

You know, if something is working and it's serving a purpose, then really there's no prize in changing it just because you can.

I think the fundamental question here is whether I'm using the example of a publication, whether the publication or whether that product is still doing what you want it to really do.

Wow, yeah, I want to call back something you said there.

Tradition by itself isn't enough reason to do something the way you do.

And I just feel like every association should embrace this because how many times do we hear, well, this is the way we do it?

And I think there's so much to unpack there, Colleen.

Like, why have you done it the way you've done it? And that's fine that you've done it, but is it making sense going forward? What can we do to, you know, to maybe...

meet our members needs or what can we do internally to make our processes better? You know, so there is so much to unpack there.

So tradition for tradition's sake, it just

doesn't make sense to me.

Yeah, for sure.