Doing digital.

Face the challenges of the digital age head-on. Two digital age observers explore the changes leaders must make now to ensure success later.

Managing an organization in the digital age is "a lot like herding cats," says Wally Bock, who along with Richard Schroth is a speaker at ASAE's Management and Technology Conferences this month. To some extent the organization's constituencies are going to lead, "but it's still a leader's job to set vision."

The role of a leader has not changed and will not change, says Bock, publisher of Briefing Memo newsletter, El Cerrito, California. A leader continually creates an organization's vision, communicates that vision, and invokes the changes necessary to bring that vision to fruition. What does change across time are the available tools, the organizational models, and the communication styles a leader employs.

The tools. Soon organizations will share information, data, and knowledge primarily in digital form. "For most associations information is already in digital form; it's just not the primary means of sharing it," Bock says. "It's in a word processing file or in a PageMaker [document] or something like that. As we move into the digital age, the digital form becomes primary and the paper [form] becomes a subset of the digital."

Another reason that we aren't there yet, says Richard Schroth, president and chief executive officer of Executive Insights, Ltd., Olney, Maryland, is that "information is still very much locked in the industrial world." What we're creating with technology now is more of an "incremental growth in the industrial world." The digital age will come when we create new companies, new services, and new associations "uniquely based in the technology," he says.

For leaders to excel during this coming age, they must get connected and start learning what's available now, Bock says. "You have to start using the media. [For instance,] you have to start using e-mail to learn to use it effectively." Executives also must learn what tools are available to them. "I just [surveyed] 125 membership-based organization Web sites," Bock says. "I tested them against a series of features that can be used on a membership-based organization Web site - [features] like chat rooms, private member areas, member signup, and registration. Only about 15 of the sites that I saw are using more than half of the eight features. Some of what we learn to do is use what we already have."

The organizational models. Leadership in the digital age also means revising organizational models. The way we define organizations is changing, Bock says; we're moving toward organizations that are defined by purpose and that have flexible boundaries. These days associations are more likely to form alliances with other organizations, he observes. "When we've got a paper-based, face-to-face-based medium, we tend to bring people together in silos. [Each] association has its own meetings and publishes its own books, publications, and magazines," Bock says. In the future, we'll see more associations connecting to other organizations. "If there's another association already doing [something] that serves my members well, there's no particular reason for me to do precisely the same thing when we can link in both directions."

Schroth looks at it from this perspective: "I am finding that these days there is no pure company represented" by an association. "Therefore, I don't think the association is going to be a pure association of something anymore." Associations will need to consolidate or partner to expand their members' access to information, Schroth remarks.

The communication styles. In the digital age, the way association executives communicate will move further from synchronous methods, such as telephone and face-to-face conversations, to asynchronous methods, such as e-mail, Bock predicts. While this move may not be embraced by all executives, he opines, it will allow associations to perform some of their core functions more effectively. If the core functions of associations include networking, bringing together like minds, sharing information, and so forth, digital world, Bock says. "You can access [information] faster, you can communicate more effectively, and you can spread the communication over a wider area - people or geography," he explains. "If you want to have a discussion of an issue, an e-mail method for having that discussion is far more effective in terms of the amount of input that you'll get and in terms of the range of people who will respond."

But don't think that you can control it, Bock cautions. "If in 1995 I could control pretty precisely what my members talked about by the way I set up the agenda at the four meetings that I had every year, I can't do that when they start doing a lot of e-mail communication, mailing lists, and so forth," he says. However, lack of control isn't all bad. While it may encourage leaders to use different methods to communicate direction, it may also enhance member satisfaction with the information they receive, Bock says.

The danger: assuming that digital is the only way to be effective. "There are still things that happen best face-to-face. There is still the kind of impromptu stuff that happens in hallways at conferences that you can't quite replicate online," Bock acknowledges. "You don't do that kind of going off in a corner together or stepping aside from the group and talking nearly as well [online]. The mechanism is there, but it doesn't work as well."

The most important thing to remember in this transitional time, Schroth says, is the word and. "Too many [organizations] get into the situation where they are choosing an or statement: You have to do this or that. I find that right now we are in an and time where we must do this and do that," he explains. "It's very important vocabulary to understand. We are not so defined that we have moved into a digital era; we are not so stayed that we are moving back into the industrial world. We are in an and world. In fact, most association heads right now need to recognize that their legacy is to help associations transition [through] this time. It's not only keeping the organization whole, but it's transitioning that organization to take advantage of [its] new station in a digital world."

Leading in the digital age may be like herding cats, as Bock notes, but the opportunities of the age justify the effort. The digital age gives associations "the opportunity to do as membership-based organizations what we have always said we were supposed to do," he says: "Help our members do better, whatever it is they do."

LaRonda R. C. Famodu is assistant editor of ASSOCIATION MANAGEMENT. E-mail: [e-mail].

Schroth, president and chief executive officer, Executive Insights, Ltd., believes that timeliness will be associations' competitive advantage in the digital age. Increased technology will allow immediate feedback from members to the association - and vice versa.