Never Confuse Activity With Results – Expanding Services With an Eye on Members Needs

Thomas A. Marshall is AANS executive director.

I’m not exactly sure where I first heard the phrase. The sinking feeling my memory generates suggests it was from the executive director I reported to at the first membership association I worked for in the 1980s. The feeling is sinking because he and I most definitely did not enjoy what organizational consultants then termed “cooperatively productive management team chemistry.”

But fortunately — and inexplicably — some of the best and most lasting lessons I’ve learned were from teachers with whom I shared uncooperative and irritating chemistry that was — also inexplicably — productive.

So, the phrase still resonates for me today: “Never confuse activity with results.”

Given where the AANS finds itself today as we start the second half of this decade, it occurs to me that our success in the first half was significant in large part because we honored this notion.

Associations work best and offer their greatest benefits when they serve as generators of ideas and implementers of initiatives. But what often results from enthusiastic bursts of well-meaning brainstorming is a deluge of disparate activities, unbounded by the realities of scope and capability. And those activities then generate torrents of reports, timelines, board motions, wasted infrastructure and volunteer resources, and of course, dollars. Because one of the things associations do worst is realize when it’s time to sunset projects whose time has passed, the champions of those projects are prone to mistake the frenzied activity they generate for substantive progress.

Fortunately, the AANS has not fallen victim to that syndrome. In the “downsizing and reassessment” phase it went through five years ago, there was only one mission for the organization: remain solvent. That made this particular threat realistically avoidable. However, danger lurks for an organization hitting on all cylinders, when the crises are past and the coffers are sufficiently robust, to rapidly change the mission from survival to sustenance, and then to progress and growth.

In the last several years the AANS has enjoyed a satisfying growth in stability and in ability to serve its members’ needs. The organization’s leadership has been as vigilant as they’ve been creative in undertaking programs aimed at meeting the greatest needs of membership in the most cost-effective manner — and with the greatest “bang for the buck.” There are not many organizations that can exercise this kind of restraint in their decision-making. After a phase of providing members limited service, the tendency is to make up for lost time by attempting to deliver anything that merely, in the dangerous parlance of many governing bodies, “seems like an appropriate thing for us to do.”

While the expansion of services you enjoy as an AANS member has been accelerated over the last several years, those services have been carefully identified, selected and delivered more efficiently than at any time in our history. Part of the reason is that we now determine program and service development by what you tell us you need through our various survey tools. Service development is therefore predominantly determined by what the membership tells the organization it desires, not vice versa.

But the AANS’ efficiency also results from many years of AANS leadership not defining progress by the length of project lists, board reports, or verbal ornamentation camouflaging moribund programs. The desired result drives the activity, not the other way around.

Thus, the maxim “Never confuse activity with results” is instructive for all of us involved in the AANS, and it also can serve as a model that many larger service organizations would do well to recognize. The immediate benefit is vital, but its ultimate value is timeless.

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