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Thomas A. Marshall is AANS executive director |
Whether you’re a chess devotee or just once knew the moves, regardless of whether your knowledge of the 1972 “Match of the Century” between then-World Champion Boris Spassky and the eccentric American challenger Bobby Fischer in Reykjavic, Iceland, is from 34-year memory or only hearing it spoken of, no matter if you view Fischer as hero, demon, or merely an unstable genius, his quotations over the decades are legendary.
Infuriating, intelligent, polarizing, divisive—they can be all those. But dismissing Fischer’s chess quotes out of hand ignores the ability they have to instruct in arenas well beyond the 64-square cauldron that forged them.
This Fischer quote is one of my favorites. It appears often in the present, history books are filled with examples of how it affected the past, and its lessons are arguably most crucial in how they can be applied in the future.
In venues of organizational management, the quote has relevance far beneath its surface. It cuts to a subtle nuance of strategic vision that is constantly reaffirmed in successful institutions.
In too many instances, organizations aim their strategic sights merely at “equality”—setting their goals of reputation, service, innovation and mission on the target of maintaining status quo. Duplicating previous levels of achievement is mistaken as success, and sacrificing organizational identity to maintain calm is viewed as wisdom.
At first glance, who would argue with that no-risk vision? Maintaining status quo offers safety, cooperation, peaceful coexistence and self-satisfaction—as well as a swarm of debilitating illusions.
For one thing, settling for indistinct equality siphons off an organization’s most critical fuel: motivation to grow. There is a “gravitational pull” on systems that merely tread water in an ocean of sameness, and that undertow is often invisible. The cost of resources spent to maintain “status quo” rises annually, while revenue that should be reinvested into services for members diminishes as it is required to absorb operational shortfalls.
When an organization changes its strategic mentality to achieve increasing degrees of excellence, however, it establishes a mindset of vigorous growth and instills vibrancy in its constituents. Significantly, the dollars available after meeting operational costs are then increasingly reinvested to expand programs that are meaningful and innovative.
Moreover, robust organizations that strive for this type of prominence underscore a critical distinction: They understand the subtle difference between collaboration and independence.
Organizations should collaborate. Partnerships can be mutually advantageous, realize beneficial economies of scale, and create systems evolutions for the partners that might not occur independently.
But the more advanced, developed and diverse the individual collaborators are, the better the joint outcomes of their combined efforts. All partners should have compatibly diverse resources to achieve the most satisfying outcomes. And the momentum born of organizations establishing their own definition of “winning” fuels the strength of the collaboration. Truly successful partnerships are most often realized by organizations that have already identified their own independent potential.
Once the AANS secured its financial foundation and redefined methods of accurately identifying its members’ needs, it moved from a “new year/same service” mentality to a robust system of producing the new services members were demanding.
In Fischer’s terms, the victory the AANS was playing for was not over external organizations. The opponent was its own historical mindset that numbed attentiveness to innovative planning in serving its members’ increasingly complex needs.
By any measure, this change of organizational mindset was clearly the modern turning point of the AANS’ “career.” The intrinsic planning processes now in place within AANS assure reinvesting annual successes, rather than merely “equaling” past, outdated benchmarks.
AANS members’ comprehensive needs are now more directly embedded into its organizational culture than ever before. This was an intentional strategy, implemented by successive years of AANS leaders who determined that merely achieving historical equality was no longer satisfactory.
No organization, management, or decision-maker should allow the loftiness of a goal to obscure the fact that errors of commission can and likely will be made. But the error of planning not to fail is without question more fossilizing than the risk of advancement. Any organization is stifled by lack of momentum and rigidness to antiquated expectations. When that occurs within service providers, innovation and quality are the first casualties of repetition and complacency.
AANS’ governance functions assure that your voice as a member will always be the momentum that drives the association forward. That your needs are now intrinsic in our strategic and tactical planning may be the most valuable benefit of the AANS’ change in how it plays the Black pieces.