by Jacqui Nelson
At the MemNet conference I chaired the session delivered by Susie Kaye of the Professionalism Group, on ‘Life cycles of professional bodies’. I see this sort of theory applied to companies before, but it was particularly interesting to see how Suzy had taken this thinking and applied it to professional bodies.
She set the room an exercise to answer a series of questions about the different functions within their organisation and out of that map themselves on the organisational lifecycle. The questions themselves had been really carefully thought through and applied directly to, and were written in the language of professional bodies. E.g. Do you have articles of incorporation or bylaws? Do you have a paid exec? How much of you revenue comes from membership?
The interesting conclusion was that in the room on Monday the vast majority of professional bodies were in the mature stage of the cycle, what Susie called ‘sustain’. Organisations at this stage have a stability about them but the challenge is to stay fresh, don’t let procedures stifle creativity; make sure you keep the momentum going.
Some of the organisations felt they had gone through this stage and were at ‘review’ which is effectively a renewal and rebirth of the mature organisations. I like the idea that Susie purported of introducing a little chaos into the mature organisation and see what happened!
If you want to know more about Susie and her model you can find out more here.
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