Pain is soon forgotten. It is one of the great human coping mechanisms. Otherwise, mothers would never have a second child. Marathoners would never run a second race. No one would ever fall in love because of the potential pain of loss.
Recessions are painful and long and not soon forgotten. But we do forget, eventually we forget to be frugal, we forget to be afraid we will lose our jobs or our houses. We forget that, in a recession, things we thought we could count on disappear. We go back to certainty. The new normal is different for sure, but is often just as complacent as the past.
Over the course of the last couple of months, I’ve been speaking to various associations and groups. Everyone looks a lot more optimistic and cheerful than this time last year, a lot less terrified. The clearest signal that things are turning around has been the size of the audiences. A year ago, event organizers attributed the decline in attendance to cost cutting, and that was part of it to be sure. But a lot of it was that people were busy, frantically busy, trying to hold onto things, shore up their businesses, staunch the bleeding, stick fingers into leaking dikes, whatever they could do to work through a situation they could not control.
I wrote an article called What Keeps You Up at Night about the challenges facing association executives. For most of the midnight terrors, I could offer at least a few ways to keep the monster under the bed at bay. But one executive said that he’s afraid of the “uncontrollable macroeconomic risks” that he has failed to anticipate. My only response was that something has to keep you up at night and at least you know that that keeps all of us awake.
What Worries Me
What worries me now is that associations already seem to be forgetting. As I said, attendance is back up. Advertising is rebounding. Retention is pretty strong, all things considered. So we’re fine, right?
Not right. It took us a long time to get ourselves into a recession, decades of over-spending and lax oversight. The good times rolled and even if they were largely supported by debt, it looked like they could roll forever. It will take us a long time to get ourselves out. Complacency would be the worst thing we could do.
As one association executive I met last week said, “I have been very clear with my board and staff that this will be a journey.” This is an association that shrunk dramatically when its core membership from the automotive industry took the recession full in the teeth. A huge conference that, it turned out, people attended not because they wanted to but because everyone else did. Publications that lost their advertising bases almost overnight. Membership that lost their jobs, some of them leaving the industry entirely.
Cost cutting was not enough. Reinvention was in order. But reinvention is not the sort of thing you flip a switch on, nor is it the kind of thing you can get complacent about. Look, we’re reinvented. Finished. Done. Mission accomplished.
Pain, even the recessionary kind, may be short-lived but reinvention goes on and on and, with the necessary commitment, prevents complacency.
Excellent Blog and right on the money Rebecca. The challenges brought on by this economy and other factors are like riding a raft on a river. We must try to anticipate what is around the corner and be prepared and be able to adapt new ways of conducting business in order to survive and be successful over the long run. We must evolve as conditions dictate to face these challenges, but also be able to recognize opportunities and act on them without hesitation.