How To Be a Game-Changer
Seven Roles to Trigger Association Transformation
Summary
Game-changers know how to build coalitions, develop compelling shared visions, and create healthy culture so we can execute on focused choices together as a community.
Innovation is rare in associations. Our strengths – a contained audience and a niche market – are often undermined by our cautiousness, traditional business model, and aversion to doing bold things.
Innovation is both a habit and an investment. To those who say it’s impossible, I recommend starting simple by building and testing new value with your membership. In this article, I stress a role-based approach to change, which builds off my recent article on the importance of trust.
I lead the product community, a product development learning community designed specifically for associations. Let’s compare ideas and build something great.
What is a Game-Changer?
“Game-changing ideas can come from anywhere. Choose to amplify diverse voices and create a culture where everyone has not just an ability, but an obligation, to think creatively. Don’t build an army that simply executes marching orders; build an empowered, free-thinking team of innovators aimed at solving a set of problems together.”
Avi Siegel
In an earlier article, I defined innovation as focused value creation.
Scott Berkun takes it further: “Innovation is significant positive change. It’s a result. It’s an outcome. It’s something you work towards achieving. If you are successful at solving important problems, peers you respect will call your work innovative and you an innovator.”
For this article, I draw from the book The Game-Changer by A.G. Lafley and Ram Charan. Though they focus on corporations, their general concept is widely applicable and relevant to associations. Their definition provides a role-based approach to change and evolution:
GAME-CHANGER (gãm chang'er)
Strategist – A visionary strategist who alters the game his business plays or conceives an entirely new game.
Creator – a creator who uses innovation as the basis for sustaining profitable organic growth and consistently improving margins.
Leader – a leader who understands that the consumer or customer-not the CEO-is boss.
Catalyst – a catalyst who uses innovation to drive every element of a business from strategy to organization, and from budgeting and resource allocation to selecting, rewarding, and promoting people.
Integrator – an integrator who sees innovation as an integrated end-to-end process, not a series of discrete steps.
Breaker – a breaker of commoditized offerings in order to create differentiated and value-added brands and businesses through innovation.
Humanist – a hardheaded humanist who sees innovation as a social process and understands that human interaction— how people talk and work together—is the key to innovation, not just technology.
Now let’s look at how these archetypes for game-changing innovation could work in an association.
How it Works in Associations
“If you focus on the process of climbing, you’ll end up on the summit.”
Yvon Chouinard
Good leaders inspire change. They open up the game, help us see new things, and motivate us to put in more effort than we thought possible. Building on Lafley’s and Charan’s definition, here’s how an association leader could become a game changer.
An association strategist helps reimagine the membership value proposition, potentially transforming how members connect, learn, and advance in their field. Instead of maintaining traditional conference and publication models, this leader might envision a dynamic, technology-enabled ecosystem where members co-create knowledge, access personalized learning pathways, and engage in global networks that transcend traditional geographical and institutional boundaries.
This strategic shift could involve redesigning membership models, creating adaptive platforms that anticipate and respond to emerging professional needs, and positioning the association as a future-focused catalyst for industry transformation.
The association creator drives continuous innovation across membership services, constantly experimenting with new formats of engagement, learning, and value delivery. This might manifest as developing AI-driven mentorship matching programs, creating modular certification pathways that allow for personalization, or designing immersive learning experiences that blend virtual and in-person interactions.
The creator focuses on consistently improving the margin of value delivered to members, ensuring that each interaction and service becomes more compelling, relevant, and impactful than the last, thereby making the association's offerings not just necessary but eagerly anticipated.
The association leader places members at the center of every strategic decision, viewing them not as passive recipients of services but as active co-creators of the organization's mission and value. This approach means conducting continuous, deep listening exercises, creating multiple feedback mechanisms, and designing governance structures that give members genuine agency in shaping the association's direction.
The leader understands that today's professionals seek meaningful participation, not just transactional membership, and thus creates platforms where members can truly influence standards, education, advocacy, and community development.
An association catalyst uses innovation as a systemic approach to organizational design, embedding innovative thinking into every aspect of the association's operations. This means redesigning budgeting processes to allocate resources toward experimental programs, creating reward structures that celebrate risk-taking and learning, and building an organizational culture that views innovation not as a separate function but as an intrinsic part of every role.
The catalyst ensures that innovation becomes a comprehensive, organization-wide mindset that touches membership services, internal operations, technology platforms, and strategic planning.
The association integrator leader sees innovation as a holistic, end-to-end process that connects different organizational functions seamlessly. This might involve creating cross-functional teams that break down traditional silos, developing integrated technology platforms that enable smooth knowledge transfer, and designing membership journeys that provide coherent, connected experiences across learning, networking, and professional development.
The integrator understands that true value emerges not from isolated initiatives but from creating synergistic ecosystems where different elements of the association's work amplify each other.
An association breaker challenges the traditional commoditized models of membership, creating differentiated experiences that cannot be easily replicated. This could mean developing unique intellectual property, creating exclusive knowledge networks, offering specialized certification programs that set new industry standards, or pioneering innovative approaches to professional development that fundamentally reimagine how professionals learn and grow.
The breaker is committed to making the association's offerings so distinctive and valuable that members see participation as an essential, irreplaceable part of their professional journey.
The association humanist recognizes that innovation is fundamentally a social process driven by human connections, empathy, and collaboration. This approach might involve designing membership experiences that prioritize genuine human connection, creating platforms that facilitate meaningful peer-to-peer learning, and developing programs that celebrate diversity, foster psychological safety, and enable professionals to bring their whole selves to their work.
The humanist understands that technology and structure are important, but the real magic of an association happens through authentic human interactions that inspire, support, and transform.
Putting Our Beliefs into Action
“The greatest predictor of success for leaders is not their charisma, influence, or power. It is not personality, attractiveness, or innovative genius. The one thing that supersedes all these factors is positive relational energy: the energy exchanged between people that helps uplift, enthuse, and renew them.”
Emma Seppälä and Kim Cameron
I developed the product community because I was frustrated at the pace of change in associations. In many ways, our associations have the raw materials: a built-in, niche market; predictable revenue; eager staff; and a business model that emphasizes community.
Still, we struggle to attract and engage young people, our revenue is un-diversified, and members have new alternatives to the traditional benefits model.
We believe in four things in the product community:
Cultivating deep connections and strong relationships with members results in spirited belonging and proactive participation.
Developing the right value – products, experiences, programming – at the right time will spark engagement, solve member problems, and keep members connected.
Positioning robust membership and diversified revenue as outcomes and indicators of health (not short-term goals) helps to keep our focus on people-centered value creation.
Designing membership as a longitudinal, perennial connection in which one pays money willingly to be part of an exciting value proposition (in which members are motivated to participate in shaping the future as well as move the needle on high-impact problems).
I lead the product community; we are a learning community because we believe great relationships help us create the value our members want. Remember, product-led growth fuels connection. Join the product community and flip your destiny.
About the Author
James Young is founder and chief learning officer of the product community®. Jim is an engaging trainer and leading thinker in the worlds of associations, learning communities, and product development. Prior to starting the product community®, Jim served as Chief Learning Officer at both the American College of Chest Physicians and the Society of College and University Planning. Please contact me for a conversation: james@productcommunity.us