I was catching up on my Google Reader this morning (I still love Really Simple Syndication to keep track of the hundreds of blogs I subscribe to) and Frank Fortin’s post about the Association of the Future caught my eye.

If you’re unfamiliar with Association of the Future, it’s a kind of experiment run by ASAE and The Center and is meant to be a form of career development for young professionals. In the experiment, a group of selected young association professionals staff a mock association and attempt to project how associations down the road will be structured, how they will operate and how they will function.

There was a session introducing AOTF at the Great Ideas Conference last week, and Frank’s post was a reflection of that session.

I don’t want to rehash too much of Frank’s awesome post (you should definitely read it if you haven’t already), and I wasn’t at the conference, so I can’t make any observations on the session itself. But as a “young professional” (millennial, Gen-Y, what have you), Frank’s post made a big impression on me.

The ideas and recommendations to “change” governance and association’s structures weren’t really remarkable or innovative, Frank wrote.

How come?

AOTF’s mantra/mission/objective was “Members come first. No silos. Listen and then talk. Go techno.” (I think it’s an awesome mantra, by the way.) But Frank wrote that he and many session attendees didn’t feel the actions backed up the mantra.

I think it’s difficult for anyone to create truly innovative change in any organization they’ve been a part of for a long time. Rather than making sweeping “innovations,” it’s easier to just tweak lots of different processes and see what sticks. No matter what age you are, if you’re used to an organization functioning a certain way, it’s difficult to take a step back and see what could be. I honestly don’t think anyone is immune to the “that’s the way we’ve always done it” attitude.

Frank wrote that none of the suggestions and changes AOTF presented focused on the actual members. Why not? Isn’t that the point of an association — to facilitate relationships among people who share a common interest of career, and to provide them with resources and education to further those interests or careers?

I’m not sure why AOTF only looked at an association’s structure and governance, and I certainly wasn’t at the session, so I’ve love to get some feedback from people who were in attendance.

However, I think Frank hit on a key learning point and takeaway of this experiment: doing things the same way and expecting different results rarely works.

What do you think? How could AOTF produce innovative, startling changes with positive reactions?