CAP & Pursuit of Innovation

[Pylon]

I don't know how many of you are familiar with Seth Godin, but he's a very respected marketing and business expert, repeatedly published author, and pretty much all around expert.  He writes awesome stuff and "gets it". 


Here's a recent impromptu interview by the Chronicle of Philanthropy (the respected newspaper within the nonprofit world) with Seth about how non-profits need to be behaving in the 21st century - especially with regard to pursuing innovation:  http://philanthropy.com/article/How-Charities-Should-Pursue/125708/



If you'll take a couple of minutes to watch the quick video:
How do you all feel that CAP falls within that paradigm?   Thoughts how we can change for the better as an organization?

[FW]

Gee, Michael, that was a great interview.  CAP's goals today are very "business oriented".  The current philosophy is to "profit"; more appropriations, more members, more missions, more a "resource of choice". 

These "goals" actually fly in the face of current non profit business theory; as pointed out by Seth Godin and others.  Our LTO's point this out.  Our short term goals do not seek innovation; just a rework of past deeds and efforts; hoping for different or more successful outcomes. 

For CAP to "break out of the box", we need to truly figure out ways to know who our "customers" really are.  We need to understand our true purpose to exist in these times and, adapt.  We need to embrace discent.  We need to understand our members better.  If we refuse to understand the principles, we will stay as we are and, slowly become obsolete.

[Earhart1971]

We're dealing with Generalities in that interview. Personally I think the future of CAP is a real liaison with Congress. Instead (correct me if you know otherwise). We go up for Congressional Week, get pictures of Cadets standing with Congressmen and Senators, then go home.

If you can create a local institution deserving of money, then more power to you.

On a National Level, we have very little in donations. The Boy Scouts in the alternative about 50 years older than we are, have a great institutional financial picture. Entire estates donated to the Scouts.

CAP is different. We are a hybrid, we are connected to the Federal Government. People associate us with the Air Force and not as a chartity.

If there is a focus on something we are deserving of funding in CAP, I have not seen it anounced, as far as I can tell, we don't even have a reason or a viable program to ask for more funding.

[RiverAux]

Some pretty useless blather in there. 

Just what does "we need more charities that act like playwrights" mean? 

Sure the juvenile diabetes foundation can shut down when it is cured, but how many non-profits are focused on something that can ever be "won" or solved?  Should CAP focus on preventing hurricanes forever so that we never have to respond to a hurricane disaster again? 

Now, in relation to innovation CAP has had some successes over the years, but is still incredibly rigid.  For example, rather than continue the same old cadet program, the middle school program was started and is growing so rapidly and has such potential that at some point I could see it being a major part of the cadet program. 

But, organizationally we are way to resistant to new ideas.  Our paramilitary style command structure stovepipes upward flow of ideas and lets a single person put the kaibosh on an idea or they can just ignore it. 

The only real attempt at reforming the way CAP operates was the Iowa Wing experiment which showed some promise in certain areas as a model for running CAP in small states with low populations.  But it didn't last long enough to really see if it would work.   

Now, as encouraging big failures as a byproduct of attempted innovation as mentioned in the interview, CAP also has tried and failed at a couple of big ideas (advertising in NASCAR and ARCHER for example).  The AF augmentation pilot project was a good one, but if they don't roll something out on the national level in the near future I'm going to have to move it over to the failure column as well. 

All the above being said, I think CAP is generally on the right track.  As has been demonstrated time and time again, if you get the right people on board, the structure is there to allow outstanding programs at the squadron level and sometimes at the wing level. 

[JC004]

I've pressed this for a long time.  Innovation is the difference between US Airways (which files Chapter 11 every few days or so) and Southwest Airlines which posts a profit EVERY...SINGLE...YEAR for more than 3 decades. 

I've been told it's about the age of the organization or the age of the volunteers.  I think both of those explanations are crap.  For one, I've worked with some of the oldest organizations in the country, FAR older than CAP - one of which is known for its innovations and firsts.  Even if you didn't know it for its innovations, you'd know the impact of them.  When I joined my organization it was almost 100% over 55.  We innovate.  We used many of the very same innovations that I proposed for CAP and were rejected in CAP.

It's entirely about culture.  I worked for one of the most innovative companies in the world.  They are not much younger than a similar company which fails to innovate.  The openness to ideas that we had on conference calls and all could be felt down to the lowest, newest person and to the random guy off the street who had an idea.  They were asking us to take initiative, come up with ideas, and take a leadership role in a massive corporation.  That's the difference.

Being open to great ideas and actively seeking them out is what makes the difference.  Books like Good to Great and others highlight that.  One thing that I learned when I was IT for PAWG was about seeking out the ideas.  I began to see a pattern because after I published e-mail announcements and started pushing the new web site at Professional Development events, I started getting a lot of feedback.  The pattern that I was realizing was that the ideas were coming from 2d Lts, 1st Lts, etc. - and far less from field grades or those with 10 years in CAP.  It was then that I realized the potential of getting ideas from: 1. People who come in with a fresh perspective and 2. People who don't know the dynamics of the organization and therefore don't know what others might see as impossible based on those dynamics.

I took this and organized a formal effort to collect ideas from new people.  I got tons and tons of feedback and I subsequently published a series of reports and proposals.  For the most part, there was a severe lack in interest in the ideas from above and I was limited it what I could implement all by myself, but we did make some progress and the lesson was important for me.  I did the same thing at my organization and continue to do that.  After people are with us for a short time, I sit down with them and pick their brains - what they expect, what they've seen so far, what problems they've encountered, where we can improve, what they expected at first vs. what has happened so far, if they are having any problems getting things done, etc., etc.  This is a culture of innovation and the type of thing that CAP needs to do.

Why does CAP have marketing, branding, and web infrastructure that is severely lacking - ESPECIALLY considering other organizations of a similar size?  Why can't CAP utilize the talents of its many volunteers to get these things done and get them done well?  If that culture changes, everything changes - and for the better.

[Earhart1971]

The Middle School and the CAP School Program is a good program that deserves funding. I see no evidence NHQ has ever asked for funding for this program from Congress.

This program has been around since 1995. The problem is we have been trying to fly that program on temporary grant money supplied by local and State Governments, or the School Districts fund the program. We have churned many schools into and out of that program.

[JC004]

Cadet Programs has been very innovative and moved forward substantially.  While, for instance, some in charge of Public Affairs is proposing policies that are restrictive and take a detailed negative approach (as with the proposed social media policy), Cadet Programs is publishing best practices, guides, and great materials that are useful to units.  That's a big difference. 

I'm not sure if the School Program has been bounced off the Congressional liaisons and members or not, but I'd imagine that JROTC would be a barrier.  That doesn't mean that it isn't worth looking into.

[Capt Rivera]

JC still have those ideas documented? CAPTalk my be a good place to post them... who knows what might happen....

[JC004]

I don't know entirely what I have.  I've been organizing documents into new folders in my free time to revise them with some help from people, then publish them on CAPTalk for use by whatever units want them.  When I transferred things to my current computer off the former one, I deleted some out of frustration and the fact that I didn't see much use for them since wing didn't care. 

I was looking at the various proposals for basically the same things over a period of 3 years and I was annoyed.  But I've been taking what I have and trying to make them into useful resource sets for here.  Work and some new contracts have been interfering with the time that I have to do that.  I'm trying to at least get the ES set done but it's a few hundred pages of documents.  Public affairs is several pretty thick binders worth.  Then there's the stuff that isn't electronic anymore because I was stupid about how I transferred some data a while ago.  I don't even have a scanner anymore so I'd have to get one or get typing.

In some cases, I converted what I created for CAP into stuff to be used for other non-profits and deleted the CAP version.  It would be possible for me to work backwards on those though.