Unconventional Leadership = Remarkable Success - Associations Now Magazine - Publications and Resources - ASAE & The Center for Association Leadership

During my nine-year tenure with the International Game Developers Association, we grew from approximately 500 to 15,000 paying members—just to note one metric of the association's insane pace of growth.

Now that I've stepped down as IGDA's executive director, I've been reflecting on some of the counterintuitive—sometimes downright heretical—ways I managed IGDA. I do this specifically because these unorthodox practices, clearly "wrong" by most standards, actually produced meaningful and positive results. I hope they will inspire you to look at your own organization in a new light.

Some Context

IGDA was founded in 1994, largely in response to anti-videogame congressional hearings occurring at the time. While big retailers and game-publishing corporations had a seat at the table, no one was speaking up for the game developers—the actual programmers, artists, and designers who were creating games and were most at risk of having their creative freedoms censored. So, some game developers got together and formed a membership association to serve that role—and, well, they just felt it was time for the young profession to take itself a bit more seriously.

The first few years were rough going. Funds were limited, everything was run by volunteers, and no one had association management experience. By 2000, IGDA was able to support a small staff, and I came aboard. I was a game/tech guy who had been in the industry for many years and knew the business, people, and culture of games.

I was handed a spreadsheet with fewer than 500 members on it and a directive from the board to go make good stuff happen. (It wasn't until April 2008 that I got an actual job description.) I plowed forward on gut instinct and tons of input from members and stakeholders. In addition to the huge spike in paid membership, we added a whopping 120,000 "free" members to the database, 70 chapters worldwide, 25 special-interest groups and member committees, and dozens of corporate sponsors and affiliates.

It took about three years for me to reach the limit of where my own intuition and instincts could take IGDA. After a quick Amazon buying spree, I was poring through books on nonprofit law, association marketing, and board leadership. It didn't take me long to discover both ASAE and The Center for Association Leadership, and then bang—it was like the clouds parted and the rays of association management enlightenment were beaming down upon me.

That was an exciting time for both my professional development and the rapid advancement of IGDA. However, despite access to a rigorous body of knowledge and newfound network of peers, I didn't feel quite like I belonged. While I saw tremendous value in the accumulated best practices, I was highly skeptical of much of it. Not considering myself an association professional—despite playing one for nine years—I often came at things sideways.

No Turf

There were never turf wars at IGDA, largely because there was no turf. Everyone involved with the organization was mission focused, putting all of their energy and resources into doing good stuff.

Never mind fighting for the corner office—I didn't even have an office. I worked remotely from my home (or whatever airport or hotel I happened to be in). In nine years, I went into the office less than a dozen times. This gave staff a great deal of autonomy and meant that we were very results oriented; if good stuff was getting done, I didn't care who was sitting where or for how long.

Not having turf to argue over meant there were no qualms about completely rebooting the organization. Every couple of years, as the industry evolved and IGDA grew, we would completely tear down the association and reformat it (moving from a staff-and-office model to an outsourced association management company model, changing the board size and governance structure, and so forth). Whatever enabled us do more good stuff is what we did.

I was just as expendable. If I wasn't doing something that risked getting fired by the board at least once a year, then I wasn't working hard enough. In fact, my recent departure was partially driven by my sense that my leadership style was no longer the most effective for IGDA's needs at this time in its lifecycle—so I got out of the way.

No Traditional Assets

Given its somewhat awkward start, IGDA never amassed the usual collection of assets that most professional societies have: an annual conference, a magazine and publications, credentialing, a job board. In the early years, nearly the entire budget was generated via membership dues. (That mostly holds true today, though there is some conference activity.)

In addition to the lack of resources to get such programs off the ground, there was already a great deal of competition from for-profit entities and free grassroots web communities. Rather than compete in an attempt to build up ownership of assets, we always looked to collaborate. Instead of owning or managing the big annual conference for game developers, we became a strategic partner. Instead of going into book publishing, we partnered with existing publishers already serving the game space to publish IGDA-driven books. And so on.

Because we were focused on making good stuff happen, we didn't care much about the details of who owned what, as long as it got done and was positively serving the community.

No Marketing

IGDA has never had a marketing and communications plan. There's no marketing budget. The organization doesn't engage a PR firm or have a publicist. We rarely put out press releases, and when we did they never went on the wire. We rarely did membership drives and have never had much in the way of direct-sales efforts. No banner ads. No magazine ads. No nothing—in the traditional sense of marketing.

I'm not kidding. In the 2008 budget, the "Marketing" line item had about $200 in it because we bought a Nintendo Wii for a door prize.

The feeling was always that if we did good stuff, we'd get attention automatically. Through word of mouth, members would be our marketing. As such, we did engage in more guerrilla-style efforts at no cost and extensively leveraged social media tools.

For example, instead of running more traditional get-a-member style campaigns, we focused on the emotional moment of the renewal as the best time to pop up a refer-a-friend form. Somewhat playing off of post-purchase psychology of further validating the decision they just made, members fired off hundreds of email referrals each month just as they completed their online renewal process—with no cost or effort on the part of the organization.

Another tactic to leverage members for covert marketing was enabling direct linking to the public portion of member profiles in our web directory. Members would include a link to their profile from their blog and profile pages at other social networking sites—including the discussion forums of other online communities specifically serving game developers.

No Exclusions

The game development community has an open and sharing culture. Coupled with the fact that much of an association's work is for the good of the order, IGDA had an open and inclusive culture from the beginning. Given the relative immaturity of the game development profession, the IGDA board understood the need for the organization to serve the profession as a whole, to elevate games as a respected medium for artistic expression and game development as a valid career path.

Good-of-the-order work is inherently nonexclusive. If IGDA successfully defends game developers' right to freedom of expression, we can't limit that "benefit" to just paying members. It comes down to how game developers define the real meaning of their membership. Contributing to the good of the order was simply more meaningful than perks or benefits they might obtain by being part of an exclusive club—driving member contributions and effort that helped us grow the organization.

Even traditional, tangible stuff like white papers were viewed as good-of-the-order work by the volunteers who wrote them. They contributed to share their knowledge far and wide with the community, not to create a saleable product for the association. To this day, every IGDA white paper and research report has been released free on the IGDA website. We would even post raw survey data from research in the hopes that the community and/or academics would further crunch the numbers.

The value proposition struggle was exacerbated by the fact that early in my tenure I created a "free member" category. A free member was not an official statutory category; that person had no voting rights. But free members did receive many of the same benefits as regular paying members, particularly in regard to website access. The intent of the category was purely to increase the size of our database, both as a way to make sponsorship and advertising more attractive and (more importantly) to expand our reach into the community. The number of free members grew from zero to more than 120,000 in about eight years.

In the end, sending news to an audience of more than 135,000 people gave IGDA a much bigger impact and sense of presence, and it reinforced our identity as an organization that serves the profession as a whole. On top of that, many of our most active volunteers and contributors were free members. We gave up exclusivity and in return got engagement and results.

No Control

All of this contributed to state of continual chaos: There was no turf, no traditional assets, no polished marketing messages, and no limit on who could get involved or participate. The hierarchy was extremely flat and distributed around the globe. There was very little in the way of bureaucracy, as everyone was geared toward making good stuff happen.

Not a single person in IGDA had a complete grasp of what was going on. Not me (though I probably had the most complete picture), not the board, not even staff collectively.

One classic example was IGDA's Facebook group. Started by a keen member, it was running for about six months and accumulated more than 5,000 members before staff, the board, or myself even heard about it. We found out when I eventually got a personal invite to join the group!

As long as we were able to facilitate and assist where needed, I had no interest in controlling things. This meant that a small staff (only five FTEs at peak) was able to serve hundreds of volunteers, chapters, special-interest groups, and committees all over the world.

But, more crucially, it spoke to my role as a steward for IGDA and its mission. I wasn't there to be in control, but rather to support members in taking control and accountability for their association. My own ideas were never precious; I always focused on nurturing the ideas flowing upward from members. I was much like the caretaker of a playground, keeping the litter out of the big sandbox for everyone to play in.

All that isn't to say it was easy. It was often hard to work past the continual state of discomfort due to the lack of control. But the point was never to create a state of equilibrium. Luckily, board members were accustomed to chaos, given the fast pace of change in the game industry.

No Clue

Admittedly, not everything we did was deliberate or intentional. We were lucky enough to pick up on certain trends and be attentive to the direction of the culture. And, despite all the growth and success IGDA has achieved, there is an ongoing debate over the organization's value proposition to paying members—more a struggle over articulation than over the value itself. And lack of control and extreme openness does lead to a certain amount of mission creep; maintaining the coherence of the organization remains a challenge.

On the whole, perhaps the most meaningful, and most counterintuitive, belief that drove me was that our efforts were never about the organization itself. As Clay Shirky laments in his book Here Comes Everybody, too often the resources of an organization are used merely to sustain the viability of the organization. My focus was on maintaining the agility of IGDA instead of ownership and control, on ensuring that good stuff got done for the community as a whole.

I was always the first to admit how clueless I was, half joking that the board of IGDA was just desperate enough to hire me. I had no background in association management and didn't know the first thing about nonprofits. But, guess what—neither did they.

Jason Della Rocca is the former executive director of the International Game Developers Association, and now consults associations on strategy, innovation, and governance as an executive advisor with Principled Innovation LLC. Email: jason@perimeterpartners.com

Want to dig deeper? Jason and Maddie Grant, CAE, will be hosting a Learning Lab on counterintuitive innovations at ASAE & The Center's 2009 Annual Meeting & Expo in Toronto, on Sunday, August 16th from 3:15-4:30 p.m.

Michael LoBue, CAE, August 28, 2009
Well written article, but the potential for misinterpretation is too great to rate it higher than "2".

Kudos to Mr. Della Rocca for avoiding hubris and taking credit for success that appears to have been do more to luck than management acumen. On the other hand, this article would have been more valuable had there been some synthesis about how IGDA might differ from the more typical organization or society supported by the majority of ASAE members.

For a more thoughtful treatment of "Shirky's Lament" ("too often the resources of an organization are used merely to sustain the viability of the organization"), I suggest Drucker's 1967 "The Effective Executive" where he makes this point about ANY organization. Shirky is correct in his observation about organizations, but he's hardly the first to make this point.