Memberships Constrict Creativity

“What can we, as an organization, do that will help farmers like you succeed?”

The question was posed, in this scenario, by a friend leaning on a fence rail as I watched my Border Collie pup chase calves around the interior perimeter of a corral.  It’s his job to attract membership, and I am not a member.

Special interest groups targeting every walk of life exhaust resources trying to answer the same question, for the same purpose, indicating that farmers are not unique in our apparent need of assistance.  Membership driven philanthropy is prevalent, and it isn’t working.

When I was pressed by my friend to provide insightful direction for his statewide organization, I couldn’t come up with a response.  Nobody else can, either: Farm policy meetings I’ve attended fail to generate interest or significant result, primarily because people have a hard time collectively identifying one particular obstruction that needs removed.  Think: Is there actually only one hindrance bothering you?  Or would the list, printed and bound, more closely resemble a dictionary?  The latter is true for everyone except the naïve; to avoid overload, policy meeting conversation centers instead on generalities such as too much regulation, not enough capital, insufficient public services, etc. 

Here’s the rub: Even in the midst of ever-increasing rules, frustrations, expenses, inefficiency, and stupidity, we find examples of businesses and individuals who have accomplished extraordinary achievements.  Their existence is indisputable proof that in every circumstance facing humanity, success is possible.  Why, then, do we act like it isn’t?

When too much help is offered, it creates a sense that the answer is indeed out there, and the masses simply haven’t paid dues to the correct group to get it.  As a result, it’s easy to become a professional help seeker instead of a professional innovator.  Seekers can’t seem to find anything that works, so they keep shuffling through the list in hopes of a breakthrough.  What they’re missing is only obvious in hindsight: from the inside, success looks a lot more like a failure than it does from the outside.

People have trouble grasping the reality that progress is not a spontaneous effect of a proper recipe.  My family’s biggest breakthroughs in business have spun out of some ongoing, disorganized, idea-laden soup that we live in.  Everything in the pot is a failure until a solution is realized, and those solutions are strained out of the soup via our specific circumstances and skill set.  Aggregated solutions, byproducts of innumerable failures, form a whole that looks appealing.  That whole cannot be replicated for someone else via an umbrella policy upheld by a third party.

Yet, an entire economy has been created around the promise of associated success.  For example, I hear small business support programs advertised on the radio, I encounter them on social media, I see them intertwined with Chambers of Commerce, I get mailers from banks dangling small business money like a lure, representatives from government entities are dispersed throughout conference crowds to collect names and numbers, and friends with questions show up at the farm on a Tuesday morning.  All of the above can provide a membership, but none are specialized enough to tackle exactly the challenges we’re facing.

In this sense, offering help is a great folly because it short circuits the creativity required to survive.  By deferring problems to a third party, that sense of genteel desperation dissolves, replaced instead with resentful expectations for someone else who is ‘in charge’ and, universally, not doing a good enough job. 

I wonder if the disruption society is experiencing spawns from a widespread lack of creativity.  Committing membership to one organization or another has for so long been a part of the culture that individuals lost the ability to strain their own soup, if you will.  Eventually, such a reality will collapse.  Independent decisions cannot be deferred forever, and those decisions must be based on personal experience and immediate need, not membership experience and propaganda.  If everyone is looking around for help, that’s chaos.

Creativity cannot be taught.  It must be won, torn out of our minds in desperate moments when proper procedure is exposed as a ghost and abstract ideas become a possibility.  There is risk involved, because creative failure is grandstanded as idiocy worthy of exile.  The pressure to assimilate with everyone else creates a loophole for those brave enough to step through: when everyone leans one way, a wilderness opens up in the other.

Wide open mental space is where creativity thrives, and I like the landscape.  We must take the risk and lean into that frightening zone of our own ability, if only to see what we are not capable of.  On that ragged edge is where progress occurs, and breakthroughs happen, and success, whatever it is, can be realized.

So, what do we need to succeed?  Grace from our customers.  Dreamers to envision a path forward.  Craftsmen to turn the dream into physical reality.  Optimists who raise spirits.  Skeptics to force consideration.  Fans who carry the stories of our farm far and wide.  Friends who can cook.  Family who sticks together.  And a sprinkle of grit throughout it all.

I’ve never noticed any of that on a membership services card.