C O N T E X T 1 1 2 : N O V E M B E R 2 0 0 9 47 Director’s cut Planning for fast change, not fast track As a professional body for conservation specialists we often seem to complain about how external factors – shortterm politics, narrow environmental perspectives, loaded fiscal and monetary agendas, and so on – shape our progress too much, and that we are more reactive than proactive. There is some truth to this, but it is also worth remembering that even within the IHBC things keep happening faster than we can anticipate.We reached 2,000 members the year before we had expected.We have established our trading arm three years earlier, and even in 2005 few would have expected us so soon to lead in the response to legislation representing some 250,000 professional memberships. This dynamic is an important sign of the vibrant health of the institute. At the same time, an essential part of our evolution has been the introduction of a more substantial management infrastructure. To this end, we have been promoting the development of our new corporate plan. This, covering the period from 2010 to 2015, looks in particular at our voluntary operations, our communications, and how we manage our relations with senior government and political interests. Details are on our web site. In the context of forward planning, the issue for me, and for our trustees, is not so much how we control our future, as how we encourage the change we think is right.We need to steer the fast change we want, and not fast track change for its own sake. Clearly there may well be lessons for the planning system in how we approach this particular conundrum, while the challenge is well represented through the leadership provided by our volunteers. Including members more effectively within our activities is an important task in the future planning of the institute.We must give them the respect, guidance and resources, and of course the thanks, to ensure that we benefit properly from their contributions. Yet even as we try to plan support for those same volunteers, they are already running far ahead of us, and shaping our future almost faster than we can plan. For example, we have been looking at how to encourage branches to develop their websites as a direct resource for branch members, to help in our communications. Typically the branch pages are pretty static, and change mainly as new events are organised or as new business plans are approved. Developing a devolved, branch-based communications network comparable to the home page of the IHBC’s own site would be a wonderful thing to support.Yet as we have been planning infrastructure that would support this, there are at least three separate initiatives to do just this, each in their own way, and each addressing distinct needs identified at branch level. And then there’s Twitter! It seems everyone is into it – well, some are – so Devon DeCelles has been experimenting with this (alongside our Facebook presence) as an informal and experimental aspect of her role as membership services officer. In fact, though, she has been doing this as a personal initiative fully comparable to any other voluntary activity in the IHBC. Twitter and web pages are both radically different communications systems from, say, our Context and Yearbook, with distinctive strengths and weaknesses. But they have grown, even as we have invested almost nothing in planning for them. At the other end of the spectrum of corporate reaction to voluntary initiative, we have two ideas under development to help us engage better with some members’ activities and capacity. To help the many volunteers that guide colleagues and friends as they seek full membership of the IHBC, we are developing a web-based mentoring resource, which should be with you soon. To get a closer connection between our organisational resources and potential volunteers, we have developed a web-based system to help people communicate their ideas to us, and get advice, commentary, guidance or capacity in return. Called the IHBC’s CapacityBuild, it should be on our website by the time you read this. Both of these initiatives represent the corporate body catching up with the voluntary potential. Clearly, while the management processes try to shape our forward progress, our volunteers are running ahead and doing all these things anyway, even without our help (or at least, without much help). To understand how best to support this capacity for the future, it may help to analyse this phenomenon a little further. The energy inside the IHBC may in part originate in the dynamism of our youthful profession. Unlike architects, engineers or archaeologists – who can lay claim to centuries of tradition in shaping their profession – as conservation professionals we are still only scoping out our territory. Even if our core approach to managing places has its roots in the work of Patrick Geddes, it is still little more than a century old, while many would argue that another half century should be taken off that really to get to the heart of area conservation, with the formal development of conservation planning in the middle of the last century. Others would say that the profession only really pinned down our essential multi-disciplinary standards with the ICOMOS guidelines on conservation training of 1993, or even – some argue – with the development of our Areas of Competence, which took ICOMOS a step further. In understanding our organisational dynamics, it is worth remembering the argument that the voluntary or third sector is hugely sensitive to genuine market opportunities, and can represent a vision as entrepreneurial as any private marketeer. Volunteers act to address the needs of others because the private sector failed to identify the market in time. Certainly both volunteer and entrepreneur respond to a hiatus in servicing society – whether as market failure or opportunity – and the actions of both can be seen to reflect a speedy response to circumstances that bigger organisations find more difficult to achieve. Whether our fleetness comes from volunteers or youthfulness,
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