Sunday, June 7, 2009

No more "status quo"


Most of us keeping doing what you've been doing. Why? It's easier than innovating, creating, taking risks to create something new. Trying new things involves the potential, maybe even likelihood, of it not succeeding exactly as we envision.

But we grow as leaders and our organizations improve when we strive to be better.

For example, ASGA discovered a new way to gather information that we store in our SG Database which include information on every student government in America. Our team literally researches information on every college and university in the nation, one at a time. It's time-consuming, exhaustive work. In the past, each of our data-entry team members might, on a good day, be able to complete research on five institutions.

However, in the last month, we experimented with a new system. This new system has led to us tripling our production. Each of now can complete 15 schools on a good day. This mean updating as many as 75 institutions a day. With 5,000 colleges and universities in the nation, we ideally need to be updating data on every institution twice a year. we were barely getting through once a year using the old ways. Now it's more realistic to get through the nation twice a year. That's exciting. We're better able to serve our members with better data on student governments everywhere.

Changing our methods was risky and potentially could have caused problems. But the risk paid off. ASGA is much deeper and more accurate now as a result.

All of us in Student Government must be willing to take risks when the reward and result could better serve our constituents. We can't be content with the status quo.