I wrote a little while ago asking… what do you do when you are out of ideas? Most business that are out of ideas don’t realize that they are… even if it’s obvious to the rest of us.
Knowing you are out of ideas is often the most difficult part. Like an addict, admitting that you have a problem is the first step to recovery.
A big part of the difficulty in recognizing that you are out of ideas occurs when you look around and see that everyone else is doing, pretty much, what you are doing. Two cognitive biases that I have mentioned before are almost certainly at work (confirmation bias and status quo bias) but another significant contributor is the limited source of genuinely new ideas.
So where do you get your ideas… IHRSA… ACE… ACSM… Fitness Management… Club Industry… industry conferences… industry consultants… industry publications… business books… the local competition…
These are all good resources… but very few of them provide genuinely new ideas. The majority of information out there right now is, at best, variations of the same old ideas that have been around for years… in some cases decades.
To be fair some business can still benefit from some of these old ideas but the improvements are likely to be incremental and not transformational.
The issue is that despite the hard work of our industry associations there is a distinct absence of independent, original, critical thinking. The lack of divergent perspectives creates precisely the kind of intellectually limiting, incestuous, narrow thinking that stifles growth. For example, IHRSA is a valuable resource but it is simply specious to reason that the fifty or sixty people at IHRSA have all the answers for our industry. That goes for the other industry associations as well.
The point is this… when you are out of ideas don’t simply rely on the usual suspects like everyone else. No one has a monopoly on good ideas so take them where you can find them.
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