Here's the reality: There's a version of your association that costs less to run, serves members faster, and delivers personalized value at scale. This association embraces AI-first thinking. It reimagines traditional constraints. It starts fresh with member value as the only sacred principle.
Who's building that association?
We think it should be you.
The Disruption You Don't See Coming
Many organizations, for-profit and nonprofit alike, are falling into what we call the retrofitting trap. They're taking their existing processes—designed in an era of filing cabinets and fax machines—and trying to bolt AI onto them. It's like putting a rocket engine on a horse-drawn carriage. Sure, it might go a bit faster, but it's still fundamentally a carriage.
But transformation doesn't come from making old systems 20% better. It comes from asking a different question entirely: "If we started from scratch with AI, what would we build?"
The difference between retrofitting AI into existing processes and AI-first thinking is the difference between improvement and transformation. One makes you slightly better. The other makes you unrecognizable—in the best way.
Here's what makes this challenging: Your established processes, your governance requirements, your trusted reputation—these are important assets. But they can also become constraints when trying to innovate. They create a natural resistance to change that makes transformation harder than starting fresh.
And that's exactly why you need the exercise that follows.
The Build Your Own Disruptor Exercise
Here's a thought experiment that can transform how you think about your association:
Imagine a brilliant entrepreneur sees an opportunity in your space. They see a massive gap between what your members need and what they're getting. They want ALL your members because they genuinely believe they can serve them better. They want to grow faster than you ever could. They want to deliver unprecedented value using AI.
They're not bound by your processes. They can experiment without committee approval. They can move at startup speed. And they have venture funding.
This entrepreneur probably doesn't exist at this moment in time. But imagining them can unlock possibilities you'd never otherwise consider.
Your mission: Use this imaginary competitor as a tool to reimagine what your association could become.
Essential prerequisite: This exercise assumes you and your team understand AI's current capabilities. If you haven't done that education, start there. Sidecar's AI Learning Hub is one of the many educational resources out there available to you and your team. If you've done the education but are struggling to channel it into transformation, this exercise is exactly what you need.
The Four-Step Disruption Blueprint
You can run this as a multi-hour intensive or spread it out across a few days. The key is maintaining momentum and the creative tension of competition. Here's your blueprint—adapt it to fit your team and timeline:
Step 1: The Honest Assessment
Start by getting brutally honest about two things: why members join your association and where you're falling short.
Your members come to you for real reasons—credibility in the industry, required certifications, exclusive networks, advocacy, belonging. These are your strengths, your moat. But be equally honest about the friction points. Where do members get frustrated? Maybe it's the certification process that hasn't changed in decades, or response times measured in days, or networking events that don't actually create meaningful connections.
Your imaginary competitor is studying both sides of this equation. They can't match your history or credibility overnight. But here's what should keep you up at night: they're asking "What if we could deliver the same core value—career advancement, knowledge, community—just in radically better ways?"
Step 2: The Value Reimagination
For each pain point you identified, imagine how AI could transform it—not incrementally improve it.
Certification taking 6 months → AI tutor that adapts to each learner, cutting time by 75%.
Generic industry updates → AI that curates personalized daily insights for each member's specific challenges.
Annual networking events → AI that pre-matches members and facilitates introductions based on complementary needs.
Don't limit yourself to what seems reasonable. Your competitor isn't.
Step 3: The Member Poaching Strategy
Now write their pitch. After understanding the pain points and possibilities, draft the message that would make your members consider switching. What would they put on their landing page? What comparison chart would they create? What member testimonials would they seek out?
This isn't comfortable. It shouldn't be. You're writing the playbook for your own disruption.
Step 4: The Business Model Innovation
Finally, design how they'd actually deliver on these promises. Build the AI-powered operation that maximizes human potential: staff focused on high-value creative and strategic work while AI handles routine tasks, dynamic pricing based on value delivered, content that updates continuously, virtual-first delivery that reaches members anywhere.
Calculate the economics. Be honest about what this model could charge while delivering dramatically more value. Face the reality of what becomes possible when human expertise is amplified by AI rather than replaced by it.
What This Actually Looks Like in Practice
Now here's where theory meets reality. This is the fun part—you get to play.
Give your team access to AI tools like Claude, ChatGPT, or others. Let them experiment. Here's the amazing thing: even your most non-technical team members can build working prototypes just by describing what they want in plain English. Have them build quick prototypes of whatever excites them—maybe it's a smarter member onboarding system, maybe it's an AI that can answer certification questions, maybe it's something completely unexpected.
The key is to build! With today's language models, you don't need to code. You just need to explain what you want. Your membership director who's never written a line of code can create a chatbot prototype in less than 30 minutes. Your education manager can test out an entire learning pathway just by having a conversation with Claude.
After a few hours of experimentation, bring the team back together. What did everyone build? What surprised them? Which prototypes made the team go "whoa, we could actually use this"? Which ones revealed opportunities you hadn't even considered?
This is how innovation really happens—not through elaborate planning but through rapid experimentation and seeing what resonates. Your imaginary competitor would be doing exactly this, moving fast and testing ideas. The difference is, you're doing it first.
The Discoveries That Change Everything
Here's what typically happens in exercises like this. The first discovery hits hardest: your moat isn't as deep as you thought. That proprietary knowledge base you've built over decades? An AI can absorb it and deploy it in seconds. Those industry connections that took years to cultivate? AI can facilitate better networking at scale by actually matching people based on complementary needs rather than random cocktail hour encounters.
But here's the flip side that surprises teams even more—there's more flexibility within your existing constraints than you ever imagined. Yes, you have governance requirements. Yes, you have established processes. But when you start thinking AI-first, you realize many of your constraints are self-imposed habits rather than actual requirements.
The real revelation is about value delivery. The value you provide to members is absolutely real. But how you deliver it? That turns out to be far more flexible than anyone assumed. When AI can personalize at scale, when it can provide instant expertise, when it can connect people intelligently—suddenly you realize you've been thinking too small about what's possible within your existing structure.
The Mindset Shift You Didn't Expect
Here's what's fascinating about this exercise: While you're building your own destroyer, something unexpected happens. Your team shifts from scarcity thinking to abundance thinking.
Instead of "how do we protect what we have?" you start asking "what could we create?"
Instead of defending the status quo, you start seeing opportunities.
Instead of viewing constraints as permanent, you start finding creative ways around them.
The exercise that begins as competitive analysis transforms into creative liberation. You stop seeing AI as something to be carefully added and start seeing it as something that fundamentally expands what's possible.
From Imagination to Reality
After building your own disruptor, you face a choice. You can file this away as an interesting thought experiment, or you can use it as a catalyst for transformation.
Smart associations recognize there are multiple paths forward from this exercise. The most aggressive approach is to pilot the future—take the most exciting elements from your alternative association and test them within your current structure. Maybe it's that AI-powered certification system or the intelligent member matching. Start small, measure results, iterate fast.
Others choose strategic evolution, using the insights to inform a longer-term transformation strategy. You can't change everything overnight, but you can start moving toward the future you've imagined. This might mean gradually shifting resources from traditional approaches to AI-powered ones, or redesigning member journeys one touchpoint at a time.
The defensive innovation path appeals to more risk-averse organizations. Identify the innovations from your exercise that would be most disruptive to your current model and implement them yourself first. If an AI-powered competitor could undercut your certification program, build the AI-powered version yourself before they do.
What doesn't work is doing nothing. The insights from this exercise have a shelf life. The longer you wait, the more likely someone else—maybe that entrepreneur who doesn't exist yet—starts building what you've imagined.
Making It Happen
Start by assembling your disruption team with intention. You need both your innovators and your skeptics—people who love your mission but aren't married to your methods. Mix departments, mix generations, mix perspectives. The facilities manager might have insights about member experience that your membership director has never considered.
Create psychological safety from day one. Make it crystal clear: this is an exercise in possibilities, not a critique of current operations. When people feel safe to imagine without judgment, that's when breakthrough thinking happens.
Give yourselves a tight timeline—perhaps an afternoon or a few days. Constraints foster creativity, and a long timeline invites overthinking. Remember, your imaginary competitor isn't spending months in committee meetings.
Here's the crucial part: build actual prototypes. With AI, your non-technical team can create working demos that make possibilities tangible. When board members can interact with a prototype instead of reading about a concept, transformation suddenly feels achievable rather than theoretical.
Share the results widely. Don't let this become another strategy document that lives in a drawer. The insights from this exercise should ripple through every strategic conversation in your organization.
Most importantly, pick one innovation from your exercise and implement it within 30-90 days. Not a pilot, not a study—actual implementation. Small wins build momentum, and momentum builds transformation.
The Bottom Line
Imagine if Blockbuster had run this exercise in 2000.
Picture their leadership team gathered in a conference room, building their own disruptor. "What if someone could deliver movies without stores?" they'd ask. "What if late fees disappeared? What if selection was infinite? What if you could watch instantly?"
They might have prototyped a mail-order DVD service. They might have experimented with streaming when the technology emerged. They might have built Netflix before Netflix built Netflix.
Instead, they spent the next decade defending their store locations, optimizing their late fee revenue, and retrofitting small improvements onto a 20th-century model. We all know how that ended.
Your association stands at a similar crossroads. AI is your streaming moment. The question isn't whether someone will build an AI-powered alternative to what you offer. The question is whether you'll build it first.
Stop trying to retrofit AI into your 20th-century model. Stop defending what was instead of building what could be.
Start building the association that would put you out of business.
Because unlike Blockbuster, you still have time. Use it.
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