The Associate Network

Banff Executive Leadership Inc. was a small practice that could field a large one. That was deliberate, and it is the single most interesting structural fact about the firm. The practice used an associate model rather than a directory of individuals.

A small core, a wide network

At the centre there were a handful of people. A president and lead faculty member, Doug Macnamara, who designed and led the majority of the governance and executive sessions. A programmes manager, responsible for developing learning materials and for the learning environment and logistics. A personal learning advisor, whose job was participant needs assessment and helping a senior person choose the right programme, which at this level is a real question rather than a sales conversation. That was the standing organization.

Everything else came from the associate network: several dozen faculty associates, drawn on for a specific engagement and not carried between engagements. They were senior practitioners, academics, former executives, public-service leaders, consultants and, unusually, working artists. Between them they covered strategic planning and systems thinking; governance structures and processes; knowledge management, intellectual capital and innovation value; executive coaching and executive team-building; public policy, political strategy and government relations; change leadership and civil-service process; Indigenous leadership and management; social services governance; strategic human resources, communications and information technology; environmental impact assessment and sustainable strategy building; sustainable architecture; complex systems; and creativity leadership taught through music, theatre and the surface arts.

Why the model suited work at this level

Three reasons, and they reinforce each other.

The first is credibility. A vice president will take a framework from someone who has run a comparable organization and will discount the same framework from someone who has only taught it. Senior audiences are unusually good at detecting the difference, and unusually unforgiving about it. An associate network let the practice put a former deputy minister in front of public-sector executives and a former operating executive in front of a corporate board, rather than putting a generalist in front of both.

The second is range without dilution. The subject matter the practice covered was genuinely broad, spanning by-law drafting at one end and creativity work with a professional musician at the other. No firm of five people holds that range honestly. A firm of five that can convene thirty can, provided it is disciplined about which thirty and about admitting when none of them fits.

The third is economic. Senior-level engagements are episodic and unevenly distributed through the year: a board retreat in one quarter, a strategy session in another, nothing in August. Carrying that capacity as salaried faculty would have forced the practice either to sell continuously or to shed people. Assembling it per engagement kept the practice small enough to say no to work it should not take, which is the condition under which a specialist practice stays specialist.

There was a cost, and it is worth recording. A network has to be maintained rather than managed. The practice's own critical success factors named the development of a referral network and of global partnerships as one of five measures it held itself to, which tells you how much attention the arrangement required. The vision and mission page sets those factors out in full.

How an associate was actually used

Associates were matched to an engagement rather than rostered onto a programme. A board effectiveness review would be led from the core practice, with a governance-model specialist brought in for the session where a board argued about which model it was really operating. A retreat on innovation might be co-designed with an artist whose function was not to entertain but to interrupt a way of thinking. A public-sector strategy session might be paired with someone who had sat on the other side of a ministerial briefing. The design work stayed with the practice; the depth came from the associate network. The description of how engagements ran covers the rest of that process.

The associate model

The practice used an associate model rather than a roster. The practice published roughly sixty individual biographies, often with direct contact details. Repeating those dated listings would republish other people's professional biographies long after the practice stopped trading, so they are deliberately omitted.

One example remains at the Goldstein associate page. It carries only the professional facts published at the time, states plainly that it records a past faculty listing rather than a current engagement, and includes no contact details.

The associate-network model was not unusual for its era, and the competencies it drew on are now codified formally by director-development bodies such as the Institute of Corporate Directors in Canada and the Institute of Directors in the United Kingdom.