In the first few days of June the District Conference was held in Schenectady, also known as the birthplace of General Electric.  Albert Einstein, who vacationed in Saranac Lake and knew both of the founders of GE (Edison and Steinmetz… what did they all talk about?), once said:

 

“The world as we have created it is a process of our thinking.  It cannot be changed without changing our thinking.”  Albert Einstein

 

The District Conference theme, Sparking Action in the Capital Region, included the notion that change can serve as a spark to action, and the Conference focused in part on change and change leadership.  Whether we are considering ways to attract young professionals to Rotary, or be more relevant to our communities, or engage the highly complex issue of opioid addiction, we recognize that our clubs must change, that the ways Rotarians think about serving our communities must be more radical, and that we must focus on impacting outcomes – moving the needle – if in fact we want to change the world.

 

When we think about change, we sometimes focus on problem solving rather than creating the desired outcomes.  We say: our clubs are getting smaller.  What must we change to stop that from happening?  We say: our service projects are great, but they only seem to have limited impact.  How can we change the project so that our impact is more significant?

 

And there’s nothing wrong with approaching things in this way.  The answers can return our clubs to the sizes they used to be, and make our service projects more successful by many measures.

 

But we don’t spend much time thinking about the most desirable outcome – the actual result.  What would we want our clubs to be like?  What are the fundamental issues underlying the usefulness of our service project, and what is the plan that solves those root issues?