JCI is your oyster. You can use it to develop your talent and give back to your community at the same time. What a perfect combination.

You might be familiar with JCI's continuity problems. Change of leadership every year brings many weaknesses to the structure and processes.

But as always you have to do the best of the situation. You as a leader and member of JCI need to look at how we can deal with the "one year to lead" situation as smooth as possible.

One idea I have that might help to improve local handovers is to introduce an "Best handover award" for local JCI chamber. Do you like the idea? Please comment or send me an email at sofie.sandell@jciuk.org.uk.

The better the chambers continues the work and its activities when a new president and council start the year the better. 

To become a successful chamber you need to think and act as an innovative entrepreneurial company. You have to create an atmosphere so your members dare to be creative. Doing the same things year after year will not satisfy your members. If you do what you have always done you'll get what you always got. 

Chamber processes is an interesting chapter. You can easily write a book about JCI processes and how to do it. Processes are there to help you and the chamber to be more effective, create a better work flow and make things work more smoothly. All organisations around the world are always improving their processes, and when you do this in a good way you will save time, money and energy.

One way to prevent project and process chaos is to never start a project if you don't have the buy-in from the future leadership. The next Local President and council need to like your ideas and projects before you kick off. Then they are much more likely to continue working on it and you're saving yourself a lot of hassle and frustration. 

I like this definition of innovation: "the successful exploitation of new ideas". 

Here are some tips what you can work on to bring innovation and innovative thinking to your chamber:

• Improve member management
• Create a creative culture - encourage people who have new ideas
• Improve your communication channels
• Learn how to be more creative - why not arrange a training in creativity?
• Set up processes that the future leaders will understand how to use
• Invent new events and project
• Combine two old events and deliver them with a new touch
• Bond with other organisations and become a partner with them
• Dare to try new things
• Stay in touch with the past. Alumni members will be able to explain the history and they might be very helpful and open some doors for you and the chamber
• Think big and have fun!

It's up to you as current local leaders in your chambers to create processes and models that the future can adopt and use. You're planting seeds that hopefully will grow up and become beautiful trees in the future. 

Best of luck!