Most union leaders brace for the worst going into a modernization project; bad data, broken systems, a painful slog. Kevin VanderKley keeps finding the opposite. The Chief Consulting Officer at Bursting Silver joins Riley Miller to explain why the surface chaos is misleading and most unions are in far better shape than they think.

The real problem usually isn't bad data, it's fragmented data. The answers exist; they're just scattered across people, locals, and systems that each solved the same problem a different way. Kevin breaks down the one-person litmus test, the member-address example that shows why the same field means different things to different teams, and why so much critical knowledge lives in people's heads with no written path. Then he gets into the work behind the work: building consensus on a North Star, sorting out data ownership and stewardship, setting governance rules before the hard conversations, and keeping the why visible so a transformation doesn't quietly slide into "just an install." This isn't about union identity. It's about union enablement.

If you lead, work in, or build for a membership organization, this episode was built for you.

📄 Show notes, transcript, and links: https://www.burstingsilver.com/podcast/ep9

About Bursting Silver

We're a fully remote consultancy specializing in modern CRM, iMIS, and AI solutions for membership organizations across North America.

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