We are experiencing a time of historical change, and organizations need to take a broader look at the strategic approaches we use to grow and serve our members. The steady growth of remote events and experiences, artificial intelligence, and proliferations of data, as well as macro forces like geopolitical, economic, and environmental uncertainty, all seem to be coming to a head. We have to look beyond adapting to these trends individually.

My research analysts and I recently conducted a study to measure how the strategic playbook for companies today is evolving. We took a pool of 3,000 companies to identify 15 that have significantly outperformed close peers over the last five years. For example, until relatively recently, Intel was way ahead of rivals like Nvidia in the semiconductor stakes. Five years ago, the company’s enterprise value (EV), at $226 billion, dwarfed Nvidia’s $76 billion, according to my team’s analysis, based on Value Line data. Since then, Nvidia has quadrupled its value to $315 billion, while Intel’s EV has shrunk to $218 billion. We see similar stories in Microsoft versus Oracle, Tesla versus Ford, and Deere & Co versus its competitors.

We found a very clear shift in strategic approach among these companies. Organizations like Nvidia, Microsoft, Tesla, and Deere & Co. that are thriving in today’s fast-paced digital world are playing with a different playbook. Associations that understand and implement these plays will similarly be able to turn current challenges into advantages. Here are the six key plays that can lead to faster growth and stronger financial performance.

Participate in an Ecosystem

Play 1: Coordinate with third parties. Many of the technologies being rapidly adopted today, such as digital communication channels, coupled with AI and advances in data-sharing, change the economics of partnerships. They lower the cost and effort required to coordinate with others. It used to be that your Apple Music catalog could only be played on your Apple device. But today, it follows you into your Ford, creating a more seamless experience. What used to be a difficult and costly collaboration is now easy. The same is true for your Google home devices and your alarm system or smart lights.

To take advantage of this emerging capability, put yourself into the minds of your members. Think about the bundle of services that your association offers, then ask yourself what other products and services would enhance or facilitate the value your members get from their membership. Consider not only the complements (e.g., they use Google Chrome to access your website, a payments provider to buy a ticket to your conference, Uber to travel there, the hotel front desk to check in), but also the higher-order experience they are seeking to have.

For conference attendees, think about each association, conference, newsletter, database, or potential third parties you could coordinate with to create a more complete understanding of the industry that begins with your event and continues throughout the year.

Play 2: Borrow a road or become a borrowed road. The same technologies that are helping businesses coordinate with third parties are also enabling organizations to leapfrog the middleman and go directly to the end user. Throughout history, you bought cars from dealers and paid for movies through theater chains or cable providers. But now, increasingly, you can purchase directly from the manufacturer—for example, Tesla has no dealer network—or from the movie producer—streaming services like Netflix are producing and distributing their own content, and production companies like Disney have their own streaming services.

Therefore, to guarantee the long-term viability of your association, it becomes critical to ensure that you will continue having access to the road that your members use to access you. And it’s ideal to also become a borrowed road for another organization. Amazon’s Alexa product and other smart speakers are becoming that road through which service providers like radio stations, UPS shipments, tracking, home delivery services, and more seek to borrow to reach their end users.

Who or what might be the future borrowed road leading to your members and how can you ensure that you have a lane on that road? How can you become the borrowed road to your members for other providers?

Activate the Ecosystem

Play 3: Openly reveal your strategy. The idea that our strategies should be kept secret is so broadly accepted that it is rarely questioned. We design strategies behind closed doors and document them on secret plans. But more and more, this is not the case. If our success depends on coordinating with third parties and building roads to the member base within an ecosystem, then we want our partners to know what the plan is.

Successful organizations turn their plan into a mission and enroll others in that mission. Associations already naturally do this, which gives you a head start.

Deere & Co. embraced this concept early, and last year, it saw its earnings per share jump by 37% as a result. They saw that farmers were incorporating technology and smart farming. The information the smart devices provided allowed farms to automate processes. Deere’s competitors saw this trend too. But rather than simply follow the trend, as their competitors did, Deere decided to advocate for it. They created a movement they called “precision farming” and started announcing partnerships with startups. They allied with SpaceX to provide satellite services to farms. They filled their website with white papers and research reports, and their executives started delivering speeches advocating for precision agriculture at conferences like CES.

This activated collaboration with ecosystem partners and encouraged them to build this connected future vision of agriculture.

Play 4: Be good. Your ability to activate collaboration with ecosystem partners is enhanced naturally when they see how participating with you benefits them. This is why companies that pursue a purpose that benefits not just their organization, their customers, and their investors but also other partners and even society as a whole, are outperforming others.

Mastercard saw that the opportunity that would most benefit the company and their shareholders was not to compete with Visa or American Express, but rather to compete with cash. Even well-developed countries, like Germany, still predominantly use cash. If Mastercard could steal market share away from cash, they could grow faster with less effort. Their goal was to create a world in which cash no longer existed.

Achieving this strategic goal wouldn’t just benefit the company; it also would benefit others. By underscoring this, the company activated an ecosystem: Nongovernmental organizations, governments, and social groups all saw benefits for themselves in helping Mastercard achieve this goal. More startup tech companies wanted to partner with them. Mastercard’s employees felt a sense of purpose, which increased engagement. Mastercard’s remarkable rise from a stock price of $25 per share to $350 was due in no small part to this approach.

New Ways to Execute

Play 5: Let the competition go. Most for-profit companies seek first-mover advantage. There are many reasons why being first can lead to an advantage: you can build a brand early on, capture loyal customers, establish channels, and raise barriers to entry.

However, these advantages are eroding. Because loyalty has been steadily declining, establishing a brand and customer relationships early is worth less than it used to be. Today it is easier for organizations that enter later to steal away customers and brand loyalty. As a result, it’s preferable to let others go first while you carefully follow behind, ready to advance if and when the market is proven.

Apple has benefited from this strategy for years. They didn’t come up with the first MP3 player, the first streaming music platform, or the first tablet. They waited and watched, only pushing forward when the time was right.

Play 6: Organize small-scale attacks. Most established organizations follow a “proof, plan, execute” (PPE) model: Prove that an idea will work, build a business plan, and then fund and execute the plan. But in times of rapid change, as we are experiencing now, a better approach is to adopt what you might call an “act, learn, build” (ALB) model: Take action on an idea, learn from that action, and then build based on your learning.

When Tesla built its first huge battery factory, the Gigafactory, in Nevada, it could have followed a PPE approach. Tradition would’ve said that to optimize the efficiency of the factory, you should design the entire factory, build it, and then turn it on. But instead, Tesla chose an ALB approach. They built a small factory and started operating it, learning from each section before building the next. This enabled them to produce the next section more efficiently, and it allowed the company to generate revenue earlier.

Which of these plays can you start implementing at your association?