Every association claims to have a focused strategic plan. The board retreat happened. The priorities were narrowed. The strategic pillars were defined. Everyone left feeling aligned.
And yet, somehow, the organization is still doing everything it was doing before—just with new labels.
If this sounds familiar, you're not alone. Association strategic planning has a structural problem: it's almost always additive. New priorities get layered on top of existing programs. The language changes, but the work doesn't. Staff reorganizes their task lists under fresh headings while the actual portfolio of activities remains untouched.
The result is organizations spread thin across too many initiatives, unable to make meaningful progress on anything, and certainly unable to carve out space for the kind of transformational work that AI demands. The solution isn't better prioritization. It's learning to say no.
Watch what happens in a typical strategic planning process. The board identifies three to five priority areas. This feels like narrowing. Three priorities sounds focused compared to the sprawling list of activities the organization currently pursues.
But then the real work begins: fitting existing programs into the new framework. That annual conference? It supports Priority Two. The certification program? That's Priority One. The member newsletter, the advocacy work, the regional chapters, the awards program—each finds a home under one of the strategic pillars.
By the time the plan is finalized, nothing has been cut. Everything that existed before still exists. The only change is that activities now have strategic justifications attached to them.
This isn't strategy. It's reorganization.
The dynamic is understandable. Staff members have invested years building programs they care about. Board members have pet projects they championed during their tenure. Volunteers have emotional connections to initiatives they helped create. Suggesting that any of these should end feels like an attack on the people who built them.
So instead of making hard choices, organizations make accommodations. The strategic plan becomes a document that validates existing work rather than redirecting it. Everyone leaves the retreat feeling good, and nothing fundamental changes.
Strategy, as a discipline, is exercised when you say no to things. If you're not cutting, you're not prioritizing—you're just reorganizing.
This isn't a new insight. Business strategists have been making this point for decades. But associations struggle with it more than most organizations because of their governance structures, their reliance on volunteer engagement, and their genuine commitment to serving diverse member needs.
The problem is that every initiative you continue consumes resources that could go elsewhere. Staff time is finite. Budget dollars are finite. Leadership attention is finite. When you say yes to everything, you're implicitly saying no to the focused execution that creates real impact.
Consider the event you've been running for 15 years. Attendance has declined. The financials are marginal at best. But it has tradition behind it, and a small group of members still loves it. Keeping it on the calendar feels easier than having the conversation about ending it.
Or the program that a former board chair championed. It never quite found its audience, but killing it feels like a repudiation of their leadership. So it continues, consuming staff hours and budget dollars that could support something with actual momentum.
Every association has programs like this—initiatives that persist not because they're delivering value but because no one has been willing to say no.
There's a concept in finance called zero-based budgeting. The traditional approach to budgeting starts with last year's numbers and adjusts from there. Zero-based budgeting starts from zero. Every line item has to be justified as if it's new, even if it's been in the budget for a decade.
The same philosophy can transform strategic planning.
Instead of starting with "what did we do last year?" start with "what should we be doing?" Instead of fitting existing programs into new strategic pillars, ask which programs would you create today if you were starting fresh. Instead of assuming continuation is the default, require every initiative to earn its place.
This is uncomfortable. It forces conversations that organizations typically avoid. But it's the only way to create genuine strategic focus rather than the illusion of it.
The question isn't whether your annual conference is good. The question is whether it's the best use of the resources it consumes. The question isn't whether your certification program has value. The question is whether that value exceeds what you could create by redirecting those resources elsewhere.
Zero-based thinking doesn't mean you'll cut everything. Many programs will survive the scrutiny and emerge with stronger justification than before. But some won't. And those are the ones consuming oxygen that your organization needs for other purposes.
The reason zero-based thinking matters now is that AI requires headspace.
If your strategic conversations are consumed by sorting the same priority lists year after year, defending the same programs, and accommodating the same stakeholder interests, you'll never get to the transformational questions. You'll never ask what your association should look like in five years if AI reshapes your profession. You'll never explore how your value proposition needs to evolve. You'll never create room for experimentation and learning.
One association executive took a different approach. Ann Gergen (Executive Director at AGRiP) led her board through a future-state exercise: imagine your organization in five years under three scenarios. In the first, you embrace AI aggressively and lead your profession's adoption. In the second, you wait and see what other associations do, then follow. In the third, you largely ignore AI and focus on traditional programs.
The board worked through each scenario in detail. What would membership look like? What would your competitive position be? What would your relevance to the profession be?
The exercise created clarity that months of conventional strategic planning hadn't achieved. The board could see, concretely, what was at stake. They could see that the wait-and-see approach wasn't neutral—it was a choice with consequences. And they could see that making room for AI leadership meant making room, period. Something had to give.
That kind of conversation is impossible when every minute of strategic discussion is spent defending existing programs and fitting them into new frameworks. You have to create space first. And creating space means saying no to things.
Knowing that you need to cut programs is different from actually cutting them. Here's what works.
Let the data make the case. If a program isn't performing—attendance is down, financials are negative, member satisfaction scores are low—put the numbers in front of decision-makers. Data depersonalizes the conversation. It's not about whether someone's pet project is worthwhile; it's about whether the metrics support continuation.
Separate emotional attachment from strategic value. Acknowledge directly that people care about programs for reasons beyond their current performance. The founder of an initiative may have deep personal investment in its continuation. That's legitimate. But it's not a strategic argument. Create space for people to express their emotional connections while making clear that strategic decisions will be based on strategic criteria.
Give people permission to advocate for cuts. In most organizations, proposing to cut a program feels risky. What if the board member who championed it takes offense? What if staff members whose jobs depend on it push back? Create an environment where suggesting cuts is seen as responsible stewardship rather than disloyalty. The people closest to programs often know best which ones aren't working.
Frame cuts as investments. Every dollar and every hour freed up by ending a program is a dollar and hour available for something else. Cutting isn't just subtraction; it's reallocation. When you end an underperforming initiative, you're not destroying value—you're creating capacity for initiatives that could deliver more.
Build sunset provisions into new programs. One reason programs persist indefinitely is that continuation is the default. Flip the default. When you launch something new, set a review date. At that point, the program has to justify its continuation rather than opponents having to justify its elimination. This makes saying no easier because it's built into the structure from the start.
Here's a concrete challenge: identify one thing your organization can stop doing.
Not "no" for the sake of it. "No" because it no longer serves your members or your mission. "No" because the resources it consumes could create more value elsewhere. "No" because continuing it crowds out work that matters more.
One thing. That's the challenge.
It might be a committee that meets out of habit rather than purpose. It might be a publication that nobody reads. It might be an event that loses money every year. It might be a member benefit that costs more to administer than members value it.
Look at your portfolio of activities with fresh eyes. Ask which ones you would create today if you were starting from scratch. The gap between that answer and your current reality is where the opportunities lie.
If you genuinely can't find one thing to cut, that's a signal worth paying attention to. Either your organization has achieved perfect strategic alignment—every program delivering maximum value with no waste—or you're not looking hard enough.
Most likely, it's the second one.
Associations that learn to say no will have the capacity to say yes to transformation. Those that keep everything on the list will keep reshuffling priorities while the world changes around them.
AI is not a program you add to your existing portfolio. It's a shift that affects everything you do—how you create content, how you deliver education, how you serve members, how your profession practices. Engaging with that shift requires attention, resources, and strategic focus. It requires room.
Zero-based strategic thinking isn't comfortable. It forces conversations that organizations prefer to avoid. It asks people to let go of programs they've built and championed. It requires leadership willing to make decisions that disappoint some stakeholders in service of the broader mission.
But it's the only way to create space for what comes next. And what comes next is too important to crowd out with programs that have outlived their purpose.
The choice isn't between keeping everything and cutting everything. It's between strategic focus and the illusion of it. Between making hard decisions now and having them made for you later, by circumstances rather than choice.
Associations exist to help their members navigate change. That starts with navigating it themselves.