Most associations can start things. Few can end them.

Most associations know they need to stop doing some things, but almost none of them actually do it.

That's not a leadership problem. It's not a courage problem. It's a criteria problem.

The leadership team sits down to talk about what to cut, and what they're really doing is negotiating in real time. Every cut is a judgment call and every judgment call has a loser.

Someone built the program. Someone is proud of it. Someone will feel demoted if it disappears. So the conversation stops being strategic and becomes political, whether anyone intends that or not.

We worked with an association that had to do this the hard way.

Their strategic plan called for four critical things, what the team started calling the Big Four, and doing them well was going to require real resources, attention, and organizational will.

None of that was available. It was all tied up in the accumulated weight of everything the association had always done.

They cut most of them. Not all at once, and not without friction, but enough to free up what the Big Four actually required.

They had to stop. And to stop, they needed a filter.

The filter is a set of questions the leadership team agreed to apply before anyone started defending anything:

If the answer is no on more than one of those, the program doesn't get a defense. It gets a sunset date.

That's a completely different conversation than "should we keep doing this?"

The first conversation is about whether the program is worth keeping. The second is about whether the program belongs in this organization at this time, measured against a standard the room agreed to before the politics got personal.

That's also the only reason stopping can become routine instead of a once-a-decade crisis. A leadership team can't put "cut something" on the annual calendar if every cut still has to be re-argued from scratch.

The filter is what makes the rhythm possible. Every year, before planning begins, something exits. Not because it failed, and not because anyone is being blamed. It exits because the organization decided what it is trying to do, and that program isn't it anymore.

That's not a painful conversation. That's a mature one.

The hard part, and it really is the hard part, is the discipline to apply the criteria without flinching. Any leadership team can write them down, but very few use them when the moment arrives and someone in the room built the thing being cut.

The associations that actually do it are the ones where the criteria exist before the list of sunsetting candidates does. Written down, agreed to, signed off on, prior to the meeting where it gets personal. The sequence matters.

What got built over fifty years doesn't dissolve in one planning retreat. But if you can't name what you're going to stop doing, you can't name what you're actually going to do.

Does your association have criteria for stopping things, or does it only have criteria for starting them?

And the harder version:

When did your organization last stop doing something, not because it failed, but because it no longer belonged?

— Chris

More on member value and what members expect from associations today: sequenceconsulting.com.