đźš‘ ASSOCIATION ER
🚨 Code Blue: Board Dysfunction Detected!
Welcome back to Association ER, where we crack open the real operational challenges associations face — and how to actually fix them.
Sometimes it’s not the members causing chaos — it’s the leadership team itself.
The Diagnosis: Board Dysfunction We walked into this one thinking it might be a quick tidy-up. A few governance tweaks, maybe some help with engagement. Nothing too wild. But no. This was a full-blown emergency. The kind where you take your jacket off immediately because you know you’re going to be there a while.
The Board was in gridlock, no signs of life. Meetings were dragging on for five or six hours with nothing to show for it, except maybe a collective existential crisis and a very large Uber Eats bill. No decisions, no direction, just the same arguments on loop, you could hear the sustained beep of the flatline.
The executive team? Exhausted. One was doing the job of three people. Another had started referring to the strategic plan as “that cryptid we once sighted in 2021.” And the actual plan? Sitting untouched in a forgotten Dropbox folder like a sad digital ghost.
No one hated each other — which, weirdly, made it trickier. They wanted to do good work. They just didn’t agree on what that looked like, or who was meant to be doing what, or when. Or how. Or why.
So, we did what we always do: we sat down, shut the laptops, and started listening. Not fixing. Not leading with solutions. Just listening to the mess and the misfires and the miscommunications until the noise started to make sense.
And once it did, we started untangling.
We reworked their framework so people knew what was theirs to run with and what wasn’t theirs to carry. We helped the Board get clear on what decisions actually belonged to them — and which ones could happen without a five-hour conference call and a unanimous vote. Beep beep beep, the signs of life returned. We had a pulse! We didn’t magic away the dysfunction, but we gave it somewhere to go. Somewhere useful.
And slowly, it started to shift.
By the next Board meeting, the vibe was completely different. They didn’t rush, but they moved. Decisions happened. Actual progress. People spoke to each other like colleagues again, not like rivals in a reality show finale.
We’ve seen enough of these now to know: the problem isn’t usually the plan, or the budget, or the software. It’s the fog. The slow, creeping chaos that builds up when no one’s quite sure what their job is anymore.
And complete resuscitation.
Until next the next set of rounds,
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Let’s make sure your association is running at its best. Together, we’ll keep it out of the ER and on the road to success.
Warm regards,
Peta Riles
Founder & Principal Consultant
PR Association Services & Consulting
PR Association Services & Consulting 