Jay Karen, CAE, CEO of the National Golf Course Owners Association, joined the ASAE board in 2020. “It was the best kind of time to become a board member, when there’s a lot of change management going on,” he says. “You can have a real direct impact through conversations, strategy discussions, even branding discussions.”

Now the current chair of the ASAE Research Foundation and chair-elect of ASAE, Karen shared some insights and guidance about how organizations can effectively respond to the accelerating rate of change at the current moment.

Stay future-focused. Karen cites the Foundation’s ForesightWorks tool as “some of the best content and programming I’ve ever seen at ASAE.” That’s because it emphasizes oncoming change drivers that associations are often still resistant to facing. “Most associations tend not to think beyond a year or two ahead,” he says. “It’s training us to think down the road and consider all the possible intersections with our space—society, politics, the economy, workforce, all of those things.”

But provide practical guidance for the current moment. The seemingly constant march of executive orders coming out of the White House presents a challenge for leaders looking to separate the signal from the noise and determine how the orders affect their lives. “A great role associations can play is filtering for your community,” he says. “When you see that there are 100 executive orders, an association can be helpful by saying, ‘We’ve picked the eight that we think are impactful for our community—let’s talk about these.”

Learn how to welcome and work with disruption. That doesn’t just mean the disruptors in the world around us; it also means those within an association’s community. “I think what we’re seeing in today’s society, in many ways, in many sectors, is possibly how easy it is to disrupt institutions,” he says. “Usually the disruption comes from the nay-saying voices, the critical voices that think it could be done better in other ways. CEOs and governing bodies need to find new ways of embracing and synthesizing those disrupting voices into our processes.”

CEOs and governing bodies need to find new ways of embracing and synthesizing disrupting voices.

Jay Karen, CAE, ASAE Research Foundation Chair

Think nimble, think diverse. Boards learned how to move faster to make an impact during the pandemic. Karen suggests that associations take a look at their bylaws to make sure that rules don’t impede the ability of boards to act with the necessary speed. Moreover, boards should cultivate a range of approaches to leadership, so long as strategy tops the agenda. “I think that an emphasis on critical thinking, strategic thinking, big-picture thinking is what you need at the table,” he says. “Who’s tasked with reminding people that we’re here to talk strategically and about governance, and we’ll leave management and the execution to the staff? Maybe someone needs to be the crier on that at every meeting of the board.”

Transparency is different now. Those bylaws usually set limits on how association members experience board activities, usually through a terse set of minutes or other report-outs. Today, members demand more clarity and communication, which means maintaining trust is more essential—and more difficult. “Boards need to determine how to walk the tightrope of transparency in today’s day and age,” he says. “We used to think transparency was providing the minutes, which aren’t really that transparent, and your 990s. And that was the best definition of transparency. Well, that’s not good enough anymore.”

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