Secrets of Agile Associations

Preet Bassi, CAE, CEO of the Center for Public Safety Excellence (CPSE), jokingly says she has a precise technical term for association members’ current environment: “nutso.”

“The political tenor of discussion, the rejection of expertise, has trickled down from federal government to local government,” she says. “There’s so much more scrutiny on our members. Many members, their departments are seeing leadership transitions that are entirely political.”

Like a lot of associations that are facing disruptions due to federal agency changes, CPSE is under pressure to respond to immediate crises while still taking the long view. Board meetings that used to occur every six to eight weeks are now monthly. But more important than the frequency of conversations, Bassi says, is their focus on risk: which disruptions the organization will have to absorb, and which it may choose to initiate to predict its long-term stability.

In terms of the former, CPSE’s board has had to accept that one longtime federal-government customer has not been as reliably involved with the association as in the past. “They have had stops and starts in their engagement with us, and the board has said to effectively segment out that part of our budget,” she says. “We have to plan for it not to exist.”

But getting ahead of disruptions—and compensating for potential losses—means establishing faster-moving revenue drivers. In 2024 CPSE launched a subsidiary, the CPSE Center for Innovation, which provides research, training, and expert connections. In 2025, as departments within the Department of Homeland Security were reshuffled, the center almost unintentionally filled the gap by providing reliable data and technology guidance.

“We now have to step into this data and technology leadership role, not just for our customers, but perhaps for our industry and allied industries, and we have a group of subject matter experts that are like right there that we can pull into this,” she says. “The parent organization has to work more on a marathon basis, but the subsidiary is able to sprint.”

Jeanne Sheehy, CMO of the association management company Bostrom, notes that many clients are considering similar approaches—looking at more near-term strategic planning with a stronger emphasis on data.

“A lot of our strategic plans are really business models,” she says. “We start with the value proposition, look at our key targets, have the board vote on the programs they want to prioritize. It’s a very focused one-year plan. And what’s great about it is that they find out sooner what resonates well and what doesn’t.”

Leaner and Faster

The American Society of Safety Professionals (ASSP) has tried to avoid the board-meeting-every-month approach to responding to current challenges. But it has worked in recent years to streamline its governance so that it can more nimbly address member needs. In 2021 it eliminated a cumbersome house of delegates, reframing it as an advisory group and better empowering the nine-person board.

The challenge is that an association can only be so sure these days about which direction it should go in. At CPSE, Bassi uses the term VUCA—volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous—when discussing the current environment. But rather than using that as a rationale for becoming more conservative, Bassi says, it’s improved the board’s capacity for risk tolerance because it has a firm grasp of its current performance data and is inured to a certain level of uncertainty. “At our last in-person board meeting, we spent a lot of time talking about risk appetites, and one board member said, ‘I’m almost risk-seeking right now.’”

Bassi says she likes the term one CPSE board member coined to describe their mood at the moment: constructive paranoia. For her, it means being clear about the headwinds that are almost certainly coming, but pushing through it instead of despairing. And her role is to set the pace—when to act with urgency, when to slow down and consider.

“How that shows up is in convening,” she says. “That shows up as bringing in a facilitator. That shows up as sending staff to more training, or us all reading an article. I’m the one saying, ‘This is important. Look over here, even if you don’t think it’s important.’ I’m always thinking about how we’re going to fall off a cliff tomorrow. So I’m always prepping for not falling off a cliff.”