123. Building a fit-for-purpose association board (feat. Jeff de Cagna)

Special OMG guest Jeff de Cagna explains the importance of fit-for-purpose boards. Although his specialty is associations, the message applies universally!

 

SCRIPT

Hi, I’m Jeff De Cagna, executive advisor for Foresight First LLC, located in Reston, Virginia. My sincere thanks to Matt for inviting me to be the guest host for this episode of the One Minute Governance Podcast.

 

The focus of my work is on helping professional, trade, and other association boards become fit-for-purpose by setting a higher standard of stewardship, governing, and foresight, or SGF. The crucial question I pose to boards is one we should all ask as we consider our personal responsibility for addressing this decade’s intensifying challenges: what will our successors say about us? The purpose of this question is to push association boards to focus their attention on how their actions, rather than their words, will help shape a different and better future for the people who will follow them in the years and decades ahead, with a specific emphasis on future humans they will never know personally.

 

At the heart of SGF is the board’s duty of foresight, a term I originally coined in 2014 and recently redefined to integrate both more than two years of painful pandemic lessons and a clear-eyed recognition of the serious struggles still ahead: the duty of foresight requires association boards to stand up for their successors’ futures through intentional learning, short-term sacrifice, and long-term action. In contrast to the legal mandate that underpins boards’ fiduciary duties, the duty of foresight is a choice—a profoundly ethical and moral choice—that fit-for-purpose association boards must make every day.