At a glance
Amateur sport, non-profit club · Around 200 members · Online consultation and one working day
The challenge: A club that became a national reference has grown faster than its organisation. Must it choose between sporting ambition and a sense of community?
Our approach: A consultation of every member, then one collective working day to settle the choices.
Result: A mission, four ambitions for 2030, three values adopted unanimously, and seven work streams carried by fourteen named people.
The divide is not between people. It lies in the rules nobody ever wrote down.
In twenty years, the club has gone from a small, close-knit team to a structure of around two hundred members spread across many training venues. The sporting results are there. But the leadership put it bluntly: “we are no longer quite sure, all of us, that we recognise ourselves in the way the club has evolved”. The initial request: redefine the values, the mission and the objectives.
What was at stake: not fixing a club in crisis, but making choices. Deciding what the club guarantees to everyone, what it adapts to each pathway, and who owns what.
What the member consultation brought to light:
- Strong attachment: 86% of respondents are proud to belong to the club. The criticism comes from people who care.
- Two mirror-image fears: 49% reject a club reserved for an elite, 47% reject a club without ambition. Each camp fears the other.
- One team, groups that ignore each other: 74% feel part of a single team, but only 18% believe the groups know each other.
- A shortfall in explanation rather than information: the information is clear, but only 31% know what the club decides, and why.
- A core of five or six volunteers carrying almost everything, with no identified successors.
The challenge: turn a vague feeling into explicit rules of the game, without damaging what makes the club proud.
“A day to make the calls”: start from everyone’s voice, leave with names
We designed and facilitated a short programme, at a non-profit rate, in three stages. The principle: bring the voice of absent members into the room, put the disagreements on the table from the morning onwards, and let no decision leave without someone to carry it.
Before: listen widely
- Scoping conversation with the chair and the co-founder leading the project.
- Online questionnaire sent to all members: 102 responses in thirteen days, close to one response for every two members, 78 of them with a written proposal or observation.
- Detailed analysis by section and a one-page summary, from which the four questions for the day were drawn.
During: six hours to decide together
Intention: move from a shared diagnosis to wording members recognise, then to commitments carried by named people.
- The shared diagnosis: feedback on the consultation, reactions in mixed pairs (what surprises, what confirms, what is missing).
- What we have become: in subgroups mixing committee, coaches, parents and athletes, what we are proud of, what we lost along the way, what we no longer want.
- Mission, 2030 ambition, values: wording drafted in subgroups, tested against real situations, then voted on and brought together in plenary.
- The sporting model: what can vary from one pathway to another, what never varies, and the rules to make explicit (progression, selection, allocation of resources).
- A two-way commitment base: what the club expects from families, athletes and coaches, and what it commits to offer in return.
- Who owns what: seven workstreams, each entrusted to a guarantor from the committee and a pair from outside the committee.
After: anchor
- Report of the day delivered the next day: wording adopted, decisions made, points left open, guarantors appointed.
- A thank-you document for members, to show that the consultation made a difference.
- An effort / impact sorting method so that each workstream separates its quick wins from its projects.
The signature method: the reality test and guarantors in pairs
Every value statement is confronted with concrete situations built from members’ responses: an absence that disrupts a recreational group, a training slot wanted by two groups, a last place on the team between two athletes of similar level, a parent who wants to help without knowing whom to ask. If the value does not say what to do, it gets reworded.
Each decision then leaves with two names: a guarantor from the committee, to keep it moving, and a pair from outside the committee, to widen the community. The guarantor does not do everything: they set the pace, check that it gets done and raise the alarm if it stalls.
“A value that has never cost a hard choice is not yet a value.”
A charter written by the club, and the names of those who bring it to life
- A full analysis of the consultation, read by section, and a one-page summary.
- A one-sentence mission, four 2030 ambitions and three values chosen unanimously (respect, excellence for everyone, team spirit), each with its concrete applications.
- A first grid of the rules to make explicit: who decides, on what criteria, published where and when.
- A base of mutual commitment between the club, families, athletes and coaches.
- Seven workstreams, fourteen names, and a method to get started.
- A feedback document for members, ready for the committee to share.
A club that no longer chooses between ambition and belonging
The programme aims to embed, over time, what members were asking for: not choosing between competition and recreation, but making sure the choices (who gets what, who trains where, who is selected) are explicit, explained and applied to everyone. At the end of the day, the club has:
- an identity expressed in members’ own words, not in charter jargon;
- a shared principle for moving beyond the divide: different resources, equal quality;
- clear commitments in both directions, announced from registration onwards;
- an identified pool of successors and specific tasks to lighten the load;
- a first signal of trust sent to members: their views shaped what comes next.
Some points remain open, and that is deliberate: the precise definition of pathways, the link with the coaching philosophy, the role of the coaches. They are entrusted to the workstreams, with a review after three months.
Giving a voice to those who rarely speak, and making decisions stick
- An approach that starts from the data of all members, not only those present in the room.
- Facilitation that treats disagreement as working material, talking about rules rather than people, with strict confidentiality.
- A demand for anchoring: every decision leaves with a guarantor, a pair and a deadline.
- A lean format calibrated for the non-profit world, with a rate suited to the means of an ASBL.
Has your club or association grown faster than its rules of the game?
If your organisation is torn between ambition and belonging, or relies on too few shoulders, we can design with you a consultation and a working day that lead to decisions people own. Let’s talk.
