During the last decade, the club averaged around 120 members. In the past year, it’s been closer to 80. Even if things turn around tomorrow and we start growing again (which I think is more likely than most people realize), it will take many months before we end up where we were. This presents us with a problem, because the club’s organizational logic implicitly assumes that we have 120-160 members to keep things going. That assumption leads to a lot of behavior which doesn’t make much sense anymore. Here are some examples:

• Soliciting applications for new openings with a list of hard requirements up front. This makes sense when 5 people will all compete to hold the same position, and the difficult part is selecting only 1 of them for that position in some fair way. This does not make sense when we struggle to find 1 person to apply, and there are 3 other people who are discouraged from applying because they think someone with way more experience than they have will get the position.
• Insisting in FCOMM that any command-level vacancy on a ship must be filled within 14 days of its occurrence, and if it is not filled, subjecting that ship to immediate decommissioning. It’s harder to find people to fill command positions, so we don’t consistently enforce this rule anymore. We were to do it today, we would have to cut 14 of our 21 ships. The 7 ships we would be left with would probably not be the right ships for everybody either.
• Paradoxically, the rule above is impractical because the club has been a low-accountability environment due to absent or weak leadership. A club of 160 people can afford to have a few leaders unaccountable, because plenty of other people can step up to make up for it. A club that is half that number of people cannot.
• Having ~40 people in the cabinet and cabinet-adjacent leadership roles makes sense when that number is a quarter of the club’s membership. It makes a lot less sense when it is half of the club.

We have to adjust to the fact that we’re a smaller club than we have been. That means we have fewer people who can be leaders at whatever level they would be leading. Because there are fewer of them, we need to be more selective about who they are and what it is they are doing, rather than less.

When I say “more selective,” I do not mean that we need to create a bunch of new rules that limit positions to being filled by people with a Bachelor’s of Science in Starship Historical Interstellar Theory. We already do too much of that, and it’s one of the things that turns people off from helping out.

Instead, we have to make extra effort to find the right people for a given position. We have to go scout for talent, approach people who show potential, and ask them directly if they’d like to help out around here even if they haven’t said anything about that. We also have to start asking in a broad sense who is interested in helping out the club without a specific job in mind, so that when we can think about who those people are and how we can help them help us in the future. We need to meet people where they are, and find a way to raise them up to whatever their potential here is, rather than set up barriers so that we only have to talk to one or two select people who can be really active on Discord.

I say “we” here because this isn’t something the President can just do by themselves. Steve and I are going to do this at the cabinet level, but that people in our cabinet are going to have to do at the levels below theirs. Fleet Commanders are going to have to scout for people to be COs and XOs from the pool of people who are currently DHs. COs are going to have to be sure that talented people on their ships are known to the rest of us. If people aren’t interested in doing these things… well… I don’t think we can afford to have any COs who are only interested in-character about the shiny pips on their collar; we need out-of-character work to be done too.

I think as we do this, we will find plenty of indications that we have the wrong positions in the club also; that the club is asking for volunteers to do things that nobody really wants to do. In that case, we need to change the club, so we stop having a vacancy open, and instead create new opportunities that match people’s interests. There’s a lot of apathetic people who are just holding down a fort because they think they have to do it; we should give those people a break by taking away that obligation from the club’s ledger and replace it with something fun that they actually want to do.

**It is better to build an organizational structure around the things its people actually want to do from the bottom up, than to impose a structure on them from the top down and expect them to fit it. **

That, in abstract, is what restructuring the organization is about. I’m deliberately not going to tell you about a grand plan I’m going to impose upon you, because I don’t want to impose grand plans. I want you to understand why I think we need to do something different together, and how we might go about that, before we fully settle on what needs to be different.

Steve and I certainly have some specific ideas on how things could be different (merging some departments, adjusting fleets, and one very radical idea about what to do with ships), but the truth is that how things play out really depends on who around here actually wants to help the club out, and what it is they want to do. Steve and I will not actually know who those people are until after we are elected, and we’ve started the process of figuring out who is in the cabinet. So it doesn’t actually make much sense for me to stand here and announce some grand plan until we know who we really do or don’t have to work with.

The one thing I am certain we will do differently is change the application process up front for the cabinet. We’ll still ask for applications, but we’re going to have two processes. One will be a more traditional process, where we tell you the existing cabinet positions that exist today that we’re looking to fill, and those will have some expectations listed. In the other process, we’re going to ask everyone who wants to help out at all just to drop us a line and tell us whatever it is they want to bring to the table. Then Steve and I will figure out how to set the table.

Because this post is now really long, I’m going to just pause here and let you all digest it. Feel free to ask any questions you might have about it.

Joe