| T.I. #97, Winter ’90 |
My cousins, back in mid-summer (when I sat down to write this), SCA membership was
already above the 10% growth level we’d projected for the end of the year. The
total was still climbing fast, so there’s a fair chance that almost one in four of you
are reading your first Winter issue of Tournaments Illuminated. And even if the flood
has slowed a bit, we’re surely at a level where we need to give some thought to the
survival of the Society.
Survival? Isn’t our growth a sign of success? Yes—but
growth can be fatal if we don’t adapt to it. Bigger isn’t necessarily
stronger.*
Think about ants. Ants are very strong for their size,
and it’s easy to picture them as big as horses, tossing cars around and terrorizing
cities. But a horse-sized ant would collapse into a pile of chitin and glop before
it took a step. Ants wear their skeletons on the outside, which works fine if you’re
the size of an ant. However, simple geometry makes a creature’s volume rise much faster
than its surface area as it grows. A three-inch ant has nine times the surface area
of a one-inch ant, but twenty-seven times the volume (and weight!), and this
square-cube progression holds for any increase in size. Long before an ant got big
enough to saddle, there just wouldn’t be room on its surface for an organic shell
strong enough to hold it together.
Likewise, small human organizations work very well with
structures that would collapse under large ones. A one-man business trusts its owner’s
mind and hands for everything. If the owner is good at his trade and pleases his
customers, he’s apt to get more work than he can do. And his business will fail then,
unless he figures out how to hire help, explain what needs to be done, and make sure
it does get done properly—all of which call for skills he didn’t need before. If he
manages to find them, he’ll be able to take an occasional day off without closing down;
if not, he’ll be working harder than ever, losing sleep, and finally looking for another
job. And if the business keeps growing, it will require more and more new
skills—record-keeping, space allocation, delegation of supervision.... Every change in
size brings new benefits and new demands, and it takes new skills and procedures to
profit from the former and cope with the latter. If a growing business tries to get by
without adding anything new, and just does more of the same things that worked when it
was smaller, it will fall apart.
The Society has always regarded itself as a special case.
We’ve grown and we’ve prospered, and we’ve ignored almost every principle of modern
organizational practice. One of my favorite Old Time Stories features the Sociology
grad student who proposed us for a thesis; the faculty advisor is said to have rejected
the idea because no human group could possibly function the way the student said we did.
We don’t vote, yet we generally satisfy the will of the membership. We don’t have
reliable systems for rewards or sanctions, yet we tap into a virtually limitless pool
of enthusiastic and creative labor. We charge the lowest possible prices for everything
we do, yet (without grants, government aid, or public fund-raising) we always have
money for anything we need to take on. It hasn’t always been smooth or effective—some
of the old files are hilarious, and others are pretty scary—but we’ve always gotten
by.
We’ve staggered along from transition to
transition—sometimes amid widespread outcry, sometimes with no one noticing, even
the participants.
Our incorporation was controversial, and our first paid employee (who cost a whole
twenty-five cents an hour in contributions to a work-study program) was a major
decision. But when the Board went from monthly to quarterly meetings and told the
officers to run the Society in the meantime, it hardly raised a ripple. Back when we
couldn’t afford $50 to get Tournaments Illuminated collated, it would have been
hard to imagine the Society with a modern office and a nearly full-time staff, but
we’ve been in commercial space for almost two years now, and just moved into an
office complex a lot younger than we are. The one thing to be said of all our history
is that none of it was planned—challenges or opportunities appeared, and the people
on the spot flanged together some sort of response.
It’s worked so far, and it may go on working—but it
feels to me as though the pace of change is picking up again. The chart at the end
of the column shows midwinter membership as far back as I can trace it. All I can
find before 1978 are scattered T.I. mailing figures—500 in 1971, 1450 in 1973,
1200 in 1974, 1300 in mid-76, the year after I joined. The last big jump, in 1982,
seemed to consist mainly of regular participants signing up to beat the rate hike.
It didn’t feel like real growth, even at the time, and the next two years were almost
flat. When we did the 1986 budget, we figured membership had topped out around 10,000,
so we shouldn’t plan any major increase in the scale of our operations. This year
feels different from 1982; there’s no obvious incentive to rush into membership,
and the queries we get at the central office indicate that people are joining before
they attend any meetings or events. It’s more like 1979, when a widespread
word-of-mouth recruiting campaign first turned the Society into something other than
an extended family; it took years to adjust to that bolus of new members (and vice
versa), and some old-timers feel we never quite restored the original balance.
The Society’s greatest strengths—its adaptability,
its capacity to develop and use human resources, and its economy—all depend on very
high levels of common knowledge and attitudes among the membership. By and large,
members understand what the Society does, what our events are for, and how we relate
to the rest of the community. Anyone who walks into a grocery store in garb is a
spokesman for the Society—and usually a good spokesman, too. Events and offices
almost seem to run themselves, because whenever a job needs doing, someone is there
to take it on—teaching, record keeping, first aid, it all gets done. And very little
of this effort gets paid for by the branches, because one of the things “everyone
knows” about the Society is that there isn’t much money around, and officers assume
they will need to support their jobs as well as do them. Working on their own time
and at their own expense, volunteers do pretty much whatever they please, and the
Society prospers on the foundation of a general understanding that links individual
choices to the common good.
In the past, this consensus just happened. People
tended to join with a ready-made support structure—they heard of the Society from
friends, or they came upon an event by accident and made friends with people they
met there. Those who didn’t make such contacts didn’t stay around, which was a
loss—but also made life easier, as we never had to worry about bringing them into
the culture. Nowadays, there are so many people coming in at the same time that
there’s a good chance of all a newcomer’s first contacts being equally new. If
people have to figure the Society out for themselves, they tend to get it wrong;
they’re uncomfortable in strange surroundings, and they “see” (that is, interpret
and guess at) things that make them more uncomfortable. Then they pass on the tale
to newer newcomers, and you get things like the rumor the West quashed last year,
which said you had to be a peer to stand on the King’s side of court....
Our growth is putting pressure on our internal
communications. We’ve gotten too big to rely on luck and observation to bring
new members up to speed—to keep the benefits of general understanding, we have to
step up the effort to make ourselves understood. We’re making some progress. The
Society Chronicler has been urging editors to insist on notices a newcomer can decipher,
and the newsletters are getting clearer. (Though there’s a lot of room for
improvement; I still see sites labelled “same as last time”, which isn’t much use to
someone who hadn’t heard of the Society last time the branch used the site.) The
Registry has added a glossary to the membership card packet, to help newcomers cope
with the newsletters. The kingdoms are doing a fair amount on their own, as well, by
building up the office of Chatelaine or Hospitaller and encouraging activity both at
the local level and for the kingdom as a whole. And my Deputy publishes a newsletter
for kingdom hospitality officers, to help them stay in touch with each other and share
ideas. But however much we do, there’s always more to be done—and I’d be happy to see
any ideas you care to share with me!
Our growth is also putting pressure on our system of
volunteer officers. Ten years ago, almost everybody at all levels worked for free. The
Registrar was a contractor, paid at a flat rate of around $550 per month, out of which
she hired clerical work at minimum wage and kept any-thing that happened to be left
over. She also had an expense account for postage and office supplies, which ran
another $150-200 a month. (Since her husband’s employer had agreed to donate computer
time, the contract Registry was actually cheaper than the previous volunteer Registry,
which had been renting computer time.) The rest of the Corporate staff got reimbursed
for postage and office supplies when they turned in receipts, which they rarely bothered
to do. Some kingdoms helped Great Officers with expenses; others did not. Nowadays,
officers need more and more financial support. Many corporate jobs take too much time
for unpaid volunteers, and the ones that require people to drive to commercial office
space have to pay market-rate wages in order to keep competent staff. Most of the
kingdoms are too big to run on personal donations from their officers. We’re still a
far cry from the Boy Scouts, who I’m told have full-time paid employees at the county
level, but we need to keep looking at our offices to make sure the internal and
external rewards are adequate for the demands on the incumbents.
One way to keep the kingdom officers’ jobs within reach
of cheerful volunteers is to have lots of relatively small kingdoms. Every branch is a
work unit for a kingdom officer—large or small, it generates reports to review,
achievements to publicize, and problems to unsnarl. Unfortunately, it’s also true
that every kingdom is a work unit for the corporate officers—and an extra kingdom
takes a much bigger block of time than an extra shire. The Society’s structure still
works, but it’s becoming clear that we can’t cope with an unlimited number of kingdoms.
Maybe we could deal with twice as many as we have now, but maybe not—and almost
certainly not much more than that.
We don’t have to do anything instantly, but we do need
to think about ways to strengthen our structure. One possibility would be to place
more weight on principalities, giving them some powers currently reserved to kingdoms,
but using the kingdom instead of the corporation for the first level of review and
appeal. Some principalities already see themselves as permanent parts of their
parent kingdoms, and I believe that’s a useful development.
Another possibility is to design kingdoms and
principalities so they’re easy to administer—that is, make them more or less
round, so travel times aren’t too much greater in one direction than another, and
more or less uniform in modern outlook and approach to the Current Middle Ages,
so they don’t have to deal with ingrained differences in priorities. The map of the
Known World offers little hope for this project—it’s a tangled mess, and there are
only a few places where subdividing a kingdom is likely to improve matters. On the
other hand, you could make a good case for, say, a kingdom in the northern plains—if
there were enough members and regional interest there, you could draw a nice,
comfortable border around land currently held by four kingdoms in two modern countries.
If a proposal like this ever comes up, please try to set aside your natural reaction
to losing or gaining land, and concentrate on the quality of life in the branches
that would be caught up in the merger.
If we hope to thrive in the next quarter century as
we have in the past, we must make sure that information—the blood of the organism
we call the Society—reaches all its parts smoothly and accurately. We must make sure
that its officers and branches—its muscles and bones—get the supplies they need and
are not taxed beyond their endurance. The pressures on us are as real as gravity.
We can’t wish them away, or hope that instinctive understanding and unstinting
generosity will always be enough to keep us going. As we grow, we have to look at
the things we do and be prepared to change them—not to change what we are, but to
keep what we have.
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The West Kingdom History Website was created by and is maintained by Hirsch von Henford (mka Ken Mayer).