… in three weeks.
That’s what happened to the Swedish Pirate Party during the Spectrials last year. How do an organization handle that?
As a person that gets an e-mail notice whenever a new member in the Stockholm area pops up, this was not only a pleasurable experience as we got ~10000 new members, hehe. The general notion in the party was, and still is, that “we need to engage all of these new members” but no progress has been done on this front that has given any effect.
We have an organization with almost ten thousand members in the district of Stockholm, but our organization has not changed at all to meet the demands of these new and eager members. There is no organizational framework other than the rule:
If you have an idea, find three other PP-members and if they think it’s a good thing, DO IT!
And a district based hierarchic structure, in Stockholm based on one leader of the district with three people leading the larger election circuits. These circuits then span into 10-15 municipals, each having one leader. There are also seconds to all positions that is helping to carry the workload.
This is how PP has always worked, and it sure is an extremely creative way to work. I’ve never seen an organization where people take as much initiative and get recognized in the same way for what they do. I’ve also never seen such a large organization held up on so few stabilizing pillars.
When doing a check on how many official officers we had in the district of Stockholm, I found that we had 68.
68 people that are supposed to help, coach, guide and activate 10000 members. During their free time…
This operational structure is centralizing responsibilities but not giving any mandates in the same way that a more traditional organizational model would. It also creates a situation where you create ’specialists’, or ’supernodes’ if you will, that sit on a lot of knowledge but tend to either get burned out or lose their flame as the workload landing on their shoulders are huge. There just isn’t any underlying supporting structure to fall back on.
Now, I just got appointed to be one of three people in an committee that is to handle the role of DL (District Leader) during a transition period in which a new DL should be elected. During the meeting held to appoint this committee the usual question popped up: “So, what power do they have as DL’s?”. The answer is as always “None, but they do have control over the budget. Other than that just responsibilities.”. The budget for the 10000 members in Stockholm area is very limited, actually so limited that I can’t even understand why. Now money isn’t everything, especially for us as we have great in-house resources ready to work for credit & recognition, but I hope that you get my drift.
What I’m trying to get to here is that in order to sustain member growth and retention, we need to do something. Doing something means changing things… I’m sorry but it needs to be done. If carefully planned and executed, such a change does not have to impede on either creativity or the possibility to get engaged. Actually, it might help create more interested members.
Looking at this in a strategic way, one should first assess the current situation.
To get a quick picture in your head, imagine 68 people standing on a field. Then drop 10000 gold coins over them from 1 mile up and see how many they can catch (and still be standing).
The probable result would be that the people die and the coins slip through their fingers landing on the ground and slowly decomposing together with the 68 skeletons. Not too funny and no one gains on that in the long run.
Now what can we do about this? Provide them with umbrellas or helmets to protect themselves might be a starting point. Continuing on, providing them with some buckets to catch the coins without having them actively reaching after each and every one might drastically improve the chances of capturing some. Those captured can then be polished so that they attract a much greater value than they had from the beginning.
Translating this into reality might for example be to build better supporting structures for handling new members and providing them with information that they can use to activate themselves. Some might say that this exists, but let me ask you “Where?”. The answer would be “In these five different places”. That connects to another issue and that is the RTFM-culture that runs through PPs veins. That needs to be remedied, immediately, as information should be available for anyone and easily accessible. What happens if it is not? People lose interest and quit trying.
Moving on, the officer roles DL and VL (leaders of underlying election circuits) need to be changed and responsibilities for the larger districts need to be delegated and responsibilities for the delegated areas need to be enforced, even though that’s almost never a problem with the great people we have. Today, we have maybe 10-15 people in Stockholm handling everything when it comes to operations, logistics/planning/information/creating intiative, and this also needs to change. It is no wonder the pace has slowed after that marathon.
Also please understand and remember that I’m not trying to diminish the roles of the people that worked out in every municipal around Stockholm. You were the ones that carried us to the greatest elective victory in PP’s history. This is rather critique against the current organizational structure, that we apparently have grown out of.
I will be a candidate in the elections for District Leader, and if elected the first thing I’m going to try to do is turn that single role into a 4-5 people board (or similar). This board will have helping functions that have certain responsibilities, but also mandates to officially act in those areas. This will be done to ensure that we move away from the ’single supernode’ concept and make our organization more efficient while letting people keep some of their time for themselves. It will also make us more adaptable to new situations as one person alone does not have to decide on and handle things that needs to be done.
Doing these things will not change anything when it comes to the “three pirates rule”, instead it’s a move to ensure that there is an organization there to back our creative and well spoken pirates once they need it.
To sum things up, we need organizational change… and if I’m not going to initiate it I hope that someone else will.
