Making decisions at a distance

I've worked with international bodies, and for a global corporation before, so I knew decision making was going to be a slow process in the WCF Management Committee.  Don't get me wrong, this is NOT because we're trying to be slow.  It's just the reality - to explain:

• there are 9 of us
• in 5 time zones that span 21 hours
• it's always the croquet season for half of us at any time - so there are always going to be people away
• face-to-face meetings are at best, annual, and usually only some of the members can get there
• everything is done by email (we're trying a little Skype conferencing too).

This means we give a topic a reference, so we can each track the numbered email threads.  Part of my job is to manage the process, so I kick off the topic, give it a number and some initial outline or proposal.  Then I give the discussion some structure - we start with a discussion stage (1 week) and if we're lucky, by the end of the week I can update the proposal to make it much more complete and likely to be accepted.  The improved proposal is circulated for formal comment (another week).  Occasionally, there is such close agreement after this stage that we can close the topic off then - we've agreed it "by consensus".  More often, we may need to iterate, revising the proposal again, taking further comments, and so on (another week or more) until we have a clear proposal we can vote on.  We then have a final week voting cycle.

All this means many topics will take about 4 weeks to reach a decision.  A few things may be agreed more quickly - and others may take longer.  A particular problem I'm finding is that I know so little of what went on previously - and we could do with more continuity so we avoid chewing over stuff that was discussed a couple of years ago.  To help this, I'm starting a rolling log of what we've agreed, with an index - so at least from now on, it is possible to easily trace what has already been covered.

We have made really good progress in sorting out the 100 or so "To Do" tasks we started with 3 weeks ago, and have created specific groups to tackle Development, the Regulations, and Tournament Development.  We've also nominated specific MC members to take the lead for each of the championships being run or planned in 2011 and 2012.

One of the big improvements I hope we can make very soon is to publish a 10 year rolling schedule of when we'd like to hold each type of championship - and then start asking for bids for the next couple of years. Thereafter, we can hold an annual round of requesting bids for a few years ahead.  This will give us more opportunity to manage the process and to advertise in better time what events are being staged.

And finally, a bit of movement on the web site front.  I've been filling up my head with Dreamweaver tutorials so I can drive the software to update the site, and tomorrow Brian Storey (the S-G before last) is kindly talking me through connecting to the live site and grabbing a copy of all the pages.  So if it all goes dark tomorrow, you'll know I did someting wrong!