Don't let your daughter grow up to be President

An article submitted to the July 2007 ANZSI Newsletter.

ANZSI has now had two Council Presidents in seven months. Before we politely press-gang another hapless victim into this toxic position, perhaps it is time to consider the whole apparatus of our higher-level administration. Why are Council jobs so stressful, and where are the outcomes for all this agony?

When I took the job of President in 2006 I was already aware that the job was a poisoned chalice – tedious, time-consuming and largely thankless. But that doesn’t explain why it’s also so stressful. Hard work can be exhilarating – if it produces results. Unfortunately, the ANZSI Council – and its predecessor, the National Committee – produce very few results. The stress of the President’s job lies in the fact that the incumbent gradually comes to realise that nearly all their hard work is going to waste. The mountain is labouring mightily, to produce – what? Not even a mouse. More of a microbe, really.

Ask yourself; just what has the ANZSI Council/Committee achieved for members since, say, 2003? True, there are the regular ongoing services like registration and the Indexing Medal, but these are largely self-running, and certainly don’t need weekly or even monthly intervention. Likewise the Conference Committee. Let’s take those as read. What members’ benefits have come out of the Council in the last four years?

Well, there’s the redesign of the ANZSI website, now moving into its fourth year with nothing to show for it. We have a New Zealand branch which took a great deal of effort to set up and immediately flatlined when the prime mover could no longer spare the time for it. We have an automated members list and Indexers Available, done on my own initiative when, after two years, the National Committee had been unable to find someone to take over the existing system. And a good deal of time has been spent on making new Council guidelines, position statements and other regulations, so that ANZSI now has, by my estimate, at least one page of rules for every three members.

Older members who are familiar with the Council may feel no surprise that simple initiatives should take so long to carry out, but to our newer recruits these time periods must seem like a bizarre joke. Four years to set up a website, when most of them have set up their own in a matter of days or weeks! Six weeks to arrange a meeting, in a world of email and SMS messages! Our Council members collectively put in at least twenty hours a week on the job. Anyone hiring an indexer for that time would expect to see some pretty impressive results. Why doesn’t ANZSI get results? Why does everything take so long? No wonder Presidents give up in despair.

One immediate cause of the delays can be found in the vast number of rules and regulations which make it extremely difficult to function at all, much less to achieve any changes. Here’s a simple example: the President, as Chair of a Council meeting, is not allowed to propose motions. Why not? Who knows? A President is supposed to lead, but an ANZSI President must lead by stealth, joining with the Secretary in a kind of furtive double-act to get his or her ideas put forward. In this way a five-minute job turns into a three-hour email session. Multiply this rule by fifty or so, and we have a massively entangling web of bureaucracy. Administration requires checks and balances, they say: well, ANZSI has so effectively checked and balanced the President – and the other Council roles – that the incumbents can spend all their time simply meeting the administrative requirements of their position, and have none left over for actually doing anything.

I’m not criticising the system in general: no doubt it works well for organisations with thousands of members, and millions of dollars in assets. But ANZSI only has about 200 members, of whom forty or so are in any way active in the organisation. To try and sustain two levels of administration for 200 people is manifestly absurd.

Bureaucratic administration has another drawback: it attracts bureaucratic minds. Every Council draws a share of members who are more concerned with following formal rules than with actually achieving anything, and the current administrative structure permits them to have a field day. Cantankerous Councillors can tie down initiatives for weeks or months with nit-picking pettifoggery. Spending money, in particular, is regarded with deep suspicion, so that false economy assigns crucial jobs to volunteers, to be done piecemeal over months or years, rather than to paid professionals who could complete them in days or weeks.

The result is that genuine initiatives – and there are a few – move forward with agonising slowness. Money accumulates because it takes too much trouble to agree on how to spend it. Any decision that might ruffle the smallest feathers is postponed, debated at endless length and eventually sent off to a sub-committee for consignment to limbo. Since people who enjoy this kind of atmosphere are rare, when one of them is sick or absent there is no-one else to do their job, and progress grinds to a halt. Meanwhile endless paperwork creates the illusion of achievement. Like any bureaucracy with no real goals, the Council’s main task has become making work for itself to do.

From my background on the Internet, where the prevailing philosophy is ‘try it and see; fix the details later’, I found this whole environment utterly frustrating. But it was also clear that to attempt reforms would take more time and effort than I could be bothered to spare. By the time I resigned in December I had come to realise that I could achieve more for the world in five hours on the Web than in five years as ANZSI President. Now the Presidency has claimed another victim. What can we do?

The solution is not to change the Council membership. New recruits will bog down in the same bureaucratic quagmire. We must address the underlying problem; and the underlying problem is that the ANZSI Council has outlived its usefulness.

When the National Committee – as it was – was set up in the 1970s there was no Internet, no email, no fax machines, no websites. Interstate phone call costs were measured in dollars, and overseas mail took weeks to arrive. There was a rich and valuable role for the Committee to play in representing members, coordinating information, training and quality control at a national level. Copies of the Newsletter from that period are full of discussion, questions and debate. The Committee’s job, in short, was to facilitate communication between indexers, and it did it well.

That was then; this is now. In 2007, most of us need facilitated communication like we need a hole in the head. Discussion of technical issues takes place on INDEX-L; socialising occurs in a dozen other newsgroups and mailing lists. The Newsletter is mostly a set-piece for Council propaganda, and the ANSZI website is a largely static collection of administrative bumf. The Branches run the conferences, hold parties, organise training, take initiatives. Ongoing services like Conferences, registration, awards, Indexers Available and the website largely run themselves. The Council mostly rubber-stamps, hands out funds, or raises difficulties. Its elaborate structure is – quite simply – no longer necessary.

I propose, therefore, that we take this opportunity to cut membership fees, abolish the ANZSI Council, and replace it by a communal website and an ANZSI mailing list. Unlike the Council, these will cost almost nothing to run – in fact, we could set them up and maintain them at no extra cost via the interest on currently accumulated funds. The website will provide a forum for formal discussions, advice, rules and recommendations. The mailing list will substitute for the Newsletter and allow for informal chit-chat. Those few decisions that have wider implications can be taken by an ad hoc committee of Branch Presidents. Services like registration, if we decide to keep them, can be carried out by one Branch as a service to the others; or – better still – spun off and run as self-funding businesses that can then be opened up to the wider community.

Or we can go round and round, stressing increasingly reluctant Presidents and Council members, until we finally run out of candidates, probably sooner rather than later. What’s it to be? You decide. After all, you’re paying for it.