I started this year’s essays talking about leadership. As the year slowly loses light, we shift our focus to who we want to lead us and where we want to go.
Twice in my life, I’ve been put in the position to either rebuild an organization or oversee its dismantling. Both times I chose to attempt the former. And both times, while I was elected to the position, in reality, no one else wanted the responsibility. I am just the kind of special idiot who volunteers when no one else steps up.
The first time I was in Boy Scouts as a teenager. Unlike most of my peers, I’d come to the organization late. I’d never been a Cub Scout. I’d only lasted a few months as a Webelo as I’d gotten bored because we didn’t do anything except attend meetings without much else in sight. I’d been spoiled by the brief time my father and I had spent in an organization called Indian Guides where we actually did things like camping. But by then, my father was out of the picture. He still lived locally but had made it clear that his life and mine would only intersect every other weekend at best. Less after he left for Spain.
Of course, my lack of commitment to Webelos meant that by the time my middle school friends introduced me to Boy Scouts, my mother was reluctant to let me join. But once she learned that she wouldn’t be responsible for getting me to the meetings and that every few months I would disappear for a weekend, she was onboard.
Our Boy Scout troop was somewhat bipolar. Because it served a geographic area, its neighborhoods were half sleepy middle-class bedroom communities and half old-school Florida crackers. In my subdivision, Boy Scouts were seen as leading to a single goal: Eagle Scout. It was a box you checked. It was the American Dream writ small. If you studied hard, showed discipline, accumulated the right awards and leadership roles, you would eventually be rewarded with opportunities down the road. If nothing else, it looked great on a college application. Today, we would call that privilege.
Not so much on the other side of the boulevard. The rednecks in our troop were more interested in practical skills than academics. Our fathers were mostly white collar, theirs were blue-collar as well as hunters and boaters and fishermen. While we were interested in merit badges like Fingerprinting and Citizenship in the Community, they wanted to learn how to camp and cook and shoot, be it a bow or a gun. In general, it came down to us wanting to learn things and them wanting to do things.
All of which meant on our side, activities could get pretty academic and individual. While my friends were suburbanites, I found my interests aligned more with the rednecks. I quickly discovered their side had more fun.
Like the space program our city largely served, our troop went through boom and bust. Shortly after I joined, the troop expanded to six then eight patrols, our fundamental grouping similar to teams. We actively considered spitting the troop in two but ended up encouraging people to join the struggling troop just north of us to relieve the pressure. Which only cast it a short-term lifeline before it eventually folded and we inherited their remnants.
By then we’d fallen onto hard times of our own. In the time I had gone from a member to a patrol leader to troop librarian, our troop had begun struggling, too. Through new rounds of layoffs at the Cape and general disinterest, our numbers were more than cut in half. We barely had enough attendance to justify meetings. When annual elections for the youth leadership came up, our Senior Patrol leader could no longer dedicate the bandwidth. Like many other suburbanite boys, other activities and organizations, like band and baseball, placed greater demands on his time.
But for me, camping had become a sanctuary. I found more peace in nature than I ever could have at home. To avoid the chaos there, I often spent whole Saturdays or Sundays with a book and a BB gun in the woods. Full weekends away were much needed respites.
So, before a minimum quorum, I threw my hat in the ring and won easily. I encouraged a friend who was a year younger to run as my assistant. He picked that up with ease. I knew with him to help we could turn the troop around. At the time we had several existential issues facing us.
First, the church where we met had become a bit disenchanted with us. We usually met in one of their side rooms but our boisterous nature had begun to clash with their restrained Methodist sensibilities, especially with our proximity to their sanctuary. But we needed a sponsor, be it a church or a school or some other organization. I remembered when we’d gone camping, we’d often met outside a little plywood shack tucked in the back of the church lot. I asked who that belonged to. Well, it was on church property but our troop had built it sometime before any of the current members remembered. Nobody had been in there in years. No one had a key. But it’s ours, right? Checking with the church, we confirmed it was. If we met there, would the church still be willing to continue sponsoring us? Reluctantly, they agreed.
We met one Saturday to check it out. Someone brought bolt cutters for the padlock, which we cut then replaced. Inside, the space was larger than it appeared. It was divided into two areas, a larger room, equipped with folding chairs no one knew we had. Once we cleaned it up, we found it would easily meet our needs. We discovered a number of old merit badge booklets, enough to start a real troop library, along with miscellaneous camping supplies no one knew existed. We set most of that aside to distribute to the patrols as needed.
The second, smaller area was a small storage room, stuffed with tents and even surplus army cots. No one knew we owned any of that. Our leaders thought the canvas was likely all dry rotted so we left it for another day. But I didn’t forget about it.
Now that we had a place to meet, we faced a second existential problem: Adult leadership. In order to maintain our charter, we needed a minimum of three adult leaders to sign the paperwork. At the time I took over, that was a huge problem. The sons of two of our three adult leaders were no longer active in the troop. Naturally, they were no longer interested in donating their time. The third leader had hoped to step aside as well, although his youngest son had just come of age to join. We targeted him first. Reluctantly, he agreed to stay on if we could find two more leaders. Next we managed to convince my assistant’s father, a college history professor, to sign on, a role he never envisioned himself in but gamely tried on. Which still left us one short.
Problem was, this was the late 70s. Like most communities, the divorce rate in our city ran about 50%. Which meant a lot of our scouts didn’t have fathers around to volunteer. My own was in Spain or California by this point. Even if he’d been local, I doubt he would have volunteered. We targeted every father around could find. No luck. We even looked into trying to get a female leader. A one or two mothers were willing. National said absolutely no way. Women could lead a Cub Scout den not a Boy Scout troop. They’d rather let the troop fold than change, which given their more recent problems should surprise no one.
As the paperwork deadline loomed, we went the desperation route. We approached one of our former leaders with an arrangement. If he signed on to the paperwork, we would make sure he wouldn’t have to participate. We were confident given time we could find a replacement and swap him out. Reluctantly, he agreed. It was either that or watch the troop cease to exist. He had too much attachment from his son’s time with us, and his previous leadership, to let that happen. As it turned out, before the year was up, an old member of the troop who had been away in the military returned and stepped up.
Having cleared that hurdle, I turned to membership. Our troop had become a shell of its former self. As I mentioned, soon after I’d joined, we’d had to split patrols, the smallest level of our organization, just to keep things manageable for the boys leading them. But those eight patrols had dwindled to barely four, maybe three of which were functional with minimal membership. If we didn’t attract more members, adult leadership would no longer be a problem.
For that we needed something to draw them in. I had a pretty good idea of what that might be. Up to now, our leadership had been focused on creating Eagle Scouts as one of its primary goals. While that served half of our community, for the other half it just wasn’t a big concern. As I said, ours was somewhat of a redneck troop. They were more interested in doing than learning. Not that those two things were mutually exclusive. But the approach made all the difference.
So, I came up with a plan, something I could sell to both halves of our community. I sketched it in my mind then approached our leaders. I said I wanted one major activity each month in addition to our meetings. A camping trip, local or distant, a canoe trip, a hike, a camporee. Something, anything I could point to that was fun. While I had ideas, I needed help with the logistics, reservations, driving rotations, contacts, etc., which at the time were beyond my ken.
When I laid out my agenda to our leaders, they were skeptical and a bit daunted. I tried to ease their minds. There were two major camporees our troop attended every year. That left ten more events. Summer camp, either in FL or every few years in North Carolina, were annual activities, so I counted that as another. Nine more. For campouts, I reminded them of several locations I remembered we’d visited before, one in the far north of the county, one in the far south and several in between, plus the campground of our summer camp. Add in a few other full-day trips, and we were in business.
My enthusiasm must have been infectious. They started adding in their own ideas. One of our leaders had a boat, as did some other fathers. Previously, we’d camped out on islands in the Indian River, which were free. Someone threw in inner-tubing down any of Florida’s numerous spring-fed rivers. In the end, the leaders said the plan was ambitious, yet agreed to give it a try. Why not. Even as they signed off, I think they thought there were enough obstacles that it might never happen. But they were willing to feed me some rope to see what I did with it.
The moment I got their buy-in, I started a recruitment campaign. I began with former members who’d fallen away, boys who were still the right age and might be interested. I talked to a dozen or so former members, some older, some younger. asking why they’d fallen out of the troop. Almost universally, I got the answer that the meetings were boring and we didn’t do anything fun. So, I laid my plan before them and told them the leadership had agreed. As a sweetener, I added that after each meeting, we would reimplement some sort of game like the ones we used to play. Capture the flag was always a favorite. I got the sense many of them didn’t believe me. Why not show up for a while and see?
I didn’t stop there. I knew we couldn’t survive on returning former members alone. So, I knocked on a few doors of a few friends and acquaintances who I thought might be interested but had never joined. Guys who used to run around in the same woods I did. Guys in ROTC. I talked up our proposed activities along with the current and likely returning former members they might know. Again, I told them, give it a try. If you like it, sign on. If not, what do you lose but a little time?
Within a month, our meeting room was full with boys who wanted to see if I was for real. I was. We immediately started planning our first camping trip. That’s when one of our leaders pulled me aside. He counselled me on another aspect of our troop I hadn’t had to think about before. A number of our newly reconstituted patrols were filled with boys who came from neighborhoods where there wasn’t a lot of money. Unlike boys from my neighborhood, they didn’t have the fundamental supplies for camping, especially tents. And they couldn’t just tap their parents to buy them. Those were big purchases, mostly reserved for Christmas and then on layaway. Some of these kids didn’t have sleeping bags. Some used blankets, or quilts their mothers made. He advised I might need to modify my plans.
I didn’t. Remember when I said there was a store room in our meeting house? I said, ok, I understand. But before we scale back and lose the kids we just got, let’s check out what’s in there and see if it’s of any use. So, the first troop activity we scheduled was go through that store room. This leader tried his best to temper my expectations. As I mentioned, the tents we’d seen were canvas. He’d been in the Army. He knew dry rot was a real issue, especially in Florida, especially if any of them had been put away damp however long ago.
That Saturday we started pulling out tents, unrolling them and setting them up. Four-man frames, two-man pups, and one really interesting three-man version. They had some stains and smelled a little musty, but amazingly, all of them had poles and stakes. The first one we set up had dry rot in a corner at one stake loop where a pole rested. We set that one aside, forging on, now preparing for disappointment. In fact, while I directed others to keep going, I examined that one to see if there was anything to be salvaged. I spent the next half hour hand-stitching a repair with canvas thread and a needle-point needle I pressed into service, fashioning an adequate and durable if not elegant repair. As I did, report after report got called over my way. “This one’s good.” “This one, too.” “No problem here.” “Here, either.”
In the end, all but a couple tents we pulled out were either fine, or, like the one I nursed, needed just minor repair. A few didn’t have all the right poles or stakes but we cannibalized those from the others. By the end of the morning, we had enough tents to outfit two to three patrols as long as some didn’t mind sharing a four-man tent. All we had to do was divvy them up.
That led to a bit of conflict as every patrol thought they should get at least one of the big ones. I shook my head and explained. Those were going to the patrols that needed them, the ones without, not the ones that thought they would be cool but already had their own. We dedicated the pup tents to any patrol that ended up needing them on an ad hoc basis. A few kids didn’t like it, but everyone pretty much agreed it was fair.
But I did claim the three-man pup tent as a leadership tent for my assistant and me, which no one had a problem with, especially when I stressed the next set of leaders would get it, too. It became a kind of status symbol, exactly as I’d hoped.
So how did my first experiment in leadership work out? Well, that first year, we had events in ten out of twelve months, including a three-day canoe trip down almost the entirety of the St. John’s River, and a ten-mile hike into a local ranch. Not quite my goal but easily double the highest number of events we’d ever pulled off before. As well, we used each trip as an opportunity to earn merit badges and other awards that helped with our advancement.
At the end of that year, I said I would step aside as leader, which had always been my plan. I encouraged my assistant to take it for himself with my support. He was more than capable and ready. To assuage any fears, I said I would stay on as his assistant if he wanted, so he could rely on me if he needed to. Basically, switching positions so our overall leadership team remained intact. We were both re-elected without serious opposition. And the troop rolled on. The next year, we might have slipped to nine events. But we still had a lot of advancement in rank. Everyone was happy or at least content.
I score that as a win.
Five or so years later, I had an opportunity to put those skills to work again. At college, I’d become an off and on member of the campus Society for Science Fiction and Fantasy (FITSSFF). I’d encountered them at some point in my first couple years, and was attending meetings somewhat regularly by my sophomore year. Much like my old Boy Scout troop, I could see they were struggling. Membership hemorrhaged as the year progressed. There was a core group who were a somewhat boisterous lot that tended to put new members off. Mostly, again, as a club, we didn’t really do anything but meet and cut up. No real events, no real discussions or activities. Just kind of hanging out. Given we were all in college with science and engineering majors, most people had better places to dedicate their time.
By the end of spring semester, that apathy and ambivalence had begun to show. We’d started the year with maybe fifteen people showing up to meetings, including some seniors who would be graduating. We ended with five. Barely enough to qualify as a club. And even getting that many to the final meeting had been a struggle. What I didn’t know at the time was that the club president had already written a very creative club obituary to post in the campus newsletter if our final meeting came out as he expected.
To keep our status, we had to hold elections for club president and vice president for the next year so we could submit their names along with our current membership with our renewal forms. The problem was, of the five of us there, three refused to run, which our president knew in advance, hence the obit. Of the remaining two, which included me, this was the other guy’s first meeting. When the president opened up nominations for the next year, I looked around and said, if no one else wants it, I’ll take it. Our president looked surprised, stunned even. Done. Unanimous. The other guy took Veep. We’d survive another year. Or at least the summer.
This time around, I better knew what needed to be done. But unlike with Boy Scouts, I didn’t have adult leadership (I was the adult now), or a reliable second to help me (the guy we elected Veep didn’t return after the summer). But that didn’t matter. I did have our former president, now a senior, offering his help, which I gladly accepted.
That summer, because I was local, I crafted a plan. The first thing I wanted to do was start the year off with a bang. Every year, FITSSFF like most clubs, manned a table during freshman orientation to recruit new members. I knew it was a somewhat ineffective process. I’d skipped my freshmen orientation (much to several people’s consternation). Even if I hadn’t, I wasn’t the type of person to cruise tables looking for activities. I wanted deeds not words.
So, I talked to a few working engineers I knew who could put me in touch with a liaison at NASA (we were twenty miles from Cape Canaveral). I told them who I was and that I was hoping to get a speaker for my college. Ok, exactly what are you looking for? I was hoping for a subject along the lines of science fiction to science fact, which I sketched out. Let me look into it was the official reply. Eventually, they put me in touch with an engineer who said he’d be happy to speak. He just needed a projector, a microphone and a screen.
I scheduled the main auditorium, which seated around 300 plus (on a campus of 7000), not knowing how many people would show up. Me and the former president drew up flyers that the school activities department printed. Who knew as a club we had a standing budget with them for that? Not us until we talked to them. We crafted and hung a banner across the main thoroughfare from the dorms to the classrooms advertising it.
I didn’t have much hope for turnout. So I was more than astounded when I met our speaker backstage to agree on his introduction. The auditorium was well over half full. A hundred and fifty people, only a dozen of whom were former club members. Wow. That exceeded my expectations. Sadly, the speaker did not. It became apparent after he went through his first few slides that there had been a grave miscommunication somewhere. He was talking about the art on the covers of his classic pulp science fiction magazine collection. Not at all what we’d advertised. Which showed as the audience began to slowly hemorrhage as the evening wore on. By the time he’d finished, one fifty had dwindled down to fifty.
As he closed his talk, I stepped back to the microphone and asked people to hang out for a couple minutes. I put on a good face to hide my disappointment (and annoyance), thanking our speaker and seeing him off. Instead of returning to the microphone, I sat on the edge of the stage and addressed people directly. I am not a great public speaker, but I can do it. Somewhere in introducing myself, I stumbled over something I said, which drew a laugh, but one that I got the sense put people at ease. Laughing with me not at me. I told them who we were, gave a brief pitch off the cuff and said if they were interested to come check us out at our first meeting, giving them a time and place.
Again, after what I thought was a debacle of an event, I didn’t have much hope for turnout for that first meeting of the year. Once again, I was surprised when I arrived just a little early and it was standing room only. Our regular crew had ensconced themselves in the back row and began chanting my nickname as I walked in. Generalissimo! Generalissimo! Generalissimo! Our first meeting was when campus activities insisted that we take club photos, so I’d dressed the part in a fatigue jacket and a foreign legion cap with a revolutionary beard. I know I made an impression on at least one redhead in the room. But not enough of one to be first or even second in line. Dammit.
After a group picture, somehow, I got the meeting under control. First order of business was the remainder of our deferred elections, the results of which we had to submit with our membership list along with the club picture. By then we knew we needed a VP as well as a treasurer and secretary. A rather chaotic election ensued. Our new VP wanted to be called Il Duce. Our treasurer got elected unanimously when he came in late wearing a suit because he’d just gotten off work. He turned out to be more reliable, with more of a can-do attitude than our Veep, which worked out. I honestly don’t remember our secretary.
Even with all the weirdness and miscues, by the end of the night fifty people had signed the attendance list. Better than any of us had a right to expect. But I didn’t rely on sheer numbers to hold the club together. We needed to keep people coming back.
My first goal was to organize a mini-gaming convention once each quarter, roleplaying and wargames. When I glanced through the club’s scant archives, I found we had hosted similar ten years before. I knew we had a lot of gamers on campus and in the club so it seemed a perfect fit. Each time I never ran a game, and only managed to sit in on one due to learning crisis management, schedule adaptation and game promo on the fly. Despite none of us ever having done anything like it before, we pulled off all three, mostly based on my experience attending a couple Gen Con Souths in Jacksonville and organizing some small, informal events for my high school gaming group. All three were wildly successful judging by attendance and enthusiasm, as well as the decent attendance of our meetings. That served as a foundation.
We also invited members to give reviews for whatever science fiction/fantasy books they were reading after meetings. We informally discussed books and movies, and gave each other recommendations. We ended up consulting with the club’s adviser, who taught a course on science fiction, on restructuring her reading list, which necessitated a research trip to the local public library for ideas after we’d worked through very limited options in the college library. We got together informally and watched science fiction/fantasy movies that we (usually I and other officers) rented. We organized trips to the theater when new science fiction/fantasy films came around. When one of my dormmates had a meltdown and handed me all his gaming books, wargames and science fiction books because his Christian faith suddenly told him they were an evil influence on him, I accepted them and started a club library, asking for other donations, and donating every science fiction/fantasy book I read. And of course, we continued our annual ritual of showing the short film the club owned a copy of outright although no one knew how. Hand of Death. 1960s science fiction at its very best (or arguably worst).
In short, we did things. Things other students apparently wanted to do. We even managed to attract consistent female membership, no small trick in a genre that isn’t always welcoming or accessible to women on a campus with a 7:1 male to female ratio.
All of which meant that by the end of that spring quarter when we had to hold elections for the following year, we had twenty-five members show up, a week before finals. Quite an improvement from a year earlier. Once again, I stepped aside and convinced a friend to take over. He kept things moving forward for my senior year. After I graduated, I learned the club library I’d started had grown to a point where two presidents after him got it allocated its own storeroom on campus. From humble beginnings.
When I looked up both organizations twenty plus years later, both had not only survived but thrived. I am sure in the intervening years each faced other crises forcing someone new to step up. I fundamentally believe that without good leadership in that critical moment, whether mine or someone else’s, either organization easily could have failed. I know in my heart that my stepping up gave them that opportunity to flourish. Because I valued them.
Like I currently value science, evidence, facts and truth.
Now, in the previous paragraphs, you read a lot of “I”. The truth is in both cases this was all a major group effort. In the first, without our adult leaders, who handled most of the logistics, without an eager, more than competent assistant, without the other patrol leaders, older mentors and rank-and-file boys willing to put in the effort, it never would have worked. FITSSFF was much the same. A lot of people chipped in with their time and effort. Without the other people in the club and one other solid officer, things wouldn’t have gotten done.
I don’t claim full credit for either outcome, just for having the imagination, motivation and problem-solving tenacity to convince others we could get it done. Together. And get it done we did. Sometimes people just need to be shown the way. In fact, there are a number of things I don’t remember exactly how they got done, likely because I didn’t do them. At times, things happen around me. People take up tasks that need doing, contribute contacts, attend to details I’ve missed, put out fires I never see.
All of which helped me when I reluctantly took on a leadership role in my engineering career. But once I did, I quickly rose from a team lead to being slated to lead multiple teams with over two dozen members and oversee a multi-million-dollar budget. And still helps me today, when I organize something as simple as a Kitten*Con.
Which is a long way of saying, I know a little bit about leadership and rebuilding.
When you lead an organization or a team, you first seek to preserve and protect it. You look out for all its members, not just the ones you like or the ones who agree with you. Not just your family, friends or base.
And yet, right now, we as a nation are entering a struggle for the kind of leadership we wish to see. I don’t mean that in the normal sense of a quadrennial election.
Although perhaps our current struggle isn’t really over leadership per se. On one side, we have someone who, while not likely to be a great leader, still wants to protect and serve the overarching organization he seeks to lead. On the other side, we have someone who, while charismatic, is a disrupter and destroyer. His record on those points is clear, at least to anyone without motes and scales obscuring their vision, purposefully or otherwise.
Most of my point here seems obvious, at least to me. So obvious that it’s difficult to put into words without belaboring it or sounding pedantic. By the nature of our current Orwellian environment where black is white and up down, anything I say is likely to be twisted and turned as a weapon against the idea itself by apologists and propagandists. I use those words advisedly.
Imagine for a moment that I had adopted that second style with either of the organizations I’d led. Now imagine I’d made it plain that I didn’t value either of those organizations at all. Imagine if instead of putting up ideas for how they could change and improve to benefit more people, all I had done was rely on pandering to a vocal few. Or imagine I’d treated the people around me the same way I’d experience in “Switching Sides”. Imagine working in that environment, with leadership who embraced it. Would either organization have survived?
That question might seem rhetorical or hyperbolic. And yet, I can point to interviews from decades ago outlining that this is where someone wanted us to be, with a group or party actively exploiting low voter turnout, or suppressing it, to gain a series of positions to build resumes so they could get elected to the highest offices with the expressed purpose of dismantling huge portions of the organizations they purported to lead, from local school boards to state legislatures to the federal Executive branch.
It was a brilliant and effective, if deeply cynical and anti-democratic, strategy. But that roadmap led to exactly where we are.
Back when I was a systems engineer, we tested the secure communication system our project had designed. We found that the most potent threat to its operation didn’t come from an external jammer, it was another unit in the network acting erratically. Which made sense. That errant terminal used all the same frequencies and all the same timing for its signals, it shared all the same resources and algorithms. That inside knowledge allowed it to disrupt an established, functioning communications network superbly, if in our case inadvertently, by spewing nonsense data that interfered with the otherwise orderly distribution of information.
The easiest way to destroy and dismantle an organization is from the inside. Which is to a large extent what we are seeing. People in power purposefully using every resource and lever within government agencies to suppress and distort the dissemination of vital information to the public, as they slowly, perhaps irrevocably, undermine and damage valued institutions central to our nation’s democratic principles, things like national security, the nonpolitical independence of scientific research, civil rights, justice, and the rule of law.
This is not leadership. And leadership, even merely competent leadership, is what we need to rebuild the public trust in those valued institutions and change the course we are on. And if we choose not to, may the gods of history have mercy on our souls.
© 2020 Edward P. Morgan III
