Concept 11 and Service Structure – Concepts Workshop – Part 1 of 3 – Tim M.

recording and Tim the floor is yours please come in and share on concept 11 thank you very much very good thank you, very much Robert and Robert very kindly allowed me to have my suggestion implemented of not reading the whole of Bill's essay on concept11 which would take 50 minutes or so uh so i selected a few short paragraphs about five minutes or so of me i think that's enough any more than your my brain would explain i read the whole of the essay earlier today and my yes it was um taxing shall we say um uh step 11 is concept 11 rather very complex as well and what i want to do rather than going through everything uh i'll give you an overview as i go through and then zone in on particular things but also i want to cover a list of examples of how aspects of concept 11 can actually be applied in one's life so just a general principle if people are not haven't been to other ones of these um the program consists in the steps the traditions and the concepts and particularly with very complex uh questions of how work gets done uh the concepts are where the answer lies the steps won't tell you how to do that the concepts will so there's an awful lot in there that's of value also to put concept 11 in its context and i'm sorry this is going to be a repetition for people who've been at the other talks but um there we have it there might be people that weren't there and it doesn't hurt to repeat these things. So AA, the people who have the ultimate authority are the members but we as members can't run the telephone lines and organise events at the Houses of Parliament and run the website. That must be delegated someone else has to do that so we're ultimately in charge of it but there's a chain of delegation where the chain of delegations turns into actual work uh so the big decisions are made by conference they then delegate the authority to the board of trustees to do the actual work but the trustees they do a few things themselves but almost everything they do is delegated to five categories of people um these are i'll cover these in more detail but committees corporate service directors executives staffs and consultants and lots of the essay is about the nitty-gritty in particular of the committees and corporations but that's describing aa in America as it was in the 1950s and early 60s. So, it's not necessarily super relevant. Our structure and GB is actually simplified compared to that and is different in some ways. So I'm going to skip over lots of the detail of exactly how it was operating in the 1960s and look at principles. So the trustees are assisted by these five committees, directors, executives, staffs and consultants. And what the concept is about is why these people are there and why these bodies are there, but some of them are bodies as well, what they're up to, how they relate to each other, and general principles which can be extrapolated from there about how we, for instance, choose officers in our group or how we elect people at intergroup. And the seven things it says are terribly important are composition. So if you have a board, who's going to be on the board? If you have a committee, who is going to go on the committee? Personal qualifications. There's a view sometimes in AA that everyone should be given a chance to do every single job and it's nice and democratic sounding but you really I've seen this happen at intergroup where someone puts themselves forward to be the secretary but they are someone who has some personal objection to computers and also doesn't own a typewriter and is very upset at the suggestion that there they might not be the best person for the job or someone who doesn't have any money maybe should not be given the treasurer role just now. Maybe let them count things at the meeting but watch them while they do it. Not everyone is suited for every job and lots of these jobs, the further down the service structure you go, down being up in the sense of more and more responsibility, the more important it is to have people who are very good at the job in question either naturally because of their skills or because of their experience in the outside world which is why the experience in the outside well actually does have a bearing it really doesn't hurt on London Region North to have three or four people who are lawyers or accountants because there are people who will spot problems that other people will miss it really helps to have people on London region north who have experience with advertising and marketing so that when we're doing public information campaigns there are people that know what the hell they're talking about when it comes to different forms of marketing and know how to negotiate a really good deal with an outside organization. And this runs all the way through. It's not very democratic I'm afraid but there we have it. Democracy is a general principle and is not to be applied as a sort of blanket throughout a fellowship um one aspect of democracy is to find it's not to give everyone every role it's to find the right role for each person uh induction making sure that people are given the right information and the right tools to do the job that they're doing now i have to say on the question of induction you can uh induct people until you and they blue in the face almost no one takes any notice of how they're inducted with um i used to do armed services liaison i was the i was on the national subcommittee and we had an extra frankly a very very good pack of information which told incoming intergroup and region um uh armed services liaison officers everything they needed to know including a blow-by-blow account if you are a new intergroup officer these are 30 things you can do in the first year do them in this order and it'll just be great just do the things on here here are the numbers and then people would turn up at meetings say well i don't know what to do no one's helped me so i haven't done anything but it's an extraordinary thing to observe there's probably a psychological reason why that happens but you you have a go anyway at inducting people i've seen that in so many different contexts for instance when people take over public information at intergroup it's the same thing when people take over pubic information at groups often they're handed excellent packs handover packs but they're completely ignored and they spend the next year reinventing the wheel and saying no one helped him i don't understand why this happened but why this happens but it does happen But you do your best. And I think it's up to the group to help the individual recognize that the assistance is there if they want it, the material is there if they wanted rotation in service normally means you duck out of the role after two or three years. In the service structure, it means something slightly different it means try your hand at different jobs so that if people drop out you can hop in and you have experience to cover their posts. So as soon as you get to intergroup and region level and as soon As you get various board subcommittees, and certainly the offices in the offices, the idea I think they actually still do this in New York, they get pretty much everyone to try lots of the different jobs in the office so that if someone goes off sick or people leave, the operation remains seamless because it takes a very, very long time to train people in how the AA offices and services operate. They're extremely complex. And there's a real risk if you've got all of the knowledge invested in one person. So they practice rotation. There's interrelation between the various committees and people, which I'll talk about later. Rights and duties, that's what you're allowed to do and what you have to do, and compensation for special workers, which I'll come to later on. Let me say, I'm going to skip over some of my notes because I think they're dull even to me. One of the difficulties when you're choosing people for roles what it talks about is the risk of the person being very visible both externally and internally I've seen intergroup chairs being chosen very poorly and the GSRs just stopped coming to the intergroup meeting because of the way it's being run and it can take five years to build that back there was a problem at London Region North many years ago of I better not say which discipline one of the disciplines had an officer who had lots of uh I think today they weren't really called that then but uh today they'd be conspiracy theories um and he was dealing with outside agencies and he were weaving his conspiracy theories into all of his communications with these outside agencies And we had to get rid of him. It was a sort of ugly situation, but the public reputation of AA was at stake and the person was doing a terrible job as well. There were no results coming through. So the further down the structure you go, the more visible the person is externally and internally, which means you've got to be really careful, really, really careful who you pick. The two types of organisation that the board have available are corporations and committees. Now, corporations, that's your legal entity. So that's the entity that has to comply with, in this country, charity law, plus also company law, employment law, safeguarding law, lots of things that the Board does people get very exercised about because they have to do things which would not fly in the fellowship but are necessary under the law of the land if that's not understood they can be the most terrible arguments between the fellowship and the board i'm a little bit defensive of the board on this i'm not normally a great defender of the of the power structures but i think on on this one i really understand um i really stand the point and there was an i think one of the examples was to do with, I'll give you this specific example, paying taxes, employer taxes on the employees of the corporation, the company, Alcoholics Anonymous Great Britain. You have a relationship with an external organization which is financial you're not a separate body or part of a legal system and those payments go in one direction they can also come back in the other direction in terms of rebates and rebates were effectively available during covid to help aa cover the salaries this is not accepting outside contributions which gives the government leverage over aa it's totally different than a benefactor or another organization putting money directly into the contributions pot. It's part of the relationship between AA as an employer and the social security authorities in the country. It is a legal relationship and there is therefore a level playing field between us and other organisations in the same way that there is a level of playing field when it comes to rent, there is level of play when it comes to utilities. Then there are the committees, and the committees are an internal. So the board in this country has got a number of committees. Some are made up chiefly of board members and others are made out chiefly punters like us who want to do service and have got experience. And I tell you, the interview process is not pleasant for those board committees. A lot of people get rejected, they're very conservative about who they choose. They're very careful about who they choose, and they only choose people if they're really sure that they're going to do a good job. Occasionally mistakes are made, but generally the job is done very well. The job of choosing them is done very well So public information, for instance, the Public Information Committee is made up chiefly of public information officers, former public information officers from around the country. And then it's presided over by one of the board members. So those are the two types of organisation you have that help the board out, who actually do the bulk of the work. Now, in the essay, it's got, I think, five or six types of committee. And I think there are a few interesting things. Those committees they have in the essays are the American committees from decades ago, we have a slightly different set of committees in AA in Great Britain. The nominations committee is all about processing the people who are applying either for jobs or for positions on the various subcommittees and as I say there's a formal application process First, you have to send your AA service CV and then you have two interviews with board members. So you're not let in just on the knob. I'm sure you've noticed that groups often just anyone will put their hand up for something. And we immediately burst into riotous applause and a thrill that some of the volunteers, no one knows their name, but we're thrilled. This is not how the board operate. They're very, very careful. And in order to forfend the risk of letting someone in because they're the least worst person there and there's only one candidate, when it comes to a position on the board, a region, let's say a board trustee retires or rotates out, or as in the case of London Region North, runs for their life most often. and there's a vacancy I take this happened so many times London region north and the relationship between London region North and the rest of AA is a very interesting one um but anyway when we have a vacency we for anyone to be considered we have to send two candidates if we have only one they're not interested and I think this is very good practice because what it gets rid of is the danger that someone who is potentially dangerous to the group gets voted in, because the group feels that it has to have someone in that role now. And someone about whom there are gross misgivings will get voted in. I've seen that happen a lot. So with important things like treasurer, the important roles in the group, treasuer, secretary, chair gsr and um the relationship with the venue which is probably the most important one of all if you mess that up you'll lose the venue and you'll often lose the group those five roles i would suggest my proposition to copy what the board does unless there are two candidates we're not going to have an election because otherwise there's no guarantee that you're going to get the best person or someone who's even able to do the job uh there's also a risk that it talks about and i might come back to this later but um uh the board can feel threatened by people who are talented because they'll show them up and there is a great danger of letting people onto the board or subcommittees or indeed employing them because they're going to be easy people to boss around rather than people that might challenge the status quo and i think that's an inherent problem there's very little that can be done about that directly um with the finance committee uh it's very interesting um they talk about having to have realists in finance and pessimists in order that AA covers its backs. And during COVID, this policy paid off. So although there were some financial difficulties, the fellowship as a whole was fine. There was never any real risk to the ongoing services because the finances have run very well in accordance with the concept 11 ideas. But the activities of the financing committee, if you want AA to run well, you do what's on that list. If you want your life to run Well, you could do a lot worse than to do exactly what the finance committee does. So what you might want to do is ask yourselves whether you do the following activities. Number one, do you do regular budgeting? Number two, as the costs come through during the course of the year? Do you compare those to the budget and revise the budget and make forecasts for the rest of the years? Do control costs, do monitor what you're spending money on and see if on a regular basis, if you can get better value for money, and indeed whether or not you're getting any value out of the money that you're spending at all. Managing a reserve fund which is two years of operating expenses. so whatever you spend over two years double it that's the reserve fund um making sure that money is wisely invested but that you have sufficient funds at call so you can liquidate those it says two-thirds of those investments uh if you have a real catastrophe and you need the money very very few people operate like that and a lot of people have money worries in my experience is that it It takes a long time to get the reserve fund in place. It took me years, but it's all very well trust in God. God will do for me what I can't do for myself, but God won't do für mich was ich kann für mich selbst. There's nothing like skimping and saving for years to produce a reserve fund, to produce an amount of money and a lot more confidence that God is going to help you out in times of financial trouble than as I did in my first year, got through financially by the skin of my teeth if i'd had a disaster and not been able to earn for more than a month or so i would have been absolutely effed so i do what it says the finance committee does um very interesting also it talks about hoarding it says if the board uh and the corporations hoard money it impairs the performance of the aa central services people lose trust in the central services and they stop contributing and i was this afternoon i knew there was something in there spiritually asking what is it what is it and it's just occurred to me exactly what it is. And it's about hoarding my time, it's about keeping time back for myself because I don't want to overstretch myself with sponsors and service and going to meetings, I wouldn't want to do that, I've got to look after myself first. and what of course happens when i hold back when i've got plenty of emotional and physical resources to plow into giving my whole kind of spiritual status drops and what comes back to me from the world is reduced and then i think well i feel so weak weakened now i need to pull back even more, to look after myself even more. AA tells me to do the opposite. It tells me to expand into the world and then the world will give back to me. And that's what it talks about with the finance committee, to make sure that the fund, although you have the reserve, the funds are well used to produce very good services. If you produce very good services more people contribute and then it you create a virtuous circle um it talks although it's in tradition 11 it's In Concepts 11 as well so I'm going to cover it because it's very important at the public information committee it talks about attraction not promotion of course but it goes into detail about exactly what that involves and it says avoiding sensational techniques. So it doesn't mean you can't advertise, it means that the advertising techniques you use are not sensational and that you employ professional skills in doing so. You don't want to look like a shower of muckets, you want to looks like a professional outfit. Just because this 12 step work is non-professional doesn't mean the public information activities have to look amateurish um there's also i don't i'm not sure if the general service board in great britain uh have this and it's i i haven't seen this as my job because i'm Not an expert on the board you need to get a former board member to be if you want expert stuff about like up-to-date expert stuff I sponsored one of the board members but I only saw a little bit of what was going on through the board, through that on the board. But what they used to have, certainly in America, is a general policy committee and the general policy committee fields all of the incoming staff. So you can't direct something directly to the board any incoming staff goes through this kind of holding centre, sort of Ellis Island of requests and letters and correspondence for the General Policy Committee. And they are trusted to dispose of small matters as they see fit, to take the large matters, to make recommendations, to publish a minority report and then present that pack to the board. So the board, the big guns deal only with really major stuff. The little stuff is just dealt with. And I think my experience of myself and other addicts and alcoholics and generally effed up disordered people is everything is an emergency. Everything's a crisis. Everything is important. the house is on fire crisis kitty needs feeding crisis and then getting it wrong and feeding kitty in the burning house when you want to pick up the kitty and take the kitty out of the burning house the inability to prioritize between important things and minor things and this I think it was a stroke of genius the establishment of the general policy committee This means I need to develop the emotional maturity and expertise and basic living skills to deal with 98% of stuff myself and not bother all the people around me with all the minutiae of my life. And I do that by, yeah, you ask God, blah, blah. But try it. See what works. See what doesn't. And grow up. And then what I take to other people and to the higher power in prayer and meditation is the really important stuff. If I take everything to others, I never grow up myself and it reduces the significance of the major things. The major things get lost in the sea of tiny little tribulations and vicissitudes and problems and snags. um let's see what else we've got um excuse me for a moment so i look at the notes yes so talks about executives so this is the these are the in-charge people and i've experienced this from an absolutely excellent London Region North chair. I've known a couple of really excellent ones over the years, and also the various board members, because I've been on several subcommittees, the various boards in charge of those subcommittees, two in particular, both on the armed services were absolutely brilliant and what it talks about in the concept totally runs against the grain of what people are used to in AA um uh what people often like in a in a group sector is a sort of simpering milk sock that always defers to the group and wouldn't say boo to a goose people react very badly at times to uh a chair that actually chairs that actually runs the group in a kind of serious responsible way but frankly that is what i've seen work best and that's what these london region north chairs did this is what the the um uh board member did the buck stops with the board member he is the one or she is the one who is responsible to the rest of the board for what goes on on the subcommittee The subcommittee can't mutiny. The worst, the most they can do is resign because if they mutiny and basically if they try and override the chair of the subcommittee and basically force a decision which he can't defend or she can't defend the board member has to go back and try to defend an indefensible policy or decision for the rest of the board so the people forcing the decision they don't have to do the justification you've got to have the ability to take responsibility and have authority at the same time the danger is if people try to override the board number is uh the board member still has the accountability, but they no longer have the authority. And it's the same in chairing regions or chairing group consciences of regions. I've done a few of those over the years. You have to put your foot down. So when people start talking to each other across the room, you know, those group consciencies where a couple of noisy authorities decide that they're the resident experts on something, the rest of the group doesn't matter. They're going to resolve the question between the two of them and the chair is cut out of it, it just becomes a ding-dong between two people in the room and there are 40 other people in the room. You've got to put your foot down. And the people that you are asking to come into line and respect the group conscience of how this was supposed to run will hate you. They will hate me. They will hate you. And they will scowl. They will mutter. They'll start sending each other little text messages And you see one of them send a text message at someone else's eye, point at their phone, and the other one then looks at his phone and snorts and scoffs. And I've seen that happen when chairs intervene very, very badly. But they're doing the right thing because they're keeping the meeting going. they're keeping the that they're ensuring that the meeting is being run in accordance with the group conscience and that all the voices are being given a chance to be heard so you have to be willing to be super unpopular at times and it's exactly the same in a group where i was there was a chair of a group many years ago where in the for some reason sunday evening meetings tend to attract a lot of people who've spent the weekend driving themselves stir crazy and they finally relent and go to a meeting. They probably should have gone to a meet first thing Saturday morning but they held out as long as they could and they pour into the Sunday evening meetings so there was a really high quotient of very very crazy people at this Sunday evening meeting and it was big there were like 90 people 100 people and there was someone talking about oh i can't even say because it's so just awful there was there was one person that would say awful things about other people in the room and there Was someone else who was probably mentally ill in some way poor chap but he was saying things which were very disturbing like sent shivers down your spine really frightening and the chair had to shut him up and say mate can you stick to your own experience strength and hope or can you please just talk about yourself and the risk of violence to the chair from those people was real but they the chair put their foot down and afterwards people queued up to thank the chair for doing it so you do have to be tough in lots of these roles and they're not fun they really take especially the board roles they really really take their toll and this is why people only do it for three or four years because you have to be you have to stand up for the principles and the common good against all sorts of other forces and this these principles can be implied in other situations as well um another point people don't like this but aa needs permanent employees the now these are not doing 12-step work but you can't have the office people by volunteers who if you want the job done properly and it's a full-time job you have to pay them if you wanted to do a good job you had to pay him properly and it is the same with external consultants. To skimp on the lawyers is a false economy, to skimp on the accountants as a false economy. People don't like that, but I'm afraid those are the facts of the world. So what is true at group level? The sort of utter non-professionalism and keeping money out of things as far as possible, getting the money out of the pocket as fast as possible into the structure. Once you're looking at AA services on behalf of AA as a whole, different sets of principles apply. And if that isn't understood, people get very suspicious of what's going on in the board and at gso which is why it's so important i think it's so important that we're doing this to to get people to start thinking about concept 11 and the principles of how an office is run as opposed to the principles uh about how your local live and let live group is operating different outfits doing different things both with the AA name but with different purposes. What else have we got? One point it makes in concept 11 which is linked to concept 4, which is about right of participation is allowing people to participate is not just about giving people a vote but really giving people the sense that they're part of the team so at my home group there's a tradition which goes back to its founding of basically if someone wants service giving them a chance to do the service and it does give rise to problems with excessively complex business meetings because there are just so many more people there there are ways around you could split and have different business meetings and group conference meetings with different people attending each so there is a solution to that which might be thought about at some point but the point is we give people we give everyone that wants to be part of the group a real chance to be past the group by having their say in the group conscience meetings and also the business meetings and doing the work so you've got the work going which is the responsibility going together with the authority which is concept 10 um i've got some also uh uh nine one two three four five six seven there's nine life lessons from concept 11 one of them i've already talked about which is finances but there are eight more which i find super useful it talks about being very careful uh in aa who you appoint to a role whether it's consultants or staff or committee members many years ago I was in a relationship not with my current person but the previous person and I was complaining and someone said you're obviously very careless who you get into relationships with if these types of things really matter to you you should take more care before deciding to live with someone and i did not like this but they were absolutely right uh i would go i would go into jobs without doing due diligence i would make career decisions without properly considering what the career would involve and whether i was suited to it um all sorts of rash decision making because i don't like uncertainty i'd rather make a bad decision now knowing it's a bad decision, then hold out and have to be patient, have to trust God, and have to do the hard work of figuring out what the right thing to do is. Next point. When it talks in the concept about you want to hire good people, even if they're better than you and threaten your position. And I think the principle there is you want friends and sponsors and advisors who are not just yes people but who are going to challenge you. If you want to survive long term in AA, you've got to tell the truth to people who will challenge you if you're full of shit. It talks in the concept about a refusal to accept casual nominations, in this case, in relation to appointments. and so i'm what it talks about is being very careful about taking things on hearsay listening to gossip and believing it is an extension of this i've been too quick to it says in the concept make hasty or snap judgments instead hear people out find out for myself check things out for myself don't just take what people say about themselves and especially not what they say about other people on spec when you're sponsoring people people often tell you a very sorry tale and if you like them and they are charming and intelligent it can be very easy to turn off your critical faculties take the story at face value give input and then three years later you discover with horror you were told about one percent of the whole situation and you were taken for a ride so i've developed a very great degree of skepticism when i'm told any story i want to hear the whole story and i reserve judgment for a hell of a lot longer than i used to um in the concept there is the idea of When you hire people for an AA job, although you treat them with courtesy and respect and there is a recognition that you know them from the meetings as well. You're a professional, they're a profession and you treat them as such. You do not let the fact that you are their friend stop you from managing them as an employee or the fact that your boss is also your friend outside from doing proper work for them as you would for a third party boss. So it's very difficult doing AA service. Even in a non-professional AA service context, you are doing a job. Now you're paid spiritually by God, but the job takes precedence over the friendship. So you've got to be ready to challenge, but also perform in exactly the same way that you would at work. Just because you're volunteered and not paid does not mean you're let off the hook and you can do a shitty job and get away with it and not expect to be pulled up on it. and no mixing of business and pleasure so uh my uh little business such as it is occasionally people want to uh hire my services and i've done it once it was someone who is incredibly bounded and i trusted that they could be bounded but other people i haven't trusted it so i've just pointed them to agencies you'll have to get them ask them to do i'm not going to touch mixing the two business and business and and aa um another idea a couple more than i'm done i promise um pay people what they're worth um i've gone through my life trying to do things on the cheap and then complaining about the quality or paying for quality and feeling very hard done by you see you can't win with me can you um what else um yeah just i've covered these but i'll mention them again the ability to distinguish between the major and the minor between the important and the unimportant is the al-anon slogan uh how important is it which i think should just be written on walls everywhere right the london graffiti at the moment chiefly consists in uh uh there's there's one which is everywhere which is quinoa i don't know why people write quinoа on the wall maybe we should start a trend of people writing how important ist and there's something about a terrible thing someone did in yoga and that is everywhere as well but no so take an alum do some public service take an al-anon slogan put a balaclava on get a spray can and spray the al-anan slogan wherever you can and don't tell anyone it was me that told you to do it um and finding the right person for the job it's very difficult to do in aa in aa meetings you can only choose between the people who are there and that's a very limited gene pool uh but the best way to do it is to make sure that when there's an important post available that you've got like three four five people going for it because then you really will you're maximizing the chance that we'll get someone capable good robert that's all i've got but you said there might be a couple of thank you very much for that Tim great work yeah good lord I was looking at half loads of stuff in my life and thinking god I haven't done that so well done that's good and does anyone have any questions for Tim about Concept 11 there was a lot there there'll be some people I've got loads but I don't want to hog them please put your hand up or please jump in i think if you just go ahead robert okay i'll ask a few i'll get the ball rolling okay so i think one thing in concept 11 that really gets me and is actually was actually revelation to me was the idea of the fair complete or in other words like not letting people know about stuff before they before that i do that impacts them and not giving them the chance to um to veto it if they don't want me to do it before i do something not begging for forgiveness afterwards which is a revelation to me if I'm honest so have you got an experience of that in your life or in AA life where you know you've had to ask for someone's opinion on something they said don't do that and you've Had to do something different than you wanted to do you know can you think of examples like that or so I think what what you're touching on what you'RE touching on there you might want to mute yourself uh what YOU'RE touching ON there is the participation question so inviting people to participate in decisions um uh that if it and it's so it's it's a little bit of concept 11 in terms of how good leaders operate is by a consultation that's covered in concept three it's also covered in in concept nine and tradition four so the idea that if something affects someone else you involve them in the decision making but there's um although one is obliged morally and pragmatically to hear out a lot of views sometimes you simply someone has to make the final decision and the final position is not always in accordance with majority uh sometimes the board has to do things that i said earlier for legal reasons uh which the fellowship doesn't particularly like but their their hands are tied by the law but also it's to do with concept 10 authority responsibility going together so sometimes uh i've seen examples in my own life where um for instance the uh flat i live in is in my name and so i'm i'm the one that's legally responsible so on any legal matters the two of us will discuss it together and i will i will set a very very great store by what jonathan says but from a legal point of view i'm the one that has to make the final decision because i have to live the financial consequences of that decision because the house is in my name um so there is a tension there so the i think this is actually as much concept 9 as 11 it talks about the statesman who listens to everyone but then makes what they believe to be the right decision. And they can be deposed if they're persistently wrong, as opposed to the politico who is always trying to get people what they want and is simply a, as it were, an instrument of the masses where the decisions then flow in accordance with public feeling rather than genuine analysis of the situation. Great. Anyone else? I've got a few more. Have you got any experience of, and obviously we try to keep it anonymous here because we don't want names to offend anyone, but like of a committee or a board or a group making an intergroup or an area or region making an ill-informed decision on hiring somebody. uh and then kind of like the process of dealing with grievances and also and also maybe even removing someone because that's a that seems a great heinous sin in some parts of recovery taking someone out of their commitment um i remember a treasurer getting voted out because they hadn't paid the hadn't made the rent and had turned up for four months you know so it was like you know but that was seen as controversial by some people because it was going against tradition free you know so can we can you think of examples where people have had to be taken out or replaced or is it better for the commitment to just be not fulfilled just remain empty than have the wrong person in it you know i'm not sure about the i'm trying to think of any examples of sackings i in a country somewhere i do know of a specific example uh where someone who was doing a dangerous and bad job in all sorts of ways they've been in the job for many years it was the general secretary so the person in charge of the the office and the corporation that essentially the the most senior executive of the corporation who ran the office had been in place for 20 years and they are very unpopular and would always pull rank by saying well of course you weren't around when x y and z happened because everyone else was rotating so the delegates no one had as much experience as she did And so she was running the whole thing. And you see, the answer to that was to actually get the structure properly filled with enough delegates that the delegates representing the various regions of AA were able to exercise such pressure that the person resigned. They didn't need to be forced out because they could see the writing on the wall. So that's one way in which it can happen. Absolutely. Now, this is a very interesting thing about service. This is often not understood. In a meeting I go to, whenever someone is asked to do something, let's say that they're asked to read the these or they're asked to read the bows at the beginning of the meeting and they say every single time thank you for letting me serve as if the service is for the individual benefit and it's not it's for the group's benefit if the individual benefits that's wonderful a good example is is readers in meetings the purpose of reading in a meeting is for The Reading to be brought to life and to be understood by anyone who doesn't have the text in front of them so i wouldn't if i was an aa meeting in a country where i didn't speak the language well enough to bring a text to live to life which i've never seen before simply by reading it out if i were if i would stumble i would not i would not dare reason get someone who's better than me and just pass instead the services for the group it's not for the individual and so i don't think a group should have any compunction about ousting someone from service if they particularly they don't show up what you can do you see you have to be try and do it as nicely as possible um and uh one way in is if someone hasn't been showing up consistently is to say um how are you getting on with the commitment we've noticed you weren't there a couple of times do you need some help because quite often they're not showing up because of nerves or they're frightened or they'RE avoiding something and with a bit of help they can be they can be brought into position where they can do the service properly uh but it's it's one another example i've got so many examples there's another example where someone was um voted in as the t person and they didn't turn up the next week i think for two weeks and then the group decided they were going to vote someone else this was in another fellowship and uh when uh the group ousted this person but basically said well let's let's get someone who can show up to do the tea uh the individual felt very aggrieved by this and tried to bring a grievance process um to the group and when the group weren't having it they went to the intergroup thinking that the intergroup was an appeal body that you could go to just to sort of tell on the group and the most frightful kerfuffle because it wasn't shut down quickly enough um it's got nothing to do with tradition three tradition three is about membership of aa no one is entitled to do service and no as no one is entitled to do any particular piece of service so someone being excluded from a particular form of services but nothing to the excluding them from the fellowship um so i wouldn't have any track with that and people are tricky with it um uh rowery you had a question is it gone i've still got the question if you want to i was just mindful of time but um i was going to say so in in a situation let's say at an intergroup where you're on where you'll be part of um the service structure there and let's says someone has put themselves forward for a role um where we don't necessarily consider their experience to be in in alignment with what the role is asking but nobody else seems to be saying anything what do you suggest as a as a direct but gentle way of perhaps opening that conversation up i think there are a thousand ways of doing it um one way is to say this is a really important role to respect the the principles of getting the right person for the role you know you're great but let's have an election which is a genuine one with so so why don't we as a group think between this type this meeting and the next meeting about who else might like to go for this to make sure that we get someone the the person the group feels most comfortable with it may be this person but the fairest way to do that is to because for the individual to say to the individual um anyone is going to have more confidence in the role if they have the genuine approval of the group in a real election with more than one person then feeling the group has just put them in that role because there is no one else that's not a vote of confidence and to have the authority to do the job you need you need to have demonstrated confidence on the party group it really makes a difference when there's been an election someone has voted and has won that election uh they they very often do the Job very well there are occasionally problems there but also i'll tell you the other side of that when you have an elect i've seen cases oh this is controversial uh i've seen cases where someone was very keen on a role and was announcing to everyone for months that they were going to go for the role uh left oh i'm going to go for this i'm gonna whether it's secret pure gsr but then of course it's open anyone can go for it and when it comes to the day two other hands go up and the person is affronted thinking because they've run around telling everyone they're going to do this they've got first dibs on the role and there's an election and in this particular case the person didn't get the role they wanted and having not got the role, they said I don't even want that the alternate role. I don' t want the vice role either. If I can't have the role itself forget it and they effectively stormed off which proved that the election was right and thank god we had an election with at least two people but that wouldn't have been found out if the person had been shoehorned in to the role just rubber stamp into the role we never would have found out their real relationship to the roll which was they wanted to be number one not to do the service because if they want to do this so they would have been thrilled to be the alternate as as they would have been to do the role itself so it very much depends on the situation and who you just have to hope that someone intelligent experienced in kind is going to say the right thing in the right moments you can't legislate for it one thing to do is to ask questions about relevant experience whether like someone has gone let's say it's a GSRO have you gone through the traditions formally with your sponsor that kind of thing what other group level have you done secretary and chair of this group maybe you might want to try those first because gsr you really need to understand those other roles do gs are you have to do it differently every single time um so it does require some delicacy i don't know if you will indulge us tim but there's one more question from margot Do you want to read it out, Margot, or should I read it out? Do you Want me to read it out? I'll just read it out. Go on. What should one do in a group conference or other service meeting where someone boisterous is doing all the talking? See, that's usually me. Perhaps negatively, also usually me, but the chair isn't intervening. I'd just go and have my dinner if I were you, frankly. um there's this i don't you see this is why you have to be really careful who you pick to chair a meeting uh if you the the way around it though sometimes you've got someone who's just weak in the chair position but if the group has written procedures let's say the written procedures are that in group conscience meetings everyone that wants to have a first go on talking about a topic gets to have their go before anyone gets to Have a second go at 90 second cap on contributions to group conscience meeting. If that's been agreed in advance, then someone can anyone can put up their hand and say, might I request that we abide by what the group conscience is here? And that gives the authority to a nervous chair to do what they might well want to do already. But the thing is, this is why you want policies for how to run business meetings and group conscience meetings. And you're not just leaving it to the skill, the initiative and the courage of the chair in the moment to do the right thing, because that becomes partial if they're intervening on a particular person, establishing the policy in the moment that is well this person is just as far as I'm concerned going on for too long so I'm going to shut him down. That's dangerous. Much safer to have a system agreed in advance and then everyone is playing by the same rules. Does that answer your question Margot? Very good. I think that's it then so I think we stop recording there and