The Power of the AA Purse – Alexis K.

Hi, I'm Alexis. I'm an alcoholic. Hi, Alexis. And thanks for coming to this workshop. As Richard said, what I'll do is I'll speak on each of the concepts and then I'll basically... We'll have any questions anyone has about the 12 concepts. So, the 12 Concepts. They actually, in my experience, they can be applied to kind of all areas of my AA service work And even in my 12-step work, some of them can be applied there. And to give a bit of background on the concepts, I think it's quite important for me to kind of under... That's where one of the things that really helped me to understand was to realise the historical background, really, and where they came from. And I'm sure everyone's aware of the 12 steps and how those were kind of the experience of the first hundred alcoholics and how they recovered. and some some years after that uh bill wilson realized that um all of the you know a8 the 12 sets were working these people getting sober and um these groups forming all around the country but he was getting bill was kind of doing a lot of work in the central office in new york and he was Getting a lot letters from people saying our group's having problems we're having controversy we're Having arguments you know where the group's going to fall apart people drinking and so forth. And he realised, with the help of one particular letter that he was sending, he basically sent a letter about another organisation of alcoholics called the Washingtonians from 100 years before AA, who had helped each other to stay sober. But they got involved in controversy and internal arguments and politics and all of these external politics and those sort things and uh they'd fallen apart and they'd all died drunk so bill realized from all this stuff he was getting from the groups from the experience the historical experience of the washingtonians that a.a was um in danger of falling apart basically and he condensed this together into another 12 principles which uh with 12 traditions um and it took a while for the fellowship to accept that these were important as important to a is the 12 steps but they did in the end and And these principles are now, and we have them up during our meeting. We have the traditions and the steps stuck up during our meetings. Now, as time went on, AA's general services grew and grew. When AA first started, it didn't have these general services. Essentially, it was one alcoholic talking to another. That was really it. But eventually, as time went on um people started to realize that it would be helpful if you they had literature like the big book if they had phone lines that people could call um and um basically these what what they realized there were some people who were saying well we need to keep it simple um you know just one alcoholic talking to another but bill realized that if there is any service we could be doing for the still suffering alcoholic if there's anything we do to better enable the carrying of the AA message to the still-suffering alcoholic. And if we don't do that, we're letting down the still suffering alcoholic. And this was a vital insight. I think that's like the fundamental insight that Bill had for our general services. And from that point on, our general service just grew and grew and the group started to realise the importance of contributing to these general services and as I mentioned earlier, the central office in New York appeared and we have a central office in the uk as well in york um now the point came where bill uh felt that the principles which had worked in the running of these general services needs to be codified as well and that's where the 12 concepts come from just as the steps came from the experience of what does and doesn't work and people lived and died based on learning that experience the traditions came from the experience of you know what doesn't doesn't work in with a groups and groups played as a result of learning that experience so the concepts come from the appearance of what works and doesn't in the general services and as bill said if we don't we don t ensure the survival of these Jeff services watching down the newcomer now the actually in the twelve concepts well there are many many things which can be applied at all levels of service but when he originally wrote the 12 concepts he was thinking about what he called world services and i think he had this vision at the time of kind of the world office of gso in in new york kind of you know hey worldwide the general service is being coordinated by this world service office as time went on they realized countries could in fact have their own central service offices which were answering mail distributing literature helping new groups form so forth like we have in this country We have a general service office in York. And so these, although in the 12 concepts he talks about the world services, you can also kind of replace that with the phrase national services, which I often think when I'm reading them. Okay, anyway, enough background. Let's just give you some historical background. What I'm now going to do is go through the concepts one by one to give a little bit of my experience with the help of also a brilliant concepts checklist here I'll just give a name check to my sponsor who came up with this which gives some great ideas of how to apply the principles and concepts to my home group work and my intergroup work and so forth So starting with concept one and bear in mind as I read concept and you hear the phrase world services you can replace that with national services Concept one um okay quick one last thing before i say concept one this book the aa service manual combined with 12 concepts world service when i wanted to really learn about the 12 concepts like if i want to learn aboutthe 12 traditions i can read 12 steps and 12 traditions book and traditions illustrator if i really want to learn about 12 concepts this is the book to guess it has the concepts each have an essay attached to them in this book and those they're brilliant essays i've read them again and Again, they're really good, but that's how I've learned about the concepts in theory form anyway. And I'm reading from the short form of the 12-1-6 here. Concept 1. Final responsibility and ultimate authority for AA World Services should always reside in the collective conscience of our whole fellowship. So this came about, another realisation that Bill had that led to concept 1. um i think dr bob i can't remember what precise year it was but essentially dr bob the co-conservator bill w dr bob dr bob died of cancer and um bill had a very deep realization of his own mortality i think and how that affected alcoholics anonymous because at that point the um people could always run to to bill and bob when things were going wrong with aa and say particularly with the world services because bill was intimately involved in in the general service office in new york if things were going wrong people could always run to uh bill and bob and say what do we do what should we do and um and generally people would listen to them they were well respected throughout the fellowship but then dr bob died and it was it was just bill and bill bill started to think what happens when i die you know i want aa's got to survive i mean talk about letting down the newcomer if you let aa general services die off these services that distribute the literature, that organise the phone lines that help AA start in other countries. Vital services what happens when I die? How can I ensure the survival of these services? What happens if the general service office in New York makes some financial blunder? They make a screw up. There's a miscommunication and the groups start to think what is this office acting for us? What have they done? They made this big mistake and they basically lose faith in that office and suddenly, and that office, all it's funded by is the money that we put into the pot at the end of meetings and then we vote and we'll send a contribution to intergroup that contribution to region and so forth eventually that contribution reaches the general service office and pays for the salary and pays if this office will run and Bill thought, what happens if the groups think well, stuff you lot you know don't kind of that's all right okay can i continue okay um where was i yes um general service office yeah so the group's thinking right stuff you general service office who are you to spend this i mean gso in in york largest crunch of all mail in york million pound a year turnover gso in new york i mean huge size of a corporate office 10 million dollar turnover happens if the groups one day one day turn around so who the hell do you guys think you are spending all our money how do we know you spent you know all of this and now when bill and bob were alive even bill was alive bill said listen and he could have explained so we need all of these you know this is how it's all built up this is why we need it people would have trusted listen to him but once bill was dead who would explain all this There is an executive committee, the General Service Board, that has trustee responsibility. A bit of a steering committee for the General Services Office and its AA members. But who knows any of those members? No one knows the name of the members of the General Servicers Board. I mean people do but I suspect most people in this group you don't even know the names of your General Servicer Board. So Bill was worried the groups would stop sending money and these services would fall apart. The phone line would fall depart, the literature would no longer be published and distributed new groups in new countries or new cities or new towns, you know where would the service manual come from, where would the guidelines come from and very slowly a huge effect would filter down into all the groups and finally to the newcomer, into saving lives you know and so this was he knew he had to protect this somehow and he saw it was a, and the first thing was well who's going to when I die, in fact he handed over, he didn't wait until he died When AA came of age, when they had that big meeting in St. Louis, Bill essentially said to the AA groups, you are now responsible. You now have to take responsibility for your services and you have to have the ultimate authority. And this is what concept one is essentially saying. He explains the mechanics of how they do that concept too. that it's very important it was an important thing for me to realize what he was saying is you can't come running to me all the time he says i just want to become a normal member of aa you have to take responsibility you can'T you know it's like a father saying to a child take responsibility for your life um so um that was that was concept one and um the um you know obviously he talks about the the group conscience now not just of a single group but a group conscience of the whole country of the whole world he's extended, what he does with a lot of these is he takes a tradition and he extends it into a much larger and gives it more detail goes into more detail but here he's extending the group conscience and don't just run your groups by the group conscience we run the whole of AA by the group conscience now some ways in which this can be on a simple group level how can I apply this concept one and one of the simplest things is the first link in that chain of the group conscience from a group to worldwide to nationwide aa what is it it's the gsr gsR represents my group in this country gsI used to be called general service representative and some bright spark decided to change the name to group service representative totally missing the point essentially gsir is a general service representative represents my great and so does my group have a GSR it's a simple question You know, if my group following concept one, does it have a GSR? Does my GSR go to pre-conference? See the point of that as I come to concept two. And then looking just within the group, you know, do all members of my group contribute to the group conference? So this concept can be applied in a number of different ways on a national level and even on a group level. So now, of course, the question is, okay, Bill, you said... I tend to use the name Bill quite freely. I really look up to the guy and it's like Bill said this, Bill did this, bill did that anyway so bill says you guys have responsibility you have authority and um then then you know you say all right so what is it in this country i think we've got 25 000 members of aa in uh worldwide i think WEA got over 2 million members of aa now obviously it's a bit impractical for 25 000 people to get together to have a national group conscience meeting and it's a little uh ineffective for the world conscience to be have a meeting with two million people somehow fit them into a large hall somewhere so bill solved this problem with concept two and with with basically the idea of representation what he said is that um we have a we've already got we got our national services in york you know and world services in new york um we have a general service board which is like a national steering committee who essentially have oversight of that of that office um now what what they'll also put and then we have the groups and gsrs and he put it and then he thought there's a gap he saw there was a gap and that gap he filled with a new very large committee in fact he didn't call it a committee it was so large he called it a conference 100 people basically um give or take 20 i think at the last conference i i went to there's about 110 people that's it and these 110 people would be delegates from all around the country um together with the members of the general service board the national steering committee and they'd meet once a year um and that would fill this gap he saw that that would fill this cap between the groups and the general surface board in the general services office i.e these very important national services something else i just want to slip in here as an aside the National services. There's something else about national services which is easy to forget. Obviously, we have things like literature that needs to be done nationally. We have the unified phone line that needs done nationally, but the other thing is we have national newspapers. The probation service is run nationally. Actually, I think it's England and Scotland, but nationally, to keep it simple. We have government offices run nationally. A lot of offices who essentially create the policy for the people that have first contact with a still-suffering alcoholic, probation officers, prison officers, these national offices create the policies for doctors and nurses and national professional organisations for psychiatrists. National newspapers and television stations who kind of have the majority of the communication lines between individuals and they can reach out to people like no one else can, this national media. How do you interface? How doyou communicate with national organisations and national offices and national media? You do it on a national level. You doit in a coherent way. So as well as these other general services that I've talked about, which, you know, publishing and so forth, we need to be communicating nationally with the media and with these various organisations. So that's just slipping that in, I should have said that at the beginning so anyway we have the conference filling in this gap and why does the conference fill this gap well this is an interesting point here and has caused much discussion and debate over the last two years the GSRs vote in the delegates simple as that the GSРs decide who the delegates are for their for their region in our case in this country that's what bill said that was the spirit of concept two the gsrs choose these delegates they hold the delegates accountable if the delegates don't go and carry the conscience of the grs to the conference meeting when they meet with the general service board and representatives from the general services office then gsr can vote out these delegates that's how the direct accountability comes in now unfortunately not mean to be controversial but in this country the GSRs don't vote in the delegates due to a misunderstanding of the concepts particularly the spirit of the concept and for what I can only think are historical reasons and reasons ignorance really one region London region north the GSRLs vote in the delegates there are other regions who are looking into the GSLRs voting in the delegates as well but this was Bill's vision and I'm sorry to start on well not start I'm sorry to reach concept two and already give a negative point but inthis country we haven't quite caught up with the spirit of the concepts but this is isn't that's why it's so brilliant that bill wrote these down if he hadn't wrote down these concepts if he had just thought some people were saying to him we've done the steps then he said let's do the traditions people said no we don't need traditions only write that down don't we just shut up come and talk about your spiritual experience don't talk about don't tell us about traditions and then concepts the concepts people say well do we need to write all this down and it's too complicated you know it's not simple you can't write but if he hadn't wrote this down we would not be having the current debate that we're having in this country which was why are we not following the concepts so you know thank god he wrote it all down and made it clear so that's that's concept two the general service conference of aa has become for nearly every practical purpose the active voice and effective conscience of our whole society in its world affairs and at this point the principle of delegation comes in which is fundamental to the concepts. And it's talked about in the traditions. Bill talks about the trusted servants. So what he's doing is he's taking the idea of trusted servants and he's starting to expand on it here. He's saying that, all right, we give ultimate authority and final responsibility to the groups, but then the groups have to delegate some of that to their conference delegates. And I'm just about to rotate out as a conference delegate. There's six in the southwest region and there's 15 UK regions, each with six delegates. But yeah, the groups delegate some of their authority and responsibility and that's how the conference is formed. And each year, the delegates can question and debate with the General Service Board up in York and find out what essentially our National Steering Committee have been up to. So that's concept two. and uh i guess in terms of what individual groups can look towards is you know are we taking part in conference do we understand what's going on conference do you know what the the agenda is for conference this year do we know whatthe conference decisions were um because conference discusses things like what new literature should we do are we happy with this piece of literature um the national phone line came as a result of conference discussion debate so the decisions at conference directly affect the new government and that's concept two and i guess the parallel the nearest parallel i could think of this if you're thinking of our our steering committee of this group you could think a little bit like the general service board and then each time we have a group conscience it's a littlebit like a conference meeting but we can all go to that group conscience we don't have to send delegates because there's it's basically it's if we had 25 000 members in our group we could have a group conscience but because we're you know 100 people we can twice a year actually all meet and we can hold our steering committee to account we can take votes and talk about the decisions during the year concept three the next three concepts are all they're all um rights it's they're the three rights concepts they're where bill makes statements about three very important rights actually four rights and they are the first concept three is the right of decision concept four is the right of participation and concept five is the the right of appeal and petition and concept three to ensure effective leadership we should endow each element of aa the conference general service board and its service corporations staffs committees and executives with a traditional right of decision simple question here okay how do we define there's a better way to come at this suppose you've got a TLO as an intergroup or suppose even simply you've got a secretary, it's a group a new situation basically something comes up at the beginning of the meeting before the meeting starts, one of the service officers comes up and asks the secretary a question. The secretary has never come across this before, but feels that they have enough experience to answer the question, to give a directive. Yeah, do that tea person, or yeah, do that literature person, that's fine. Now what they could have done, they could have actually gone up to the GSR and their sponsor and the group chair or whatever and said, you know, what should I do about this? What should I do about that? But what they did is they used their right of decision. And what the right of decision says is that each service officer essentially decides when they should ask people what to do and when they just do it themselves. Because otherwise, the way that what bills were, particularly as the service positions were kind of more and more national, got larger in scale, defining these service positions get very complicated. You can end up having loads of bylaws defining this service position and he saw that the simplest thing to do, and this is an expansion on the concept of trusted, on the idea of trusted servants, saying we will trust our servants. We will give them the right of decision to decide when they should ask what to do and when they shouldn't make a decision themselves. In fact, that example I gave of the secretary isn't a great one because really the correct example would have been that secretary saying, all right, everybody, shut up. I've just had the tea person ask me if he can go and buy some more milk. So I'd like everybody in here in the group to vote. Can the tea person go and buy some more milk? It's 7 o'clock, so we probably need some more milk. And everyone's like what? But basically we expect the secretary to use their right of decision at that point just to think yeah I can decide to go and Buy Milk. And then if we all had a really big problem about them buying milk then a group conscience, you know, I shouldn't mention any names but Johnny could have decided to say I don't think we should have bought milk on the 21st April at 7 o'. That was a really bad idea and this is the other side of the writer decision you know we trust our servants but trust is earned and the way it's earned is we are able to hold our servants to account so we can say so with a conference delegate at pre-conference uh the gsrs go up and they say to all the delegates right regarding that new piece of literature we don't like it uh regarding that idea for some new national phone line initiative we love that regarding this that and the other we're all to that the delegate goes up to conference passes on um some of the stuff that the stuff that he's heard and also then decision comes up at conference um an urgent decision um the charities commissioner just said to us that blah blah blah so it's something that basically has to be done uh and within a period of a few weeks or something uh and the delegate then the delegates could then choose to just vote on that basically and not to have to go back to the groups and say what do you think of this what do YOU think of that. And then when they come back to the post-conference meeting after conference if the GSRs don't like what the delegates done, they can rip them to shreds That was an exaggeration They can lovingly question and hold into account and hopefully one day they'll be able to vote the guy out but that's the ideal, that's what Bill really saw in the right of decision is that GSRs could actually not re-ratify a delegate so that's right of position the right of participation this taught me so much when I started reading about right of participation a few years ago as this group kind of grew everyone was doing loads of service and people started to queue up to do service and like it wasn't that long ago now I think about it the first time this happened was a while back there were lots of members of this group in service at intergroup and the intergroup turned around and said well you've got loads of people doing service and every time there's a vote you know it's like half the hands going up from the same group or whatever and of course that's totally irrelevant because everyone votes on their own conscience you know people don't block vote they vote on their own conscience but one of their suggested solutions actually I think this was at region intergroup one of theirs suggested solutions was take away votes from liaison officers so basically on a region liaison officers can't vote the chair and the secretary and treasurer can vote the region reps can vote but not those liaison officers now uh somehow bill foresaw this problem you know he saw this coming and he he kind of focused on the conference level he said that the the the general service office staff the main general service office stuff and the general service board should always have a vote at conference but he this this principle applies as bill says to all levels he basically said you don't take away the officer's vote. You don't take away people's votes on a committee. I remember thinking about this and suddenly I realized, of course, a committee acts by voting. There's no point in going in as a committee together. You have a meeting and then everyone goes off and there's 20 different things. The point is everyone comes together. They have a discussion. There is group conscience. Everyone votes. The committee acts as a result of that. How does the committee act as one? Because of voting. So to participate in a committee, I have to vote. And i've heard no end of rubbish i was up at conference recently and i i won't say it but i had somebody uh saying to me oh yeah our gso staff get to participate on committees and i said do they have a vote and they said no i said well they don't participate then and that's the right of participation and and it comes down bill brings it at the end of his essay on concept three brings it down some uh on a concept four he brings it Down to something very simple which is it's a spiritual need to belong and yeah, somebody simple thing, people will be demotivated it just doesn't make any sense to have somebody who is an integral part of that committee and to waste their experience and their knowledge when they're on that committee so you'll be pleased to know that it didn't happen at Region they didn't take away the Liaison Officer's vote and another thing came up, Intergroup once again, thank God Bill wrote these down it's just, it's amazing um so um uh the the other right the uh right of appeal right edition i mean this is this is brilliant um okay basically voting's all very well and it's very important um but sometimes what can happen is people get assessed with this idea well if a majority have voted for it then it goes through and that's it you know and this is this is uh this is something that in fact political activists and theorists realized ages ago was a load of rubbish um that you don't and and you know i mean the idea obviously back in greek days ancient greece all right that's when they used to consider democracy meant that oh yeah the majority always get their way but like in the last however many hundreds of years people realized that democracy on its own is very dangerous because you get a majority just repressing minority entirely and crushing them and majority gets angry and we all know like the effect of crowds when they're all getting wound up or you know whatever and essentially this uh a long time ago people saw the danger of just giving total power to the majority and that's where the concept of liberal the idea of liberal democracy came from which is where you still give power to the majority but um you protect the minority as well you put in checks and balances to protect the minority and bill talks about some guy i'd never heard of before i mentioned before i read this essay talk phil and uh he how he talked about the dangers of that but so concept five is essentially there to protect the minorities and that when there's been a debate and a vote on some issue, whether it be a conference, whether it be an intergroup I mean I was up at a conference recently and unfortunately at the moment a conference in the UK is very short, we're only two days long in terms of time in the US they have five days but we've got it all crammed into a short time and I mean there just isn't a lot of time, there isn't enough time for debate and you really have to but I've used this before when the debates happened and there's been a vote and then I might put my hand and say actually I've got a minority opinion I think he's talking rubbish or something like that you've got minority opinion and then put the opposite opinion and just try and get this over and I've seen in fact at last conference there was some literature that's blocked from being published and then later and there was a vote that stopped from being publish then the next day a minority of people opinion was stated and a new vote was taken and that literature got through and basically that's the way it works and also the other thing about the minority a lot of the time, the minority can be right there's not necessarily a link between who's right and how many of you there are just because there's 51% of you thinks it doesn't mean it's the right thing and quite often actions and the right actions and things that have moved this fellowship forward have come from minorities so Bill knew that not only And it helps unity as well, because if you have an active minority being just crushed down by whether a conference or intergroup just being ignored and crushed down by the majority, you get disunity because they get annoyed. Whereas if the right of appeal and the rightition are used to let minorities have their say, then they'll feel, at least I've had a chance to give my arguments. Everyone's heard my arguments, so I don't feel so bad about it. but I've been in situations where this has been followed at conference and you can just feel people sitting there just thinking, this is a joke and all that would have happened to take away that feeling another 10 minutes, another 10 minute discussion that's how simple this is and that's the big difference it can make delegates leaving conference thinking yep, I've had my say I've done my best or someone leaving conference they didn't listen to me so that's concept 5 and concept I should cross reference this a minute I mean actually I've noticed in our group conference meetings that the chair will often say before a vote are there any minority opinions so this can apply at any level of service um and um that's um that'S concept five anyway concept six right so we've done concept one groups of the boss concept two they delegate most authority and responsibility to the conference delegates concept three four and five the rights the three rights concept six um is another piece of delegation all right a hundred delegates that meet once a year they can't run aa's general services um this is this so what concept six is recognized and it says the conference recognizes that the chief initiative and active responsibility in most world service matters should be exercised by the trustee members of the conference acting as the general service board so what's that saying essentially is this steering committee i mentioned national steering committee on a day-to-day basis It's really the conference have to give that committee their right of decision and let them get on and do the job, you know. And one thing about the General Service Board National Committee, it's a registered charity and it's incorporated and we don't want to start doing stuff like incorporating 110 delegates and, you Know, you don't Want a letter sent out by the General Service Office every time they've got something they need to do or every time the General service board wants to do something going to have to send a letter to the conference. So essentially, concept six says that you can hold the General Service Board to account once a year at conference, but aside from that, they need to be able to get on with their job. So that's as simple as that. Now, concept seven talks about the relationship between the board and the conference, the Charter and by-laws of the General Service Board are legal instruments empowering the trustees to manage and conduct World Service affairs. The trustees are the members of the general service board. The conference charter is not a legal document. It relies upon tradition in the APS for final effectiveness. Now, I think this is great. I think that this was a really clever bit of stuff by Bill. All right, we've got the general services board who have legal control over our general service office. A million pound a year turnover in the U.S., $10 million a year turn over. The General Service Board in the UK, they are legally empowered to do what they like to that office and to all the funds that go to it. And that's their legal situation. The conference charter says that what – I'll just explain. The conference chapter, it's in the U.K. service literature. And it defines the conference. it also says things like a two-thirds majority of a vote in conference is binding on the General Service Board. So if two-third of the delegates in conference say to the board, do this, they have to do it. A simple majority vote at conference is just a suggestion to the Board. And a three-quarters vote at Conference, they can fire all the Board, they an rearrange the Board that's what the Conference Charter said. Now, one of the questions is, well, if the board are legally allowed to do what they want with the General Services, with our National General Services. But the conference have this three quarters and two thirds voting rights. And so how does that fit? The conference has no legal power over the General Service Board. What Bill said is there's two things that basically give conference that power overthe General Service board. and the first one is tradition respect basically the general service board respecting the status of conference and the second one is the power of the AA purse now this seems like, it's quite a blunt instrument the poweroftheaa purse but it is ultimate authority because the general service office can only run because the staff are paid because the office rent is paid you know, it needs money every penny a large quantity of the money to run that comes from the groups putting money in the pot and that money being passed up through and what Bill's essentially saying, he's saying to the groups if you don't like to the conference and the groups, if you Don't Like what the General Service Board are doing if they're ignoring you because they've got a legal right to if they'RE ignoring your conference that you've delegated authority to stop sending them money simple as that Now, they've got a year's supply of money up in York to keep running the office. They could keep going for a year. Then after a year, slowly, the whole thing would just fall apart. You know, there wouldn't be money to run the office to pay the staff. There wouldn't have been money to hold the GSB meetings. No General Service Board initiatives of meeting with national organizations or the media. None of that could happen. There'd be no money for it. And this is the ultimate power. This is the kind of ultimate authority that the groups have. Most of the money comes from us. So that's what Concept 7 is saying, is that the relationship, in the end, what guarantees the relationship between the conference and the General Service Board is money and tradition. It's respect and the power of the AA purse. So there is a pattern in these concepts. There's this pattern of delegation. What they're essentially doing is they're moving up from the groups to conference to the board, to how the board relates to conference. And now it's going to talk a little bit in Concept 8 about the relationship between the board and the General Service Office. Bill felt he needed to say something about that. And Concept 8, the trustees are the principal planners and administrators of overall policy and finance. They have custodial oversight of the separately incorporated and constantly active services exercising this through their ability to elect all the directs of these entities i just have to step back one concept power of the a purse doesn't just apply to the general service board it applies to any part of the service structure if you don't like what your intergroup are doing if you do not like what your region are doing do not send them money if you really you really know if it is that bad if you feel or if they are wasting money or whatever this concept says you just don't send the money so anyway that was just another thing about concept 7. Concept 8 the trustees have this, it's described as custodial oversight to the general service office now the general services office has a manager called the general secretary and she's a professional manager I've met her a few times she seems very professional and efficient and hard working and um i mean these these people at the general service office they work i mean the hours they work bloody hell they're there if you think about it they're they're like a lot of our committee meetings are at weekend and these people go to one go to the national committee meetings often our conferences is a weekend they go to these i mean it's not a nine-to-five job it's hard work working the general services office and um anyway so this is all managed by the general secretary and she does the day-to day management now obviously i don't know how many of you are aware of the dangers of micromanagement i don't know if you've ever had a boss who's always over your shoulder like saying do it like that no you're doing it like this you just said look tell me what to do go away let me do the job you know and i'll deliver you what you need you know and um what this is kind of uh thing is the general service board have custodial oversight they don't ring up general service office every day and say right has everybody got in time are they working hard enough you know all of this it's it's not it's a custodian oversight and um they do i know that chair in the uk the chair of the general service board is in fairly regular contact with the general secretary but that's but it's not to constantly manage the staff there um and um THEY talk about in this concept it talks about um that this custodial oversight is exercised through the general services board's ability to elect all the directors entities now it's a little different in this country we have much smaller general service office we don't have directors the main piece of custodial oversight that we have is the General Service Board will interview and choose the General Secretary and if the General Services Board are unhappy with the performance of the General Servers Office and feel that it's the General Secretaries fault they can fire her so that's the custodian oversight they have and by law they have to ensure they do that properly charities can have an oversight over them now um concept concept nine concept nine is uh is uh about leadership so bill has taken what he's done is he's taken this part of um uh the traditions which tiny little bit and i remember when i first came to aa and for the first year i didn't understand much about the traditions and people going on about this i've heard it so there's no leaders in aa There's no leaders in AA. And then, you know, somebody pointed out in the traditions, well, our leaders are, but there are leaders in AAA. AA is full of leaders. And Bill actually writes an essay on this. He felt something more needed to be said about leadership. And this concept kind of has two purposes. First of all, it's to try and say, look, we do have leaders in EA. And we have to... We want leaders in AE. and these are the principles of good leaders in AA, and he has an essay all about that, and that essay is I've recommended that to corporate managers, I think it's such a brilliant if I could achieve half of the things in that essay, in my day-to-day management job, I mean I would be it's a constant vision for me and he talks about stuff I haven't read anywhere else so he talks ABOUT VISION you know, this is vision, and He gives practical step-by-step instructions how to have vision in business. I've never seen anything like that before and he said that's so important when the stakes are high on a national level even on a regional level even a large group, in an AA group need to think what would the effect be if I change this you know what could happen two years down the line and he talks about how leaders have to look at some change that could come along, some new policy whether it's a group, national or whatever level and think what will the effect be in a year two years, five years and so forth and he goes through various things about how leaders will have to be unpopular at times, I mean a leader will always be a minority by definition and there are times when leaders will be very unpopular and the excellent thing about how progress is often a series of improving compromises which I found so useful in intergroup and region where when to compromise and when not to compromise to move forward on policy issues the other thing about leadership he talks about sponsor sponsorship being a form of leadership and this is where this always gets me and this always gives me a kick up the behind like am i expecting more of my sponsors than i would do myself am i setting an example and something and uh so that kind of on a personal level gives me again but also on a service level when i'm doing service i'm always thinking how i act at this intergroup will have an effect on anybody earlier in service who's watching me. How I act at this region, how I act at this conference will have an effect. So that's where this concept is so important because I'm going to rotate out of service eventually so the best thing I can leave is my example and that actually probably is one of at least 30-50% motivator for me especially in the last couple of years when I'm in a service situation what sort of example am I setting? And the other thing with this concept as well as the essay on leadership and general issues of leadership, is he's saying primary world service leadership, once exercised by the founders, must necessarily be assumed by the trustees. So he's said now we've got that link between groups and the General Service Board, it's a little safer now for the General Services Board to take on some of that authority and responsibility that Bill and Bob had, that that link's vital for that to be done. But he's talking principally here about world service leadership, the actual services in New York and New York. I mean, Bill was very involved in the world services in new York and what he's saying is, I won't be able to do that. You know, you're going to have to... General Service Board are going to having to do it. So, last three concepts. Concept 10, every service responsibility should be matched by an equal service authority with the scope of such authority well defined. This is something that, like, before i read this concept in the essay i knew i knew of it i knew about it intuitively to a degree but i didn't really understand it and i used to kind of mad people outside of aa and i'd ask them to do stuff and then i'd be kind of saying how are you doing it like this you're doing it right now and they get really annoyed if i was like saying how you're doing it and trying to and um and they said look if you're gonna ask us to do this and blame it if it us if it goes wrong you should let us choose how we do it and somebody actually said that to me reported to me once said if you want me to take responsibility for the results you've got to let me do it the way i think is best and then when i read this essay i understood what she meant basically and that's what it's saying every you have to match responsibility with authority if you're going to blame me for getting it wrong let me choose how to get it right and um in concept 10 bill goes through in a sense everything in concept10 has already been said in the previous nine concepts what bill does in the essay is he highlights in all of the links in that chain i mentioned this chain that goes to the concept groups conference general service general service office in all the links of that chain he highlights how he's tried to keep authority equal to responsibility all the way through and for example right of decision it's one of the biggest guarantors of this um this principle concept 11 um trustees should always have the best possible committees corporate service directors executives staffs and consultants composition qualifications induction procedures and rights and duties will always be matters of serious concern really snappy concept that one i used to just read that and stare at the words and not quite understand where it was coming from at all um but i think one ofthe things he's trying to capture there and i realized this i've i one of my service positions i did was i was on the literature committee which is the the uk literature committee where we actually we are a committee run by the general service board and we produce a lot of the literature so that we we uh revise literature we produce literature like the gsr pamphlet and the guidelines a lot a lot produced by the uk literary committee now this concept is all about those those committees and the subcommittee now probably a lot of you didn't even know these subcommittees existed but the general service board has about uh that this work that i told you they do to do with national telephone stuff national media national probation national prisons and all they do it through these sub-committees there's so much work to be done that what they do is one general service board member collects a committee of 5 to 15 uh aa members around them experienced and knowledgeable and they actually go out and do the groundwork on a national level and this concept is saying these committees they have to work well, let's not just focus on the board, these committees have to work well because they are very important and we have a slightly different structure of committees in the UK compared to the SA but he goes through he also goes through a number of interesting principles uh he's it's quite hard in the concepts because he realized when he wrote these they're not snappy as the steps or the traditions you know they can be long-winded in places and uh the this particular concept he ends up writing like a series of headed paragraphs because there's no other there's no better he could write a flowing essay of principle and all of that he couldn't kind of do that it's a series of paragraphs each with headings and there's things for example about um executive direction versus policy formation i think it's very interesting you don't send everyone else to sleep but that that very simply that concept is the actual executives in in the general service office who are doing stuff um they um they can sometimes get so enthusiastic people and this can be applied not just general service officer things in general who can get so enthusiastic about what they're doing that they start to create new policy. You know, like for example, they may start to break the traditions and this is an important point that you need to make sure that these people are actually undertaking service and not kind of breaking traditions and not creating new policies and we've had examples of that with board service committees kind of just through enthusiasm to try and do a good job and get more alcoholics in have kind of pushed the boundaries of the traditions sometimes. So this concept's all about that And it's about the link between money and the headings. There's only a few in here, so if I just mention the headlings, it's probably the easiest thing, which is basically he repeats full participation of paid workers is highly important. So really it's the principle of participation again. Rotation among paid staff workers. We don't do that in the UK. It's an interesting question. Why do we not do it? Is our office too small? In the US, every year they change their assignments. Can you imagine doing a job where every year you change your assignment? But these people in the US office, they're all like AA members and apparently unity that it creates and the lack of conflict is meant to be very good. Paid workers, how compensated. So he stuck that, he managed to fit that into concept 12. If you pay them peanuts, you get monkeys. We do not pay people charity wages, the people at general service. us we pay them the same way you'd pay a corporate worker because we're not really a charity i'm doing this to keep myself sober um just because this is on cd let me say we're not a charity but the general service board and your service office is a charity uh and fulfills all the requirements to be a charity and the other points status executives that's the one i just mentioned so there's kind of four points he goes through and he talks about the subcommittees as well in concepts 11 so it's a very loose concept concept 11 but he collected together all the last bits that he'd left in and it's kind of the top of that chain you know it's the subcommittees of the general service board it's the individual staff members and their rights in the general surface office and finally concept 12 um is concept 12 basically says the conference the conference must follow the traditions must follow this spirit of a.a and i mean this is so important that the the general services board the general service because the general service board are part of the conference really the conference isn't just the delegates coming from the regions it's also the general service and the members of the general service office who attend and it says the conference shall observe spirit of aa tradition and he goes through a number of things uh taking care that never becomes a seat of perilous wealth of power there's a lot of money controlled by the conference you know the the sufficient operation funds in a reserve is prudent financial principle just because you've got we got all this money let's not hoard it up you know You can have the same issues that you could have in a group. I remember the first time our group realised we were in danger of hoarding money. It was about 12, 11 years ago and we knew we had to donate it or get rid of it. He'd have just the same thing at conference. Bill calls this the AA Bill of Rights. He says it's so important, Concept 12, that unless three quarters of all the groups in the world decide to change it, it can't be changed. because he knew the conference has so much authority delegated to it that, I mean, if it went wrong, it could go badly wrong. And once again, if the conference falls apart, where would we be? So that it placed none of its members in a position of unqualified authority over others, that it reached all important decisions by discussion vote whenever possible by substantial unanimity. this relates back to um the minority opinion and i've seen this go wrong this part of the rights read out from a conference i've read this out um the importance of substantial unanimity in voting two-thirds majority as many people you know keep the discussion going it's better to spend another 15 20 minutes talking about it even if you're going to vote the same way because you can end up with more people supporting it that its actions never be personally punitive nor an insult to public controversy the conference has the money and the communication facilities to Send out a letter to every group in the country saying, that Mr Blah Blah, he's a right dodgy geezer, breaking the traditions, doing this, doing that. We don't like him at all. You know, the conference mustn't do that. And they never perform acts of government and that like the society it serves, it always remains democratic in thought and action. Once again, Bill uses this as kind of a catch-all for some really quite mind-blowing scenarios. Talking about the idea of vision, Bill applies vision here and he says, he says what happens if like an aa2 emerges what happens if like 50% of the people in ai all decide they've got a better method and they go off to form their own ai and he says well we don't do anything about it and he explains the reasoning for it and he talks through all of these quite unlikely but possible scenarios which could have such an effect on ai and how to deal with those and how it relates to the avial of rights and um that is the 12th and final concept um i guess that is the end of my the formal part of my talk so i i think two things i'd like to end on just to say first of all if you want to learn about the comments read the essays then read them again they're just brilliant the spiritual politics they're beautiful essays and the other thing i'd Like to say the concepts and bill says himself do not just apply to conference they talk about conference again and again the board again and again but we use these concepts in our group they're used at intergroup they're used at region you know that they are principles which if I really want to feel I'm giving a hundred cent in my service and I'm following the principles laid down by the old times of AA I want to follow these principles and concepts in all my search work and that's it thank you. thank you alexis watch what was now open to questions from the floor and those wishing to ask questions