The Drawer Marked That One Time

There is a particular kind of failure available to people who solve problems for a living. You identify a solution. It works. You may even be extremely pleased with yourself for a while. Then you put the solution away in the drawer marked that one time, because you were in a hurry and it felt like an emergency, but emergencies aren’t where you usually go looking for principles.

I did that once, rather spectacularly. Then I spent the rest of the year complaining about a problem the thing in the drawer might have helped me understand.

It started with a local Board of Supervisors candidate forum.

Our Chamber had agreed to host one for an upcoming election, and I had designed the format with the sort of compulsive attention with which I usually approach process design challenges. Then, for reasons that matter much more in another story than they do in this one, I stepped back from moderating it.

This left us with a fairly specific problem. We needed someone who had no connection to either side of the race, could manage a room full of people who very much did, happened to be free on one particular night a few weeks away, and wasn’t afraid of a microphone.

We started with the obvious people. Community leaders. Business owners. People with enough standing to be taken seriously and enough experience to keep two hundred adults from turning an elementary school cafeteria into cable news. I made calls, collected suggestions, then chucked names into the bin as fast as I could come up with them. Someone had endorsed a candidate. Someone had a business relationship. Someone wasn’t available. Someone was neutral but perhaps not the person you wanted holding a microphone if the room got interesting.

Applied honestly, our criteria eventually eliminated nearly every adult we could think of.

At the time, I understood this as a supply problem. There was a job that needed doing, we had searched the available pool of people who might do it, and the pool was empty. This is a familiar moment in volunteer organizations: We need someone, we have asked everyone, nobody can do it.

Then I called the high schools.

I had been a debater, so the leap made sense to me for reasons that had very little to do with volunteer management. I knew there were students who could stand in front of a room, follow a process, think on their feet and remain composed while adults behaved like adults. Or didn’t. More importantly, they hadn’t spent the previous twenty years accumulating positions, alliances, grudges and dinner-party stories about everyone involved.

Within days, we had them. A student moderated the forum. Two more kept time. Other students, working with an instructor, received written questions from the audience and selected the ones that met the criteria we had published in advance. The jobs were specific, the rules were clear, everyone knew exactly what they were responsible for, and when the evening ended, so did the assignment.

More than two hundred people showed up. The students were terrific.

I have told that story several times since, including in a book, and I have always understood it primarily as a story about trust. We had designed a fair process and discovered that fairness alone couldn’t make people believe in it. The students didn’t make the process fair. That work had already been done. They made the room capable of believing it.

I still think that’s true. It just wasn’t the only thing that happened.

A few months later, I sat in another room with representatives from other community organizations discussing a beloved local event that needed a new home. The Chamber was asked whether we could take it on, and I said no. Our calendar was full, our volunteers were stretched, and we were already discovering that every new thing we had enthusiastically agreed to do came with a recurring bill denominated mostly in human beings.

We didn’t have the capacity.

I believed that when I said it. I still think the decision was probably right. What I didn’t notice was that a few months earlier, faced with another problem that appeared to exceed our available capacity, I had found an entire group of volunteers who hadn’t existed in my mental inventory until the moment I needed them.

And then I put them in the drawer marked that one time.

Apparently, This Has a Name

I found out later that what we had done wasn’t particularly novel.

There is a name for volunteer work built around a specific, bounded assignment rather than an indefinite commitment: episodic volunteering. People who actually study volunteer engagement have been thinking about this for a long time. VolunteerPro, for example, treats the bounded commitment as something to be designed deliberately, with its own onboarding, delegation and ending, rather than simply as a lesser version of what we tend to think of as “real” volunteering.

The field has thought much more deeply about this than I had, but the basic idea would have been immediately recognizable to anyone who watched our students work that night. We had created jobs with clear responsibilities, a short duration and a visible finish line. We weren’t asking anyone to join a committee, attend meetings for the next year, become responsible for an event in perpetuity or allow their email address to enter the Chamber ecosystem, from which escape can require either resignation or relocation. We needed them for one thing. We told them what the thing was. They did it. Then they went home. Perhaps more importantly, we asked people we had never asked before.

This all seems embarrassingly obvious now. It wasn’t then.

When small volunteer organizations talk about capacity, we tend to imagine a fixed group of people carrying a variable amount of work. We know who our volunteers are. We know who always shows up. We know who can be trusted to take something and run with it, which is why those people gradually acquire seventeen somethings to run with.

Eventually we look around the table and discover that everyone is exhausted.

Then we say we need more volunteers.

What we often mean is that we need more of the same kind of volunteer: someone willing to make a substantial, ongoing commitment, preferably with enough experience to require very little supervision, who will attend meetings, answer email, learn the history, develop relationships and, if things go particularly well, become the person we can ask next year.

That person is wonderful. That person is also a unicorn: rare, beautiful and obviously mythical.

The high school students worked because we’d accidentally designed an opportunity for people who were never going to become traditional Chamber volunteers. They didn’t need to care deeply about the Chamber. They didn’t need to understand our strategic plan. They didn’t need to commit to our mission for the next three years. They needed skills they already possessed, a few hours on one evening, and a reason to say yes.

We’d changed the shape of the ask, and changing the shape of the ask changed who could answer it.

That is the part I missed.

The Maximum Ask

Volunteer organizations have a perfectly understandable tendency to recruit for permanence because permanence is what we desperately need.

If you have an event that happens every year, the dream isn’t someone who will help for four hours. The dream is someone who will own the event. If a committee needs leadership, you don’t fantasize about someone who will take notes at the next meeting. You want a chair. If your board is carrying too much, you want another board member, preferably one who has secretly been waiting all her life to spend Thursday mornings reviewing insurance renewals.

We are trying to solve permanent problems, so we make permanent asks.

The trouble is that the size of the ask determines who is able to say yes.

All this gelled later while reading VolunteerPro’s work on episodic volunteering. In one episode of Volunteer Nation, the host describes asking people why they hadn’t volunteered. One answer made me sit up: “I didn’t want to sign my life away.”

The point is that a volunteer commitment needs boundaries, a visible beginning, middle and end. If a role genuinely requires months of training, a longer commitment may make sense. But if the reason we want someone to commit for a year is simply that recruiting people is difficult, that is an organizational problem we’ve quietly converted into the volunteer’s obligation.

I wish I’d known that before I started running a volunteer organization.

A person who can’t give you a year may be able to give you a Saturday. Someone who has no interest in joining your organization may have exactly the skill you need for one project. A teenager who’d reasonably flee if invited to a Chamber board meeting may be perfectly happy to moderate a candidate forum. A business owner who can’t take responsibility for an entire event might make one introduction, handle one piece of logistics or spend ninety minutes doing something she is unusually good at.

None of these people solve the permanent problem, and that may be why we overlook them.

We aren’t actually looking for four hours of help. We’re looking for relief. We want someone to take the whole damned thing away, because the people making the ask are usually the same people already carrying too much of it. By the time an organization feels a capacity problem acutely enough to start recruiting, its appetite for small contributions has disappeared.

Unfortunately, small contributions tend to be the ones most people can give.

That creates a nasty little loop. We ask the largest things of the people most likely to say yes. They say yes because they always do. We become increasingly dependent on them because they are reliable. Their reliability becomes part of the organization’s infrastructure. Then they burn out, and we respond to the resulting capacity problem by looking for another person willing to make exactly the commitment that burned out the last one.

I recognize the pattern because I’m very good at participating in it. Turns out I’ve also been leading an organization with a long history of depending on exactly that pattern.

I’ve also been on the other side of it. There were periods when too much of the Chamber lived in my inbox, my calendar and my head, not because I’d made some grand decision to centralize the organization around myself, but because doing something yourself is often faster than teaching somebody else how to do it. The same logic applies to volunteers. Asking the person who always says yes is faster than figuring out how to make the work accessible to someone who hasn’t.

Efficiency is wonderfully efficient right up until it becomes dependency.

The forum broke that pattern because desperation removed the usual option. We couldn’t ask one of our regular people. The very characteristics that made someone an obvious community volunteer often made them unsuitable for the job. Our normal volunteer pool wasn’t merely exhausted. For this purpose, it was disqualified.

So we had to redesign the work. And then it worked.

I wish I could tell you I immediately recognized what had happened and redesigned the rest of our volunteer operation around the insight.

I did not.

I congratulated the students, thanked the instructor and cleaned up the cafeteria.

Capacity to Create Capacity

There is a dangerously satisfying version of this story in which I was simply wrong every time I said we lacked capacity.

I don’t believe that version.

Recruiting volunteers is itself work. So is designing a role narrowly enough that somebody new can succeed in it. Someone had to figure out what the students would do, write the process, make the calls, coordinate with the instructor, answer questions, prepare materials and be available if something went sideways. The students supplied labor, judgment and credibility on the night of the forum, but they did not rappel in from the cafeteria rafters wearing Chamber polos and carrying clipboards.

Someone built the opportunity they stepped into.

That requires capacity too.

This matters because “just find more volunteers” can become its own version of the same magical thinking that burns people out in the first place. A depleted organization cannot recruit, train and support an unlimited number of new people simply because the work has been divided into smaller pieces. Sometimes the honest answer really is no.

I think our answer on the community event was still no.

By then the Chamber had taken on a great deal, and I had taken on far too much personally. An annual event isn’t a candidate forum. It doesn’t disappear when everyone goes home that night. It has planning, insurance, money, permits, relationships, storage, institutional memory and the especially charming tendency of annual events to begin planning themselves again approximately twelve minutes after you finish cleaning up the current one. This particular event would also have required coordinating work across several other volunteer organizations, adding another layer of capacity we would have needed simply to distribute the work.

Breaking that work into smaller pieces distributed across other community organizations might have made more of it shareable. It would not have made the responsibility disappear.

So I don’t think the lesson is that capacity constraints aren’t real. I think the lesson is that I was treating capacity as more fixed than it actually was.

Some capacity belongs to people. Some belongs to time. Some belongs to money, skill, relationships and attention. Some of it definitely belongs to coordination. But some of it belongs to design. Change the work and you may change who can do it. Change the duration and someone who could never say yes to the role may say yes to the task. Change the qualification and you may discover that the person you need isn’t sitting at your board table because there was never any reason for her to be there.

The distinction matters because “we don’t have capacity” sounds like the end of a conversation.

Sometimes it should be. But sometimes it should be the beginning of a different question.

Capacity for what, exactly?

The Things We Solve Without Learning

The part of this that bothers me isn’t that I didn’t know the phrase episodic volunteering. There are professionals who spend their careers thinking about volunteer engagement, and I am not one of them. My professional background is managing paid professionals, or, more accurately, managing the managers who manage paid professionals. That turns out to be a very different thing.

I’d become president of an all-volunteer Chamber of Commerce through a series of decisions that, viewed from sufficient distance, could reasonably be described as a clerical error. I had never expected myself to know an entire professional field by instinct.

What bothers me is that I had the evidence.

I didn’t need the terminology to notice that something unusual had happened. We had spent weeks searching for one person in the population we already knew, failed, changed the shape of the work, asked a population we had never considered, and filled several roles almost immediately.

That should have made me curious. Instead, because the problem had been solved, I stopped thinking about it.

There is probably a larger occupational hazard hiding in there for people who pride themselves on being problem solvers. Problems create urgency. Urgency narrows attention. You find the thing that works, use it, collect the result and move on to the next biggest fire. The solution becomes evidence that you handled the emergency rather than evidence about the kind of problem you were actually facing.

We are very good at learning from failure because failure is rude enough to demand an explanation. Success can sneak out without filling in the paperwork.

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the things I’ve gotten wrong, and am getting wrong, while leading the Chamber. Those are easy to find. They announce themselves in exhausted volunteers, awkward conversations, projects that don’t work and emails you really wish you had waited until morning to send.

I’m less certain I’ve been paying attention to the things that worked for reasons I didn’t understand.

The forum worked because the process was carefully designed. It worked because the students were good. It worked because they carried none of the baggage that had made every obvious adult candidate impossible.

And it worked because, without knowing what I was doing, I briefly stopped asking the same people to make the same kind of commitment.

Then I went back to asking them.

I don’t have a volunteer strategy to unveil here. If anything, discovering that the thing you stumbled into has an established name is a useful reminder that somewhere there are people who have been studying your revelation for decades while you wander around congratulating yourself for inventing Tuesday.

The one thing I never asked was what came after. We found people for one night, and I was so pleased about it that it never occurred to me to wonder whether any of them might have wanted to come back. That question turns out to be most of the field.

What I have instead is a question I wish I had asked sooner.

When we say nobody can do something, do we mean nobody can do the work? Or do we mean nobody can do the job in the shape we’ve decided it has to take?

Those aren’t the same problem. And now I’m left wondering what else is sitting in the drawer marked that one time.