Rip Off and Duplicate

At some point very early in my first year as Chamber president, I remember thinking that it’d be really great if there were a manual.

Not a leadership manual for running a Chamber of Commerce. Those exist. There are books and conferences and professional associations and entire training programs devoted to running Chambers of Commerce. I know because I discovered most of them well after I could have used them, which has been a recurring theme of my tenure.

I wanted a manual for running this kind of Chamber. The kind with no staff. The kind where the president is a volunteer with a full-time job and the organizational chart is mostly a list of people who have agreed, sometimes against their better judgment, to do something. The kind where strategic planning has to coexist with figuring out who has the right bin, and where an ambitious new program can be derailed because the three people capable of running it are already running everything else. What I wanted, really, was for somebody who had done this before to tell me what they had learned.

Really, I just wanted them to tell me what not to do. And maybe give me a big hug and tell me everything was going to be okay.

By the time I realized a manual would be really helpful, I’d already learned several things the expensive way, although the currency I’d spent was usually time, frustration, volunteer goodwill, or some combination of all three. We can’t afford expensive at my Chamber.

I’d learned that capacity and enthusiasm are not the same thing. The hard way. I’d learned that institutional knowledge stored in one person’s head is not institutional knowledge. The hard way. I’d learned that asking the same reliable people to do one more thing works beautifully right up until it doesn’t. The really hard way.

And I’d learned that small organizations can have very large ambitions and that ambition does not, unfortunately, come with additional humans. Somewhere along the way, I started writing those things down.

That wasn’t why I started writing, and for a long time it wasn’t what I thought the writing was. I started because I had fallen in love with a place, become unexpectedly responsible for one of its institutions, and found myself surrounded by people doing more for their community than most people would ever know. I wanted to tell their story. I wanted people to know what happened behind the events and Facebook posts and ribbon cuttings, where volunteers were quietly holding things together with goodwill, borrowed tables and, inevitably, pieces of themselves. But as the stories accumulated, I started noticing something underneath them that I hadn’t gone looking for.

Surely we couldn’t be the only ones.

That thought bothered me, because there was an easy way to turn it into a very bad book. I could take everything that had happened to us, extract a few lessons from it, and announce that I’d discovered how small community organizations work on the strength of about a year in one organization, along one twenty-mile stretch of rural highway in California. I could chisel tablets and carry them down the hill to preach the Word.

I didn’t end up with stone tablets, but I did have a hypothesis, which was that some of the problems I thought were ours weren’t really ours. At least not ours alone. Maybe other small Chambers struggled with the same mismatch between ambition and capacity. Maybe other organizations had a handful of people who somehow became responsible for everything. Maybe other Chamber leaders had inherited systems that made perfect sense to the person who built them and considerably less sense to everybody who came afterward. Maybe somewhere else, another perfectly reasonable adult had looked around one day and wondered how the hell this had become their job.

This is the point where my day job followed me into Chamberland. I work in organizational strategy and technology delivery, and much of my professional life has been spent somewhere in the overlap between systems thinking, design thinking, Lean and Agile. After enough years, you stop consciously reaching for one methodology or another every time you encounter a problem. Some of it simply becomes how you think.

If you have an assumption that matters, test it. Preferably on actual humans.

So I went looking for actual humans.

I wasn’t looking for endorsements. I wanted people whose organizations looked enough like ours to make comparison useful and different enough that agreement might mean something.

One of the first was the executive director of a Chamber on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula, and she immediately found a hole in my model. She’d already started reading the book when she stopped to ask whether I had been elected to lead a fully volunteer, no-staff Chamber or whether I had been hired. The distinction mattered to her. A person can volunteer to take a job for which they are still paid, she pointed out, especially when the pay is below market.

No, I told her. Nobody was paying me. Nobody was paying anyone. It still boggles my mind that people get paid to do this.

My confession changed how she was reading the book. She runs a professionally staffed Chamber, although hardly an extravagantly staffed one, and she told me she would never take on this much work as a volunteer. What interested me wasn’t the compliment-slash-pity buried in her observation. It was the limit she had identified.

A staffed organization and an all-volunteer organization might encounter many of the same problems, but they do not have the same capacity to absorb them. In one, at least somebody has an actual job whose responsibilities continue to exist on Tuesday morning. In the other, everybody’s obligation ultimately rests on having said yes, and there is only so much weight a collection of yeses can carry before somebody changes the answer.

That didn’t invalidate the hypothesis. It made it harder.

Then I connected with another Chamber executive in Vermont.

His organization serves a collection of small communities where tourism, local business, community identity and civic life overlap in ways that looked suspiciously familiar to me on paper. I wrote to tell him that I suspected people who run small Chambers have more in common than we often assume. The budgets might be different. The service areas might be different. The org charts, when we’re optimistic enough to call them org charts, might be different. But sooner or later, somebody has to do the work.

He recognized the territory almost immediately. I sent him some excerpts, then an advance copy, and along the way he described his own operation in terms that made it clear their version of Chamber life was not substantially more dignified than ours. I knew immediately that I had found my people. He read the book over a weekend, and by Monday he had already talked about it with his board president, which tells you something about the kind of person who ends up running an organization like his. He told me he had been astonished by how much of his own experience he recognized in mine.

Here was someone in another state, working in a different organizational structure, whose Chamber had more formal capacity than mine, and who nevertheless recognized many of the same problems.

This was not proof. One Chamber executive in Vermont recognizing himself in a book about a Chamber in California is still one Chamber executive in Vermont. I’m no math whiz, but I know exactly enough statistics to know when I am abusing them.

But it was useful evidence, and more importantly, the exchange stopped moving in one direction almost immediately. His Chamber had created a deliberately low-budget video series featuring local business owners and community members telling their own stories. I watched several and thought they were terrific. Within about ten minutes, I was thinking seriously about stealing the idea.

This, I later learned from the executive director in Washington, is an established research methodology in Chamberland.

“R&D,” she called it.

Rip Off and Duplicate.

“We all do it.”

Apparently I’d found the manual.

It was just scattered across the country in the heads of people doing the work.

So I kept looking, although I should admit that the whole process looks considerably more deliberate written down than it felt while I was doing it. I did not sit at my desk with a research protocol and begin expanding concentric circles around my hypothesis. I had a question, then another question, and enough professional habit to keep looking for people who might tell me I was wrong.

I contacted other Chambers serving rural communities in Montana, Idaho, Texas, and Oregon. Then I widened the search beyond Chambers. I reached out to four people whose work touched different parts of what I thought I was seeing: rural community development, volunteer sustainability, local capacity and the informal infrastructure that keeps small places functioning. Two even wrote back.

I should point out that randomly reaching out to strangers you’ve found doing internet research appears suspiciously spammy to the person on the other end of the email.

One of the people who actually replied had spent years helping small towns make better use of the people, places and resources they already had. Before that, she’d run a Chamber herself. If I was trying to figure out whether the patterns I thought I saw belonged specifically to Chambers or to something larger about small communities and the people who keep them running, she was a particularly convenient person to connect with.

She answered the same day and asked me to mail her a print copy. She likes to read on airplanes while traveling for client work, and yes, she’d be happy to tell me what she thought.

So I mailed a book about what I was still learning to someone who reads on airplanes on her way to help small towns with things she started learning in a job I am still doing.

By then, what had started as a suspicion about small Chambers was becoming harder to contain. Maybe some of what I had been writing about really was Chamber-specific. Maybe some belonged to volunteer organizations. Maybe some belonged to rural communities where the same people keep appearing in different rooms because there simply aren’t that many people available to appear. Maybe some of it was about institutional memory, or civic capacity, or what happens when responsibility accumulates faster than resources.

I wasn’t contacting people because I expected them to agree with me. I wanted to know where the ideas stopped traveling.

I still do.

There is a temptation, once you’ve written a book, to start behaving as though writing it has made you an authority on its subject, and this seems particularly dangerous when the subject is your own experience. I know what happened here. I know what I think I learned from it. I now know that some people doing similar work in very different places have recognized themselves in it.

I don’t know yet how far that recognition goes.

But I know more than I did when I started. Some of the things I thought were unique to our Chamber aren’t. Some of the problems I encountered by accident have names, and some have entire bodies of professional practice behind them. Some of the solutions we improvised have been tried elsewhere, sometimes better. And some of the people I originally contacted to check my work have already given me ideas worth stealing.

My book comes out in November, a couple of months from now. Until then, most of the people reading it have been people I went looking for precisely because I wanted them to challenge what I thought I knew. Publication changes that. The next readers will choose the book for their own reasons, bring their own organizations and communities to it, and decide for themselves which parts look familiar and which parts belong entirely to our peculiar little stretch of road in the mountains.

That’s a much larger test, and I have no idea what the result will be.

When I first thought it would be nice to have a manual, what I really wanted was somebody who had been there before me. Somebody who could say, We ran into that too. Here’s what we tried. Here’s what worked. Here’s what absolutely did not. Take whatever is useful and ignore the rest.

I thought writing the book might let me leave a few of those notes for the next poor soul.

Instead, it introduced me to some of the previous ones.

Which is better.