Accelerated Motions

Every Toastmasters club is governed through the protocol of Roberts Rules and this parliamentary process is the time tested practice of executive meetings of the public administrator sort.  Whether it is a Toastmasters Club or the Houses of Parliament, the process is methodical but painfully slow if the process is compared to the speed found in accelerated change.  Everything is not changing, some ways remain steadfast.

A part of a business exec meeting is the raising of motions and seconding - which is a simple enough system no big shakes there.  What takes time is deliberation of motions.  Where executives are smart they have learned to have the meeting before the meeting and come to the actual meeting knowing that motions have been duly won and now simply need the blessings of the governance system to place them on record and into the organizations minutes.

This is challenging even when experienced executives who understand the means of governance contribute to a meeting - since Toastmasters is an educational mandate - the people elected to the executive are learning on the job and also this may be the first board governance experience that member has been voted to.  It is the same as what happens in the first year of any business - lots of rookie mistakes which are par for the course, but quickly overcome with experience.

The first thing that needs to be done is create a documented system for motions.  Paper is typically the primary tool of an executive meeting, but our club is going green.  The challenge we have is to create a digital motion form.  The easy part of that is describing the motion, noting whether it has been tabled, passed or failed.  The hard part is the deliberation.  The key for me is to get to the easy part in the meeting but do the hard part before we get to the meeting.

Here a digital tool has come in very handy and it is a tool of accelerated change.  The tool is SLACK and with it our group had their first ever Exec Slack meeting.  We engaged it on a Sunday morning and forthwith named it SUNDAY SLACK.   What was great with a "Sunday Slack" meeting was that we got more discussed and more shared and one of the reasons for the productivity was that we had type in our conversation - which naturally gave us more time to think, but it did something else, those of us who can parallel task, which is have a tab for slack open and a tab for google and also open go-to documents, we could inject new info in fast.

This still requires an ability to switch focus to sending a relevant document into the Slack deliberations and the ability to think in parallel.  I say parallel because this is not "multi-tasking", as another exec member is typing in, there is time to order up links and documents pertinent to the meeting.  What we did not have at our first Sunday Slack was a means of "Accelerated Motion", which simply is a digital form to record any motions.  Nor did we have a system that could act as a parking lot for discussion points not relevant to the current meeting, but which could be introduced to the agenda at a future date.

The key to accelerated motions is not that the speed of motions passed is way faster, but the importance of leverage is understood.  In a normal business meeting it is the exec that brings mind to the meeting, but in a membership-chartered body, we represent the members voice.  An accelerated motion is an opportunity for members to provide motions that can be electronically tagged and then considered for the agenda.  This system also provides a means of filing motions as an A-to-Z index, as well as those motions that get into official minutes.

The net result is that we still meet face-to-face, but that we have had the key meetings before the meeting and then with an accelerated motion system - the parliamentary system can in creative ways be less "watching hair grow" and more agile and dynamic as motions are raised, duly considered and then recorded as a part of a continuous club improvement mindset.