Month: July 2017

A Data-Driven STARFLEET

First, a blanket thank-you to everyone who has reached out to me or commented on issues I’ve written about for this goofy blog. It’s encouraging to see people disconnect from the regularly scheduled noise and talk about policy and strategy for STARFLEET.

One of the things that I’ve noticed in some of these discussions is a tendency to push for drastic measures. It’s big stuff that would probably require changing the by-laws, our financial structure, the way entire departments are organized… big stuff at the international level, for the most part.

Here’s the first part of that problem: Those ideas usually aren’t data-driven. In other words, they’re usually the result of looking at a given situation and then wanting to change that result using personal experience or intuition. That isn’t a great way to solve problems, but the folks recommending these ideas are not stupid. They’re merely uninformed.

Here’s the second part: Most of us are uninformed.

If we want to focus on creating solutions as opposed to recommending drastic measures, we need more data. The bad news is that we’re not seeing very much of it right now. The good news is that it’s probably easy to get.

For example, if you think that STARFLEET should revisit the chapter minimums, you should know how many chapters are currently under-strength. If you want to talk about making changes to the Academy, you should know the percentage of current STARFLEET members that have passed a class at the academy. If you think the Academy should focus more on Star Trek rather than having a huge catalog, you should find out how popular the non-Trek courses are in comparison.

Just as a point of reference, three or four people have taken the SFA course about sea cucumbers according to the guy currently running it. That’s three or four more than I would have guessed. My estimate was zero, so my assumption was off by 300 to 400%. Glad I asked!

Having more data will probably help you to refine your idea into smaller pieces and make it easier to implement. Having more data may challenge your initial assumptions and convince you to take your idea off of the table entirely — You can use the time you’ve saved and the information you have to invent a better idea!

More importantly, having more data will help create better policy because you don’t have to take someone’s word for it. Is the Academy popular? The data will tell you. Is it gaining popularity? Historical data will tell you.

We should challenge everything we’re doing to make sure we’re doing it the best way we can, and those challenges should be data-driven. Will people interpret this data in different ways? Absolutely. People can debate about why the numbers are what the numbers are, but we’re still better off when these debates are informed by real information, not assumptions.

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Strategy Essentials: Drucker and SMART Criteria

I’ve written about W. Edwards Deming and the PDCA cycle in two prior installments of Strategy Essentials, but you should know that they were a reaction to ideas from a guy named Peter Drucker. Like last time, I’m going to start off with some quotes.

  • Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.
  • The most important thing in communication is to hear what isn’t being said.
  • If you want something new, you have to stop doing something old.

Now, here’s the weird part: Even though the philosophies from Drucker and Deming are often at odds with each other, they’ve both been adopted by companies that have gone on to success. Drucker’s philosophy was championed by HP and DuPont, Deming’s was embraced by Toyota and Amazon. There’s no one true way.

Drucker’s philosophy is called Management by Objectives or MBO.

From the Wikipedia page:

Management by objectives can be described as a process whereby the superior and subordinate jointly identify common goals, define each individual’s major areas of responsibility in terms of the results expected of him or her, and use these measures as guides for operating the unit and assessing the contribution of each of its members.

This could revolutionize the way STARFLEET operates because it places so much effort on teaming responsibility with results. In the MBO model, it’s all about agreeing on a goal, defining a task, developing a metric to make sure that the task is being completed and an assessment to follow.

About thirty years after Drucker’s philosophy was introduced as a system, George Doran used it to create the SMART criteria for goals and objectives.

  • Specific: Target a specific area for improvement.
  • Measurable: Quantify an indicator of progress.
  • Assignable: Specify who will do it.
  • Realistic: State what results can realistically be achieved, given available resources.
  • Time-bound: Specify when the results can be achieved.

In a truly transparent STARFLEET, this information would be available for every position. When it comes to determining whether someone is doing a good job or a bad job, we wouldn’t have to rely entirely on other people’s opinions. We could see it for ourselves.

For example:

Lt. Random volunteered to do a job. Lt. Random met with leadership and negotiated the specific tasks associated with that job, how the completion of those tasks would be measured, and how long it would take. Lt. Random got leadership to engage specific resources to complete the job.

The limited results: Lt. Random was able to do more than they promised. Lt. Random did exactly as they promised. Lt. Random wasn’t able to do what they promised. Leadership provided the resources they agreed to provide to Lt. Random or they didn’t.

This changes everything.

Instead of someone trying to convince you to vote for and/or appoint them with titles they’ve held or by telling you how long they’ve been in STARFLEET, they could produce a list of tasks they have completed or goals they have met or exceeded. On the flip side, they could tell you about what fell short, and how their ideas would modify the tasks or better define the objectives.

We could make better decisions because we would have better information.

Drucker ideas and the SMART criteria require leadership to be considerably more engaged, but I think they could split the difference. If someone had to come up with metrics for every single volunteer position at the international level, they would probably lose their mind. They could eliminate as many of those positions as possible, and then put their energy into the ones that are left. The same strategy can be employed at the departmental and regional level, too.

These ideas also raise the bar on volunteer effort. It won’t be enough to say that you’re interested in a thing and you want to be in charge of information regarding a thing for STARFLEET. You’re going to be expected to detail exactly what you’re willing to do, how long it’s going to take and how that effort will be measured.

Drucker’s ideas are worth considering. So are Deming’s. There are a lot of different ideas when it comes to responsible management and leadership, and many of them are valid. As I mentioned earlier in the series: If there was one true way that worked 100% of the time, everyone would use it and no one would ever go broke.

If I’m trying to convince you of anything, it’s this: We’ve lost so much ground. We need to move away from a leadership model that’s focused on personality and move toward a model that’s focused on the improvement of our product for current and potential customers. I’m not picking a particular side; I’m just presenting proven methods and ideas for doing just that.

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Engagement: The Monopoly Theory

In an earlier essay, I talked about STARFLEET’s problem with the illusion of prestige, and how it can attract sad people like moths to a flame. Short version: Hurt people hurt people. But there have to be more pieces to that puzzle, right? We can’t really have that many members lashing out because they’re upset with something going on in their own lives. Surely not everyone scrapping on an E-mail list has those kinds of problems. It’s just not statistically likely.

A lot of people are simply bored.

That doesn’t really sound like a STARFLEET problem.

Hear me, people of Earth: It is absolutely a STARFLEET problem.

We’ve talked about chapter support and why chapters aren’t getting it. One of the myriad problems with not having great chapter support is that eventually people will start looking toward the center. The less emphasis STARFLEET puts on chapters, the more emphasis it places on itself.

I’m going to say that again. I’ll even center it. And make it bold. It’s that important.

The less emphasis STARFLEET puts on chapters, the more emphasis it places on itself.

These members have been sold a product, and part of it is that they’ve joined the world’s largest Star Trek fan club. They’ll start to wonder why everything in STARFLEET is so glacial, why nothing seems to happen. They’ll start to think that hey, we’re in the largest Star Trek fan club, there should certainly be more communication from STARFLEET. There should be something going on. We should be hearing more from the Admiralty Board. We’re the world’s largest Star Trek fan club and no one is talking. What are they hiding?

Two important points:

  1. 5,000 members isn’t even close to the largest Star Trek fan club in the world, but I can understand why you bought into the hype. It hasn’t been true for a long time.
  2. The most active STARFLEET project provides you with an incredible opportunity to do homework.

I loved the episode of Star Trek when the Enterprise crew nailed the Algebra final.

Folks get frustrated and they get annoyed and they get bored. They’ll argue. I understand that some people have issues, but I prefer to think of my fellow STARFLEET members as good people. I’m optimistic. Yes. Some of them are weird. But even the weird ones tend to be genuinely kind people. I have seen evidence for this many, many times. STARFLEET members tend to be good people. But they get bored, and boredom fosters a desire for entertainment.

Historically, STARFLEET tries to have it both ways. It doesn’t embrace new programs at the international level that are interesting and engaging, but it doesn’t want to put a lot of effort into new projects to support chapters, either.

STARFLEET needs to look at every argument on a mailing list or every fight on the Facebook page as a failure. They need to pay attention, adjust the universal translator and see these arguments not as a personality dispute but as an opportunity for positive change. Write it down on a piece of paper.

September 14th. We’ve spent three days watching an argument unfold. Could we have prevented this by engaging these members with something cool a month ago?

I don’t really have a name for this, but I’m going to call it the Monopoly Theory. Monopoly is well-known for destroying friendships. But maybe the real problem is that people got so bored that rather than do something fun together, they decided to play Monopoly.

Some people will get so bored that they’ll play STARFLEET.

No one wins.

 

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The PDCA Cycle

The laser. Touch-tone telephones. Cellular telephones. Communications satellites. Radio astronomy. The first binary digital computer. The transistor. The C programming language. The UNIX operating system, which serves not only as the core of the laptop I’m using to write this blog post, but also the webserver where this blog is being hosted.  All of these inventions came from Bell Laboratories. There have been eight Nobel prizes awarded to work performed at Bell Labs.

Remember W. Edwards Deming from the Ferengi Management essay? His mentor was a guy named Walter Shewhart, who was instrumental at Bell Labs from 1925 until he retired in 1956. Here’s what his boss had to say:

“Dr. Shewhart prepared a little memorandum only about a page in length. About a third of that page was given over to a simple diagram which we would all recognize today as a control chart. That diagram, and the short text which preceded and followed it, set forth all of the essential principles and considerations which are involved in what we know today as process quality control.”

Deming called it the ‘Shewhart Cycle.’ Today we know it as PDCA, and it looks like this.

PLAN: Establish the objectives and processes necessary to deliver results in accordance with the expected output (the target or goals). By establishing output expectations, the completeness and accuracy of the specification is also a part of the targeted improvement. When possible, start on a small scale to test possible effects.

DO: Implement the plan, execute the process, make the product. Collect data for analysis in the following CHECK and ACT steps.

CHECK: Study the actual results and compare them to the expected results and document the differences. Look for differences in implementation from the PLAN and look for the appropriateness and completeness of the PLAN to enable the execution that’s happening next.

ACT: If the CHECK shows that the PLAN that was implemented in DO is an improvement to the prior standard, then that becomes the new standard for how the organization should ACT. If the CHECK shows that the PLAN that was implemented in DO is not an improvement, then the existing standard will remain in place. In either case, if the CHECK showed something different than expected, then there is some more research to be done, and that research will help you create a new PLAN.

This is a fundamental process for successful iterative change.

We’re Star Trek fans, so whether we realize it not this process seems very familiar to us, and it should. The PDCA/Shewhart Cycle is derived from a larger concept that’s responsible for more than just the cool technology from Bell Labs that I listed earlier. You’ve probably figured out the name of it already, but here you go:

It’s called the scientific method.

The scientific method is about 500 years old. The PDCA cycle is about sixty years old. The reason we keep using both of them is because they work.

I know that this essay has been pretty dry, but I need to show you something about a fundamental way that the PDCA cycle works in practice. It’s really important, and I promise that I’ll cover this and we’ll be done.

One of the most common complaints about STARFLEET is that we’re not really embracing the future. I know, because it’s one of my common complaints. The problem is even worse than that. In a lot of ways, we’re moving backward because we’re not iterating our processes. We’re not getting better.

A good example from my experience on the STARFLEET Communique: We tend to think in terms of getting the CQ done, not in terms of making the CQ better. We’ve been asking for articles for the CQ the same way we have for years. These processes haven’t changed. If you compare a recent CQ to a CQ from years ago, you’ll notice that it seems that our design and layout has gone backward. We have not established a standard, and then responsibly iterated to a higher standard.

Another good example is announcements: They’re simple E-mail messages in ASCII text. There’s no formatting, there’s nothing bold or italic. There are no images. No matter the content, the design and the formatting of these announcements have been the same for the past twenty years. I don’t think anyone has put a lot of effort into raising the standards and embracing a process to do so. But another common complaint is that STARFLEET doesn’t communicate enough to the membership. Sounds like a product that could really use a process and iterative cycle, doesn’t it?

It means not having to do everything all at once. We keep trying to do things the hard way, where we start from nearly-zero on everything STARFLEET does. We need to steer away from drastic change. Trying to make absolutely everything fantastic all at once is a recipe for disaster. Use the process. Make it a little better every time. Keep making it better. It’s the core of kaizen.

This process is one way to make that happen. You can use it all over the place, even at the chapter level. Chapter documents, event planning, recruiting… There are a lot of great reasons for why the philosophy of the PDCA cycle has been embraced over several different industries and disciplines.

That’s all for now. I hope I’ve given you something to think about!

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A Problem, Defined By One Question

I’ve written a lot of essays on this site, and they amount to just over seven-thousand words. They’re on a wide variety of topics for STARFLEET, ranging from non-profit operations to leadership, volunteerism and management. It’s my goofy blog, so I get to write about whatever I want.

This one is different.

Rather than writing about what I want to write about, I’m going to respond to feedback from STARFLEET members. A lot of the feedback is positive (thank you!), but most of the feedback is a disappointing question, asked privately:

Are you planning to run for CS?

The short answer: No.

The long answer: What the hell is wrong with you?

Are you really so entrenched in STARFLEET political drama that you can’t read some essays without framing it as a potential campaign? If so, you are probably part of the problem. You desperately need some perspective, which is the reason I’m writing these essays in the first place. The question makes me feel like an abject failure.

I expressed these feelings to a friend of mine, and they raised a point I hadn’t considered — The volume of what I’m writing is unusual. It’s a lot. Except that it isn’t, and I guess that needs some background.

A couple of years ago, I got incredibly sick. There’s a tube that runs from your kidney to your bladder and it’s called a ureter. After several ER visits and a bunch of tests, they discovered that my right ureter was covered in tumors. Cue several more ER visits, a surgery to cut away the ureter (and the tumors) and build a new one out of bladder tissue.

I spent a week in the hospital, and then several months at home in bed under the influence of incredibly powerful painkillers. I lost a lot of weight, and not in any kind of sexy way. It’s called muscle atrophy or muscle wasting. Without physical effort, you just lose what you’ve got in terms of muscle. I got better, I got off of the painkillers, my weight came back up.

So, I’m in the gym almost every day. Six days a week, four of them with a personal trainer. I’m not trying to lose weight, I’m not trying to get buff. I’m just trying to get back to normal. It’s working. I can move around a lot more weight than I used to, even before the surgery. I feel a lot better. I have a lot more focus. If you don’t have some kind of fitness program, I strongly suggest that you talk to your doctor and get some options.

Anyway, back to the issue of volume. I’m a professional writer! I’ve had over half-a-million words published. I just write faster than most people do because it’s a skill that pays the bills.

You need to understand that these essays are written in about fifteen minutes. I go to the gym at 4am. I finish at around 5am. I get home, get a shower and write one of these essays and post a link to the SFI Discord, the SFI Business list and the Facebook group. I usually start working at just before 6am. It’s become a habit over the past week or so. It just looks like a lot more work than it actually is. The essays are fun and they’re a great kick-start for the rest of my creative day. Writers write.

So. Political intrigue. Careful readers will notice that I haven’t said anything at all regarding the current STARFLEET administration or their policies. It’s not because I’m being a careful writer, it’s because I don’t care. I want to ask better questions and find more interesting answers. I don’t want to engage in the issue of the day or the crisis of the week. I don’t want to express my ideas in an avalanche of quoted replies on an E-mail list. I prefer to think bigger and I want to encourage you to do the same.

Looking at this stuff from the perspective of a political process misses the entire point. There’s gonna be an election, I’m sure. But it’ll happen two years from now. It will be an incredibly annoying spectator sport. People will fight, divide into factions and vote. The results will probably be irrelevant, because the candidates and their proxies will drone for five months about the same old boring topics that our collective incurious nature insists on hearing about.

So, here is the last thing you’re going to see me write about STARFLEET elections (future or otherwise) on my goofy blog, before I get back to the fun stuff:

Campaigns are frustrating. Candidates are annoying. Elections are divisive. Learning new things? Super fun. Sharing ideas with people? Awesome. Learning how to do something and then sharing that knowledge with someone who wants to learn? That’s the best-case scenario. Let’s just keep doing that for as long as we can. It’s a lot more fun. It’s a lot more text, but it’s a lot more fun.

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Strategy Essentials: Ferengi Management

Welcome to the next installment of Strategy Essentials! There’s one thing I want to mention right at the top, because I think it’s important:

There is no specific way to manage a business that ensures complete success. If there were, everyone would use it and no one would ever go broke.

So, think of the Strategy Essentials series as a buffet of ideas. It isn’t necessary to eat everything. Even I don’t agree with everything I’m going to write about. I’m here to show you some things that I’ve seen with the hope that you will find something that you would like to put on your plate. In an earlier essay I talked about the importance of self-education for STARFLEET leadership, and this is an effort to break that idea open a little more for everyone.

In the first installment I mentioned W. Edwards Deming. He wrote a book called Out of the Crisis in 1982, and it’s one of Time Magazine’s 25 Most Influential Business Management Books. Deming and Taiichi Ohno were instrumental in bringing quality measurement and improvement techniques to Japanese manufacturing in the 1960s. It was essentially the beta-version for what’s now known as The Toyota Way.

Here are some quotes from Deming:

  • It is not necessary to change. Survival is not mandatory.
  • If you can’t describe what you are doing as a process, you don’t know what you’re doing.
  • It is not enough to do your best; you must know what to do, and then do your best.

Much like the Ferengi Rules of Acquisition, Deming used the preface of Out of the Crisis to put together 14 Points for Management. They were written primarily with for-profit manufacturing in mind, but the philosophy of these ideas can pay off in a big way. It’s not a checklist, it’s a reduction of what would eventually be called The System of Profound Knowledge. I’m not making that up. It’s literally a trademark for the Deming Institute. They really call it that. Here are the points:

1. Create constancy of purpose toward improvement of product and service, with the aim to become competitive and to stay in business, and to provide jobs.

2. Adopt the new philosophy.

3. Cease dependence on inspection to achieve quality. Eliminate the need for inspection on a mass basis by building quality into the product in the first place.

4. End the practice of awarding business on the basis of price tag. Instead, minimize total cost. Move toward a single supplier for any one item, on a long-term relationship of loyalty and trust.

5. Improve constantly and forever the system of production and service, to improve quality and productivity, and thus constantly decrease costs.

6. Institute training on the job.

7. Institute leadership. The aim of supervision should be to help people and machines and gadgets to do a better job. Supervision of management is in need of overhaul, as well as supervision of production workers.

8. Drive out fear, so that everyone may work effectively for the company.

9. Break down barriers between departments. People in research, design, sales, and production must work as a team, to foresee problems of production and in use that may be encountered with the product or service.

10. Eliminate slogans, exhortations, and targets for the work force asking for zero defects and new levels of productivity. Such exhortations only create adversarial relationships, as the bulk of the causes of low quality and low productivity belong to the system and thus lie beyond the power of the work force.

11. Remove barriers that rob the hourly worker of his right to pride of workmanship. The responsibility of supervisors must be changed from sheer numbers to quality.

12. Remove barriers that rob people in management and in engineering of their right to pride of workmanship.

13. Institute a vigorous program of education and self-improvement.

14. Put everybody in the company to work to accomplish the transformation. The transformation is everybody’s job.

There’s a lot to think about, and if you’re interested in diving deeper into those points, there’s an expanded and annotated version over at the Deming Institute.

Deming’s ideas aren’t just the core of The Toyota Way, they’re essentially Management: The Original Series. Camping World CEO and investor Marcus Lemonis renders a lot of this down into elements of his investment philosophy of People, Process and Product. The ideas about using processes to eliminate defects and organizational commitment are parts of what drive a strategy called Six Sigma.

Okay, but how can this work for STARFLEET?

Here’s a quick idea based on number 13: Institute a vigorous program of education and self-improvement.

STARFLEET is always looking for people to work on the database, and pulling from our existing ranks can only yield so much effort. Even if we pull the outsource handle and spend money on bringing it up-to-date, we could invest in our volunteers and encourage them to check out free sites like Codecademy to learn SQL and PHP. It could help cut follow-up costs and build additional features later.

That’s one idea for STARFLEET based on the material. I hope that this essay will inspire ideas of your own!

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Engagement: The Stick

I have a cat. She’s named Darwin, and she’s pretty awesome.

Let me tell you something about this cat. She is absolutely spoiled. I don’t have kids. If you have kids, imagine how much more money you would have if you didn’t have kids. Okay, so take one percent of that money and imagine you’re spending it on a cat. That’s how spoiled this cat is.

She’s basically got everything. She’s got one of those ridiculous multi-level cat condos. Her litter box is a robot. She gets the best food money can buy. She gets veterinary visits regularly, whether she wants them or not (and let me clear this up for you: she does not).

So, cat toys. I’m actually here to talk about something else. But I’m starting with cat toys.

As you can probably imagine, she has cat toys. All kinds of cat toys. There are two big boxes in the living room filled with cat toys. There are cloth fish, with catnip within. There is a stuffed frog that makes frog noises. There’s a stuffed bird that makes bird noises. There are a bunch of different kinds of balls. Tennis balls, super balls, whatever.

She likes these toys! But the one she likes best is called stick.

If you were to guess that it involves a stick, you would be correct. It’s a long plastic stick. On one side, there’s a handle. On the other is a piece of string, and at the end of the piece of string is a bunch of crinkly plastic tentacles.

Darwin loves stick.

There’s a big difference between the rest of her toys and stick. I have to operate the stick. Whip it around, let her chase the crinkly bits until she catches them. Wait until she gives it up. Start all over again. If it were up to Darwin, she’d have me give up my career, friendships and the need to eat food so I could play stick full-time. It would probably be more than full-time. I think she would enforce mandatory overtime.

When she wants to play stick, she sits in the middle of the living room with her paws tucked in and meows. Most of the time.

Sometimes she doesn’t meow, and I don’t realize what she wants until I walk through the living room and get a look that seems to say that she’s very disappointed that I have not anticipated her needs.

But this is about STARFLEET and engagement.

People are not cats. But sometimes they have interests and we don’t know about them because they’re not talking to us about them. They’re not meowing. They’re sitting in the living room waiting patiently. And STARFLEET may be giving them a lot of toys. They may enjoy those toys. But maybe they’d love to play the equivalent of stick. We may not know how to play stick.

It is also entirely possible that we have no idea what a stick is, because it’s something that we’ve never really considered.

And it is also entirely possible that many, many cats would love to play stick.

Part of the reason it’s important to break things down into small pieces and implement new things quickly is so that we can put something in front of STARFLEET members and find out if it’s their stick. It might not be their stick, and that’s totally fine. We’ll move on to the next thing, then the next thing, then the next thing.

Try something. If it doesn’t work, let it fail. Learn why it failed. Try something else, and maybe it’ll do better because you learned something new last time. Maybe it won’t. Keep trying. Resist the urge to create a department or a fancy position in the name of something you’re trying — If no one wants it, it’s a tremendous waste of precious resources. Keep learning.

I would write more about this but I’m hearing noises from the living room. I might be a while.

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Strategy Essentials: Precious Resources

I run a profitable small business (technically, a couple of them), but I’ve had to do it the hard way. I’m a high-school dropout with a GED. I’ve never been to college — I don’t have an associates degree, let alone an MBA. I had to do a lot of self-education, and it helped me learn the difference between risk and recklessness. It helped make the difference between failure and disaster.

I’m going to get into some thoughts from W. Edward Deming and Peter Drucker over the next few weeks, digging down into the PDCA cycle and how it affects concepts like kaizen. When we get into that you’ll see why I’ve been extolling the virtues of doing small things right now and insisting on exploration for STARFLEET leadership. Don’t worry, it won’t be a business class. I’m just going to discuss some different business philosophies and how they connect to how STARFLEET is (or could be) managed.

This is a new category for the site that I’m calling Strategy Essentials. It exists for one reason:

Nothing is free. Everything has a price. When it comes to non-profit operations, that price usually isn’t in dollars and cents. It’s in ability, initiative, effort and time.

We know this. We have an awards program to recognize people for their efforts. We know that no one’s getting paid, and the only reason anything works at all is because volunteers step up. Volunteers are our most precious resource, and that resource is not infinite.

We know this. But we’re bad at demonstrating that we understand this. If we understood it, we would focus a lot more effort on making sure that we’re driving that incredible volunteerism effectively. There’s way too much focus on how things are organized, and very little focus on whether or not the organization does what it is meant to do.

It is easy to set up an organization. It’s easy to change it, too. Answering questions about how you would change the organization is fun, but the answers don’t matter because the question is too easy. We need to dig deeper and solve more difficult problems.

How do we provide the maximum amount of value to a diverse audience of Star Trek fans with a minimum of volunteer effort?

That is a question worth answering, so we’re going to dig into a lot of potential answers. Let’s explore together!

 

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The One That Gets Me In Trouble

Life is terribly unfair.

It’s true. People have problems. Sometimes those problems are physical, sometimes those problems are developmental — Sometimes they’re emotional. Some people have a very difficult time relating to their families, other folks have a rough time communicating with others. Some people have a very hard time of making a living in their chosen field. Sometimes people feel that the life they have isn’t the one they wanted, or even the one for which they’ve been trained. A lot of people have spent their lives working very hard and finding their dreams just out of reach every time.

This is incredibly common. There are entire branches of science devoted to helping people with these kinds of problems. I am not qualified to diagnose or treat these problems.

All I know is that it can make some people very sad. It can make them deeply unhappy.

…and sometimes, these people take it out on us.

You don’t have to look very far to find the illusion of prestige in STARFLEET. It’s everywhere. We have pretend ranks from a pretend military that leads a pretend armada to the edges of our galaxy and beyond. We’re modeled on ideas from a TV show in a genre that some people call competence porn.

If you’re having a very hard time with your family, if you’re in a bad relationship, if you work a terrible job for almost no money, if you’ve been out of work for what seems like an eternity? I bet STARFLEET looks completely amazing.

Finally. They’ve found a place where people will recognize their ability. A place where people will respect them. A place where they can get away from the world and just be themselves. And if people don’t respect them, they’ll make it so. They’ll chase awards and commendations. They’ll do whatever it takes to get promoted, which usually isn’t that much.

They will tell people that they’ve been serving in STARFLEET when all they’ve really been doing all this time is paying for a membership.

This actually happens.

We’ve seen it. We could cite a lot of examples. We know that this is happening.

Realistically, many of us have found success in our personal and professional lives. Most of us that have found a measure of success realize that while we’ve worked very hard, we were also incredibly lucky.

The easiest thing to do when we see attention-seeking behavior is to just dismiss it and look away. But we can’t. We were taught better than that by Star Trek. We need to embrace the people and embrace the problem.

We need to understand that the illusion of prestige can be problematic. I’m not saying that we need to systematically remove all the pieces that contribute to it, but we really need to dial it back.

When we move away from Star Trek, we become inexorably drawn into being a club that is simply about itself. This is when the illusion of prestige is at its most potent, at its most dangerous level. It’s when debate becomes argument. It’s when argument becomes a fight.

It’s when factions become family.

And that’s not healthy. We need to be more aware of when it’s happening, and we need to be aware of what it does to people — especially people that are hurting. When they come to us because they’re angry or upset, we can’t let it be because we’re their commanding officer or their regional coordinator or the Commander, STARFLEET. We need it to be because we’re friends, and friends talk to each other.

There’s certainly a lot to be said for wanting to make STARFLEET a lot more about Star Trek instead of putting so much focus on the organization itself. Taking the illusion of prestige down a couple notches would be one of several very good reasons to do so.

“Our world hangs like a magnificent jewel in the vastness of space. Every one of us is a part of that jewel. A facet of that jewel. And in the perspective of infinity, our differences are infinitesimal.” — Fred Rogers

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Chapter Support: Ouroboros

Ouroboros is an ancient symbol of a serpent or dragon eating its own tail.


If you run an active chapter or you’re a member of an active chapter, you’re going to start thinking that you’re getting screwed. You do the work, you file paperwork every month, and your chapter makes money for STARFLEET — Money for which you (as a chapter) are receiving nothing of value.

And you would not be wrong. You are getting screwed. If you think about it for longer than three seconds, you can think of much better ways to spend that money. You could buy a bunch of Star Trek books and start a lending library. You could buy a couple of board games. Almost any investment in your group will outperform the money you send STARFLEET.

STARFLEET should be spending money to generate new members and help you grow your chapter. At the very least they should be helping you recruit. Right?

Well, yes. But also no. Because STARFLEET doesn’t actually work the way it was designed. Here’s a big part of the problem.

There are way too many chapters.

When’s the last time you’ve seen a chapter go into drydock for not meeting membership minimums? I’ve only heard about it happening once. Some chapters disappear because the people running them give up. Some of them disappear because they’re getting screwed. Some of them self-destruct over personality conflicts. Some of them just fade away. But it’s almost never because they’re not meeting the requirements.

So, we have a lot of zombie chapters that don’t meet the membership requirements. They’re all over the place. They’ve been around for years.

STARFLEET cannot find the strength to say no, and that’s a huge problem. Why should STARFLEET invest money in chapters when there are so many chapters that will be a tremendous waste of those resources? Why should STARFLEET help you build a chapter when your own chapter has been under-strength for years, or even six months? You do not have the ability to lead a chapter that meets the requirements. Spending money or other resources on that kind of chapter is a waste of those resources.

But saying no means that some people are going to feel bad. You’re going to upset them. They will become angry with you. And you don’t want to make people angry. You want them to like you. You really want them to like you. So you don’t say no. You just let them do their thing because hey — what’s the harm?

And the serpent devours its own tail.

STARFLEET’s best shot at providing great chapter support is predicated on their own responsibility to make sure that chapters are meeting the requirements. If they want to make back their investment in the chapters, they need to be putting new members on strong and active chapters so that a positive cycle can begin.

I think they should definitely focus a little effort on helping people lead chapters, rather than just having chapters. That would help, and it wouldn’t take much to do — Reach out to the COs of larger chapters and ask them for their advice and compile a Big List Of Stuff That Seems To Have Worked.

But the best thing they could do right now is simply follow their own rules, reduce the size of the fleet and greatly boost the odds that a new member will find themselves on a strong and active chapter.

Then we can have a conversation about the best way to support chapters, the best way to grow chapters, and the best way to recruit for the fleet overall. That would be great. But until STARFLEET finds the strength to say no, it’s a tremendous waste of time.

Posted on by Publius