‘All of us are bumblebees; we appoint each other and any of us may be appointed.’ Photo: by Venkata Suresh on Unsplash
Bee in the bonnet: Quakers are stuck in awkward structures, says Frances Voelcker
‘If you cannot draw a clear diagram of a society’s structure, then it is likely that there is structural problem.’
Following Yearly Meeting (YM) in 2018 various words resonated with me, and various images remained. Others noted ‘bold’, ‘creative’, ‘change’, and ‘vulnerable’. I noticed also ‘finding the balance’; ‘the barriers of our structures’; and ‘wonderful bumblebees’. Did you know that, according to the laws of aerodynamics, bumblebees should not be able to fly?
We decided to review our book of discipline, to ensure that it remains relevant. Here was an opportunity to go far beyond a book. While books remain treasured resources (and in the many situations in the UK where there is neither internet nor mobile reception, a printed book remains the only means of accessing this source of guidance and wisdom), it does not mean that we should not explore digital communications and use sound and image as well. Chris Alton’s exciting and heart-lifting Swarthmore Lecture showed us one way of reaching out – and reaching in – with humour and grace, to subvert the established order of (our) privilege.
The Quaker bumblebee is still muddling along. Bumblebees don’t do (very) high speeds. But they can do bee lines. I hope we are homing in on this revision directly and purposefully now, remembering our principles but cutting out the clutter we have built up.
There are specific issues to address. Why after all these years, have we still not worked out that Young Friends General Meeting (YFGM) are Quakers? That they already do belong, by being here, doing it? Many of them are already better at practising Quaker ways than we older ones. There may be practical matters to sort out, such as pastoral care, although they are also doing that already for each other, as shown in their work since 2014 on mental wellbeing, and more recently, on recognising racism. They use social media to keep in touch, since their lives are still moving, between education, training and jobs. The structure that suits most older Friends, settled householders, of applying to an Area Meeting (AM) for membership, and being listed as attending worship in a Local Meeting (LM), is irrelevant for many young Friends. They participate in worship with YFGM in intense bursts at weekend gatherings. Only rarely do many older Friends experience the benefits of extended time together, at Woodbrooke or Swanwick or Yearly Meeting Gathering. Then we return to our local Meetings re-charged, re-affirmed in our identity as Quakers. So why don’t we credit the Young Friends’ identity as Quakers? In time they may become settled householders and migrate from the YFGM list to the AM/LM list. And they may not. We all have different journeys to make. But surely it is very little risk to recognise their status and admit them to membership of the Society now, with YFGM being an equivalent to an AM? Far greater the risk of discouraging their ongoing participation by withholding full membership.
Another problem is demonstrated by the Sustainability Group, set up by Meeting for Sufferings to oversee the implementation of the 2011 Canterbury Commitment. It was stranded in isolation from all the other compartments of the Quaker structure, without staff or a budget of its own. Nobody intended that the group should fail but, with hindsight, it is evident that it would struggle. Sustainability was not even in the terms of reference of most of the other central committees – until this was seen in 2017 by Britain Yearly Meeting (BYM) trustees and rectified. So, despite the 2011 Commitment, it is not altogether surprising that Quaker Life, Stewardship, Property and Finance etc had not considered it.
An even greater issue is that Yearly Meeting discerns momentous commitments to action (the renewed commitment to economic justice of YM 2015 is another example) then asks Meeting for Sufferings (MfS) to implement them and to co-ordinate them. MfS itself cannot by its nature co-ordinate anything. It is a shifting group of 100 people, half of them strangers to each other, meeting briefly a few times a year usually for just a few hours. With the greatest of skill, the clerks and arrangement committee and Friends House staff choreograph how to present information and suggest how the business might be handled, to enable discernment. The actual co-ordination has to be carried out by central committees and staff (if we give them the money); the actual work discerned has to be carried out by ‘the Quaker on the bench’. But too many Quakers on the bench are too busy servicing over-elaborate Quaker business structures to do very much of the work we would like to be doing.
Our current book of discipline contains one sad little diagram of our structures. It is simplified, and shows only some of the committees, and some of the feedback loops, and the most significant is in a tiny font, easily overlooked. It seems to me if you cannot draw a clear diagram of a society’s structure, then it is likely that there is structural problem.
Recently, I decided to find out what people meant when they talked about a ‘blockchain.’ I had thought it might be related to the principle of a block and tackle, whereby significant work can be done with less effort by distributing the load. Sadly no, I find it is a computer programme using a decentralised and non-hierarchical model to record transactions, known as a distributed ledger. This was originally developed for trading in cryptocurrencies (the best known being Bitcoin) but is now also used for more benign trading, such as the flows in a local energy network.
Each transaction is a block of data added to the chain. The chain is a network of nodes, with the new block added to and checked by every node/computer. This requires an enormous amount of computing power, because each transaction entails: data sent by buyer and seller; data received; data checked; data confirmed; date shared with whole network; consensus on whole network achieved; block added to chain at each node as a record; chain now ready for next transaction.
It occurred to me that perhaps our structures are a special blend of several models. We are not exactly centralised, despite our dependence on (and occasionally ill-founded resentment of) Friends House or BYM trustees; nor are we a simple hierarchy, despite the individual-local meeting-area meeting-national or regional meeting-yearly meeting structure, because – as that sad diagram does show – the individual Friend is a full member of, and directly in, Yearly Meeting at the very top of the hierarchy.
Quaker action starts as an individual concern. The direction of leadership springs from the grassroots. Yet despite our individual consciences, we are not operating as a blockchain, with fully-dispersed, equally-powered and fully-transparent transactions, as in a distributed ledger. Our structures can present a multi-layered barrier, more or less incomprehensible until you are well inside it.
I am not a manager nor a strategic thinker, but I spent much of my life surveying old buildings to understand the underlying structure, and then removing the piecemeal alterations that made the building difficult to use for the way we want to live nowadays. I think we may need an analogous process in the Society of Friends. The stories we tell ourselves affect how we feel. An appropriate analogy may be attractive or repugnant, and selected for that reason.
Rather than thinking of a wall confronting the bumblebees bringing a concern, we could think of a net, itself made up of bumblebees, forming a sieve. The sieve bumblebees consider the size and shape of the concern, how brightly it is burning, how many bumblebees are combining to bring it, and then they work together to open the mesh to admit the concern. Or perhaps it’s a spiritual safety net, preventing a damaging fall.
You might ask ‘But who appoints the sieve bumblebees?’ until you remember that all of us are bumblebees, we appoint each other, and any of us may be appointed as a sieve bumblebee for a time.
So after all, a blockchain may be a suitable analogy: the data is our minutes going back and forth, the nodes are various groupings/nests of Quakers, and the effectiveness of the whole system depends on each bumblebee playing its part fully. It requires a lot of energy to maintain, but it has the potential to achieve much more than a top-down hierarchy where those nearer the bottom are not fully engaged, and those near the top may be group-thinking or stuck in a rut. The whole colony flourishes when each bee plays its part.
Frances, a former BYM trustee.
Comments
The flight of bumblebees is very well understood, and (of course) accords perfectly with the laws of aerodynamics. The confusion came about because biologists modelled insect wings as if they were like kites, rather than as powered aerofoils like propellers. To be fair, a complete a analysis of bumblebee flight was only made about 20 years ago.
Meanwhile, bumblebees are only just eusocial, and live in small, rather disorganised nests, dominated by aggressive queens, or are solitary. I do wonder what this comparison is supposed to be saying about Quakers!
By Keith Braithwaite on 8th June 2021 - 12:38
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