No Material Available

On Monday, October 15, we will be meeting in Salem for our Annual Council Retreat. There are a number of agenda items, from Health Care, to endowments, to the role of committees and boards. What catches my eye of course is one of the first items: Tillicum Wawa, which should read Tilixam Wawa, but maybe I’m being picky.
Council has always held retreats right around this time of year. Usually, our goal(s) are just that, setting goals. I remember the 2004 retreat being semi-productive. The 2005 version was very productive, although maybe I think that because we decided then to revamp the Tribal website, near and dear to my heart. The 2006 retreat was…I’m not sure. It just was.
However Council members rate them, our retreats are an annual event. They are one of the few occasions that we can isolate ourselves, merge brainpower, and make a concerted effort at being productive. I actually kind of look forward to the 2007 retreat on Monday, except for one thing.
That one thing really is that until Tuesday of last week I didn’t realize we even had a retreat scheduled. Personal obligations made me miss the scheduling meeting last Monday when it was unveiled that we would be having this retreat. My own understanding was that this Monday we would be reviewing the Strategic Planning Conference which took place last week. But I guess my understanding was off.
People reading this will probably think I am confused. I am. You see, over the past two years there was generally some notice given to Council members of the retreat, in fact we would try to arrive at some consensus over dates and topics. Two Council members are on travel Monday. They won’t even be there. I didn’t even see the agenda until Friday. If there are any staff reports or such to go with the agenda I am not clear. The only paperwork I have is the agenda, which indicates I am to show up at Roth’s IGA on Monday morning at 8:30 a.m. At 9:00 we will talk about the Wawa, the content of that publication, frequency, who should contribute, and a few other issues. Of course, until now, I didn’t know there were any issues, period.
I am sure this post appears increasingly unusual, like I am nitpicking over details. But let me explain a few things. Roughly two years ago we hired a company called ECONorthwest to analyze how we ran things. Their scope of work was more than that, obviously, but we really hired them to give us a professional opinion of how we, and by saying we I mean the organization and the Council, were running business. As you probably heard, not all Council members were big fans of theirs. I can speculate at the reason for that, but not right now. The point is our method of conducting business was very flawed, in their opinion, and to be completely honest I tended to agree.
According to them, we reacted to stuff, to events. Not only that, we had a bad habit of scheduling and conducting meetings without any real purpose. We would all meetings on short notice, drag staff from their work to address our issues, and provide unclear, and more importantly, unwritten direction that we may or may not remember a few weeks down the road. We weren’t incompetent, but were not models of efficiency either. Thus the Operating Procedures, limiting of meetings to just Tuesdays and Thursdays, and other minor details.
We were encouraged to develop formal grounds in which to call meetings, as opposed to just scheduling meetings at the request of individual Council members. Also, we were encouraged to have agendas for most meetings, and staff reports or some form of documentation, not only for before the meetings, but after. That way, when staff left they would have a clear idea of what they had been directed to do, as opposed to doing something, generating some sort of report so that a month later they wouldn’t be meeting with Council, only to have us say “No, that’s not what we meant! We meant do this!”
Part of this new way of conducting business involved the creation of our “packets”. The packets are literally packets, a stapled series of reports and updates that are to arrive in our mailboxes the day before meetings so that we might read them and be informed prior to going into meetings. Over the past year, I’ve learned to recognize when meetings are requested by individual Council members. As a new rule of thumb, we won’t hold a meeting requested by staff unless there is a report, background information, and written expectations that are clear and to the point. No report or documentation, then no meeting. When a Council member requests a meeting, those requirements don’t generally apply. Usually a “report” will be nothing more than a single sheet of paper, upon which is printed “Per Capita Discussion” or “Housing Discussion” or something like that, usually followed by lower-case letters reading “No Material Available”. The time slot might be one hour, it might be 15 minutes. More often than not, such meetings tend to be disorganized, unfocused, and occasionally the Council member who requested it is absent, in which case we usually cancel it and re-schedule. Such meetings, to be honest, can be a waste of staff time.
These types of meetings are becoming more frequent, and so I get to my original point of the upcoming Council retreat. All I have is an agenda, and nothing else. I know what time to show up, and what will be discussed, but little else. No material has been provided. Look at the list of 10 or so agenda items, I am not exactly sure what we are hoping to accomplish.
It’s hard not to be cynical. Not because I am an expert in efficiency, or because I myself haven’t wasted time with some odd meeting request. But after three years, I know what doesn’t work, and impromptu, poorly planned meetings, unclear direction, and decisions based on the opinions and desires of single, individual Council members, purely anecdotal, are in that category. Not always, but often.
Maybe I am wrong in my hunch. I’ll show up and find out.