What is your club’s objective?

The report and video, Why sailboat racing is dying in America, prompted a lot of feedback. This report comes from Geoff Chambers M.B.A. of Fremantle, Western Australia:

Sailing’s decline is occurring because ‘literally’ it simply doesn’t matter. Let me explain…

Years ago I attended a strategic plan announced by a large yacht club responding to 13 successive years of declining participation in its keelboat racing.

The grand plan, wait for it, drum roll, cheers, etc – to cut the racing program to only every second weekend! Call me strategically old fashioned but that was a plan to accommodate a decline in participation not to reverse it.

I studied strategy at MBA level and there’s some basic concepts to learn that seem obvious in hindsight but aren’t understood by laypersons.

This is beautifully illustrated by a famous tale when President Kennedy asked a worker at NASA what his job was, he replied: “I’m helping put a man on the moon”.

It turned out this person was a janitor.

It seems so bleed’n obvious that we all want sailing to be more popular, but how many yacht clubs or sailing associations in the world actually has that as its declared purpose?

Instead, they are like if NASA had as its Mission Statement: “to provide leadership and encouragement in fostering those who would like to land on the moon”

It sounds like I’m being cynical if not sarcastic but just as the saying goes “fish rot from the head”, if the organization’s stated objective is ambiguous or meaningless or avoidant then don’t come complaining when the very thing you want it to achieve isn’t achieved.

The yacht club I refer to had as its Mission Statement: “to be the blue water club of choice for members”

Now that might sound warm and fuzzy and well-meaning but it is in fact meaningless to the point it can be achieved, if it could ever be measured, by reducing membership to exclude those with another favorite club or who join for the bon homie of the galley. It could be achieved with a membership of two! Success is nigh!

The starting point to arresting the decline in sailing is to make increasing participation the organization’s purpose. Make it your purpose “to increase participation in sailing.”

Never mind you haven’t currently got a clue how to achieve that just yet. That is not the point. It’s the same for finding a cure for polio or putting a man on the moon. Just because you don’t know how to cure polio doesn’t mean that curing it shouldn’t be your guiding purpose.

Or for cancer; if you make it your flaky mission ‘to provide comfort and leadership for supporting people with cancer’, there is actually no imperative to find a cure. In fact, your organization expands if there’s more cancer! But if finding a cure is the right thing do do, then damn well say so – “our purpose is to end cancer”

There are actually lots of things that can be done to increase participation in sailing but with ambiguous, avoidant, and fluffy statements of purpose, it’s no wonder yacht clubs put more effort into balancing the books of their catering departments while their marinas become storage facilities for little used boats.

The starting point to arresting the decline in sailing is to change the statement of purpose in the Constitutions of every sailing association and club to be:

“Increase participation in sailing”

Just imagine you asked the barman or janitor at your club what their job was and they replied, “I’m increasing participation in sailing.” How incredibly different that would be to the way things are today.

Currently, if you asked a member of any committee what the purpose of the club or national association is, they probably wouldn’t know, and if you then asked what contribution they believe they are making, they’d probably insert their own pressing objective – “to boost patronage of the galley”, or some such.

If we really want participation in sailing to not just recover, but to thrive, then there is no other first step than to enshrine as our uniting purpose: “increase participation in sailing”.

It really is that simple.

Anything less is not just planning to fail, it’s why we are failing.