Thanks to everyone who joined the All Hands it was well attended by a variety of members. It ended up running for just over three hours and we covered over 30 questions, which was considerably longer than I planned, but I think the discussion was worth having.

I know quite a few people could not make it, which was one of the reasons for recording it. I have therefore tried to summarise the main discussion below. I have also included some rough timestamps at the bottom if you want to jump around the recording rather than listen to the whole thing.

The direction vs the exact structure

The core problem we are trying to solve is too many decisions have accumulated upwards, too many capable people can see something that needs changing without having the authority or tools to change it, and over time we have built structures and processes which can make fairly ordinary changes unnecessarily difficult.

The aim is still a simpler, faster and more active UNITAF, where responsibility sits much closer to the people actually doing the work.

Freedom to act without UNITAF becoming a free-for-all

One of the first questions was: if lots of Teams and contributors are given more freedom, what stops UNITAF becoming a collection of completely different ideas pulling in different directions?

The answer cannot simply be that the CO and XO approve everything, because that recreates exactly the bottleneck we are trying to remove, only with two people instead of several.

At the other extreme, complete independence with no common direction would obviously create its own problems.

The middle ground is a clearer common set of principles. People should have considerable freedom within the area they have responsibility for, coordinate directly when their decisions affect somebody else, and only need leadership to resolve the relatively small number of genuine deadlocks or wider issues.

A charter is something I intend to complete with the incoming leadership.

Leadership has to be active

There was a direct question about what happens if the new CO or XO simply stop doing the job.

We have historically been too willing to let people, myself included, remain in positions after their available time has changed. That cannot continue where other people depend on the role.

I talked about some fairly basic expectations for the new leadership: being present, bringing the people running UNITAF together regularly, communicating what is happening, and getting back to regular public updates and SITREPs.

If those basic responsibilities are not being carried, then we will change the leadership again.

The Roadmap should stop being the answer to everything

This became quite a substantial discussion.

The Roadmap has value, particularly where something is genuinely complicated, crosses a lot of areas or needs a durable decision record. But we have gradually turned it into the default destination for far too much.

That means somebody with an idea can end up interacting with a process rather than the people they actually need to work with, and relatively straightforward changes can sit waiting for months.

I went as far as saying that most of what currently ends up on the Roadmap probably should not need to be there. If something sits within your responsibility, the default should increasingly be to speak directly to anybody affected, work it out and do it.

Contribution needs to feel simpler than we have made it sound

Most people do not need to organisationally contribute at all. They can turn up, deploy and enjoy UNITAF.

For somebody who does want to contribute, it should increasingly be:

We may have removed more than administration in 2023

A particularly interesting part was the discussion around belonging.

There were good reasons for removing the old Troop system. Different Troops could provide different standards of administration, progression and support depending on who was running them, and centralising those things fixed real problems.

But there may also have been an unintended consequence.

When somebody joined UNITAF previously, they did not simply join a roster of 120 people. They had a Troop, a Section, familiar people around them and somebody who naturally knew who they were.

a “home within the home”.

That does not mean we have decided to restore the old Troop system. It does mean I think there is something important there which we should explore. The same applies to mentoring, buddying, Unisocial and generally creating more human connections rather than expecting a website and Force Manual to provide the entire member experience.

Training, role access and getting people onto operations

This generated a lot of discussion.

A recurring question was whether systems and requirements designed when UNITAF was much busier, particularly during COVID, still make sense when people's available time and the size of the available player pool are different.

That included FTX requirements, access to ORBAT slots, field leadership, mission making and the progression of members through specialist roles.

There was a strong case made for going back through those requirements and asking why each one exists today.

It means being much more willing to distinguish between a rule that genuinely protects the experience and one which was introduced to solve a particular problem several years ago and has simply remained ever since.

A number of more radical ideas were discussed, including wider access to empty slots, learner elements, relaxing one-up/two-up requirements, making more use of the best available person and even allowing candidates greater involvement before completing intake.

We should become much more comfortable trying reversible changes, seeing what actually happens and adjusting them based on the result.

Less policy and more judgement

Later in the meeting I was asked fairly directly whether this reset means UNITAF continuing towards more policy and more realism.

We need less policy, more guidance and more best practice, with considerably more room for human judgement.

Not abandoning realism, standards or what makes UNITAF distinctive. The Charter should provide the broad principles. Rules should exist where consistency genuinely protects something important. Beyond that, we should trust people to exercise judgement and judge things much more by their outcome.

There was an equally important challenge to that from the room: discretion can become inconsistent treatment if we are not careful. Some of the centralisation carried out in 2023 happened precisely because members were receiving different treatment depending on who dealt with them.

So this is a balance. We should not replace an overly rigid system with arbitrary decision-making. Where consistency genuinely matters, it still matters.

Systems need to enable people rather than block them

There was also quite a bit of discussion about the website and the risk that organisational change becomes dependent on months of development.

The broad answer is that we should not wait for a perfect system before changing how we work.

Where development is needed, the longer-term aim should increasingly be to build controls and settings that the people responsible for an area can use themselves, rather than requiring a developer every time somebody wants to change the way their own area works.

The same principle applies here as everywhere else: authority should follow the responsibility.

What happens now

The aim remains to have the new CO and XO leadership around 8 September, alongside a short, durable Charter which gives people a common understanding of the direction and the principles within which they can act. The exact implementation will then be something the new leadership develops with the people around them. I expect them to have their own views on how quickly particular structures should change, and that is healthy.

What I do not expect is another six or twelve-month exercise where we design everything before anything changes.

We are talking about weeks and, for some of the larger changes, perhaps a couple of months, with practical experiments and visible changes happening much sooner where possible. Regular leadership meetings and public updates should also make it considerably easier for everybody to see what is happening.

Most importantly, the discussion is not finished because the All Hands is over. The broad direction is increasingly well developed. A lot of the detail deliberately is not.

Please continue using the Rebuilding Momentum channel to challenge things, suggest alternatives and share experiences as the changes begin. The perspectives we do not currently have, particularly from newer members and people who have not traditionally been involved in organisational discussions, are some of the most useful ones.

Thanks again to everyone who gave up an evening for it.

Recording navigation

These are rough topic markers (in minutes) rather than exact chapters because the conversation moved naturally between subjects.