Anne's Blog of Order: introducing a new mini-series on becoming governable

Arguably the correct format for this is TikTok but I refuse to create short-form video content

Robert’s Rules of Order, Newly Revised, 12th Edition (2020), is the current gold standard for organizations running meetings

At the meeting for the Kwartzlab Board of Directors that I attended last night (in my current role as Secretary of the Board), I joked at one point that “someday I’m going to actually read Robert’s Rules of Order and become truly unstoppable, I will win every argument I get into, it’s going to be great for me and insufferable for everyone around me”

And someone else on the board said, you know, we have a copy on the bookshelf in the front room.

After the meeting I found it on the bottom shelf, under some other books and several years’ worth of dust. It’s a paperback and now that I have begun reading it I feel fairly confident that nobody else has actually opened this particular paperback copy with the intent of reading it.

Someone did make an offhand remark along the lines of, it might be more effective to read a version “for dummies”. I took that as a challenge, obviously. I want it straight from the source. Since then I have learned that it is a reference book. It is dense like reading an entire encyclopedia in page order starting on page one. I will not back down.

I have not made it to the actual rules yet. Here is what I have learned from the book so far:

1. Henry M. Robert became interested in how organizations run meetings over 150 years ago. The first edition of this book was published in 1876. After he retired from the military, he “devoted the last decade of his life to writing on parliamentary procedure” - which I suspect is not a very neurotypical thing to do (affectionate). His daughter continued the work after him, and his grandson Henry M. Robert III now does the same and is the lead author of this edition I am reading.

2. The current edition is ebook optimized, meaning that you can cite it by chapter and paragraph (the example looks a lot like the Bible), instead of by page number.

3. There are 20 sections across 650+ pages. It is meant to comprehensively cover every scenario one might encounter in a parliamentary meeting. If you want the “for dummies” version, you want instead the rules “In Brief” which is separately published and takes 30-90 minutes to read. I don’t have that version.

4. The Revised rules are from 1915 and the Newly Revised from 1970. I need to look up what US copyright laws said about books published 40 years ago in 1915, and count how many years are between the author’s death in 1923 and the edition that was released in 1970, to evaluate this chronology.

In conclusion, like, comment, subscribe

I will let you know if the rules are any good but I have only made it to page xxv at the time of this writing so it may be a bit. Until next time!