CHAPTER 8

Assessment of the Organizational Infrastructure

In 1876 Army Major Henry Robert was asked to lead a public meeting at his local church. Conducting public meetings was not an activity the major was accustomed to, and he approached the task with some trepidation. He was no doubt used to military order and discipline, and he wasn’t prepared for the chaos that went with public meetings. People spoke when they felt like it, and they listened when they felt like it. The major felt that holding open public meetings was a highly inefficient way to accomplish anything. He struggled through his meeting, but he told people later that he had fully lost control and, in the end, hadn’t accomplished any of his goals.

As his military career advanced, the major continued to travel extensively throughout the United States working with local governments and the public, and his need to speak at public events continued. As he traveled, he also found that different geographic regions of the country followed different customs when conducting meetings, and this just added more confusion when working with different groups of people. There was no structure or rule to govern how people interacted, and public gatherings were so unproductive that he believed they were a waste of time. Most people of his day felt that real work was accomplished only behind closed doors, but this wasn’t a very good image for the major’s meetings that were supposed to be open to the ge....Robert’s Rules of Order.Robert’s Rules of Order