Click here to read the introduction to the series of posts relating to Decision-making Structures.

Theocracy

From the very first day of Peter, Eileen and Dorothy’s arrival in the “Hollow”[1] , the Community functioned as a theocracy. Guidance, in the form of Eileen’s prophetic visions and practical daily directions, Dorothy’s devic advice, and Peter’s intuition, was inseparably interwoven with the flow of daily life. Dorothy and Eileen wrote down what they received and Peter carried it out. Peter also shared their role in his creation of the garden. The guidance did not always detail directions, yet Peter, once he “had stuck the spade in the soil . . . would know what to do next”. Many ideas actually originated with him, and he then received confirmation from Eileen. No major activities or decisions were undertaken or made unless her guidance gave approval. This pattern would continue essentially unchanged for the next twelve years and is still visible, albeit with greatly varying degrees of skill and attunement, in every level of decision making in the Community today. Essentially, Peter functioned as patriarch of a family.

A Learning Theocracy

The arrival of David Spangler in June 1970 marked the beginning of an extended period of development and population growth that was to last for the next nine years. The first six months of his stay saw a 300% increase in membership followed by a further 100% increase in 1971. He quickly began to share Peter’s role as director and initiator, and Eileen’s role as provider of guidance.

His intuitive and humorous grasp of theory meshed well with Peter’s pragmatic spirituality. This collaboration resulted not only in a theocracy where learning awareness, be it via attunement, running a printing press, or studying spiritual principles and concepts (such as synergy and group consciousness) was the prime focus, but also in a community where spontaneity, creativity and humour were highly prized. This environment would support the Community for the next several years, and despite the growth in membership its success largely eliminated the need to change the structures of governance and decision making.

Thus, the patriarchal structure established at the beginning continued until the spring of 1973 when David and a large group of members left for North America. Despite the increasing complexity (emergence of regular work departments which performed more complex tasks, etc.), Peter still retained a close awareness over day to day activities (though he would gladly let those who knew their business to get on with it) and their co-ordination within a strategic framework. No organisational charts existed as there was virtually no organisation. Peter drew on advisors as needed: aside from the Trustees who met yearly there was only a Finance Committee – everything else was done ad hoc. The major change during this period was of course the 1971 cessation of Eileen’s daily guidance for the Community. She had received that many members were becoming too dependent on her guidance and that it was time that they start turning within to get their own. She continued, however, to provide guidance on major issues and decisions.

The Focalisers Group was created in the late winter of 1973. Peter met with them twice weekly, mostly to explain policy and co-ordinate activities, but also sometimes to decide where a new member should work. Eileen’s abandonment of her previous task meant that Peter was more than ever out front as the role model for many members. Thus Focalisers, even on “kitchen clean-up”, more often than not functioned essentially as little Peters. Their meetings were secret and as a rule neither notes nor minutes were shared in the departments.

A Widening Oligarchy – Core Group

In December 1973, Eileen received guidance to create the Core Group, which also specified who should belong to it. This anticipated the travelling or “planetary work” that Peter and Eileen would be undertaking. It met on average five days a week, though in the beginning it was more of a class for Peter to teach than a decision making group. In the following year when Peter and Eileen’s opportunities to travel and lecture arose, the Core Group then started to come into its own. It held strategic and spiritual awareness and functioned as a management committee. It was also self-perpetuating since its remaining members always chose the replacements for departing ones.

By the beginning of 1975, Peter no longer met regularly with the Focalisers’ Group as the Core Group took up most of his attention. The start of the Universal Hall’s construction required more sophisticated planning and administration which led to several people moving into roles that had previously been occupied only by Peter and a couple of others. A.D. ‘Dick’ Barton had joined in June 1974 as General Secretary with the brief to help the Community deal with its current growth as well as prepare for future expansion. Information which just two years earlier had been tightly restricted was now flowing more easily. Core Group deliberations were still secret, but Focalisers’ notes and discussions no longer were, and were being circulated in work departments and in a Community newsletter, the forerunner of the present day ‘Rainbow Bridge’.

During mid 1974 to mid 1975 various committees including the General Office, and Education Branch were created and the Personnel Department firmly established. The Finance Committee continued its weekly meetings as before. To help smooth the transition to a more complex organisation, Dick began producing the Community’s first ever organisational charts. They served the dual function of illustrating both the layout of the organisation and its cosmological context using some of the symbolism of the Arcane School and that from his own transpersonal experiences[2]. Thus one knew not only one’s location within the Community, but also the Community’s place within the scheme of creation.

Despite the increasing complexity and the spreading of responsibility among a larger number of people, the Community retained its sense of cohesiveness and wholeness. The existence of a strong internal education programme and the fact that leadership flowed more from the ability to teach (both by example and by articulating the application of spiritual principles to daily experiences) helped to create an organisational climate which was essentially educational rather than administrative. If decisions turned out to be mistakes, the attitude was ‘let’s learn from them’; little energy was wasted on assigning blame.

The structure of the Community was now very visible. It would not change radically, despite the ups and downs of membership and guest totals, for the next 14 years. Only in the late summer of 1975 were the first community meetings held on the subject of expansion, brought on as they were by the negotiations to purchase Cluny Hill Hotel. They were only discussion forums since it was understood and accepted that the Core Group would make the final decision. Although community meetings would become an occasional feature of life in the Community, occurring generally at approximately two or three month intervals, they were generally used to discuss and ratify processes. (Important exceptions were decisions such as hosting the World Wilderness Conference and buying the Caravan Park.) In general terms this pattern would continue on into 1987.

Expansion

The subsequent purchase of Cluny and the arrival, on average, of over 7,000 weekly guests during each of the next four years and the simultaneous doubling of the membership to over 300 resulted in a bloating of the management and administrative structure. Problems were compounded by the high turnover in administrators – a feature which exists to this day. Peter was often away on tour and thus inexorably began to lose touch with the detailed workings of the Community’s organisation. Although his intention was to hand over day to day running to the Core Group, he in fact found it difficult to do so. Too often on returning from trips he would find himself confronted with people in positions who he did not know or decisions of which he did not approve. The temptation to step in or to only deal with those people he did know was often too much to resist. One example was his raiding of several departments for people to start the renovation of Drumduan when the Core Group had previously decided that the Cluny renovations and the Hall construction should be completed first. Through his actions he undermined both the authority and the morale of the people he wanted to take responsibility for the Community.

The antiquated accounting system could not keep up with the expansion, resulting in regular twelve to twenty week delays in providing monthly reports, which made it difficult to impose spending controls and meant that important decisions were often taken without accurate financial information. The establishment of a Management Committee in place of the old Finance Committee in late 1976 was intended to help stem the flow of red ink as was the creation in 1978 of a Management/Finance Department. The best that could be said was that it managed the flow of red ink, essentially prolonging the day of reckoning. It was difficult to deal with this last problem because Peter considered the debt a temporary blip to be solved by purchasing yet another property to be opened up as a workshop centre. (He could not accept that in 1979 for the first time there was a small but noticeable decline in the number of guests). In other words consolidation through expansion. Some, such as the Personnel focaliser, wanted to reduce the membership to 240 from the current 320 and revitalise internal education. Others thought all that was needed to resolve both issues was to re-organise the structure, so much of the spring and summer of that year was engaged in a series of discussions about a number of competing re-organisation proposals. None of them were ever adopted.

In the late spring 1979 when Peter called all the members of Personnel, Management, Core Group, Education Branch, Internal Trustees and Focalisers to a meeting in Drumduan to introduce François Duquesne as his successor, there were nearly 60 people or more than 20% of the Community’s adult population present in the room. The over-manning of administration could not have been more apparent.

At the end of the fiscal year 1979, the reality of the financial crisis hit home. Membership as well as guest numbers fell drastically following Peter’s departure and for two years the Foundation tottered on the edge of bankruptcy. An advantage of this was the lightening of the administrative load. Committees such as Core Group and Management with up to 40% fewer members began functioning more swiftly and efficiently. Despite the difficult financial circumstances, and greatly aided by the “Village Council”[3] the sense of Community identity remained strong; decision-making remained apolitical and unencumbered by long consensus building processes. Thus as the financial problems were gradually sorted out, the Community was by 1983 able to complete the Universal Hall, host the World Wilderness Congress, and make the big commitment to purchase the Caravan Park. These decisions were quickly arrived at with great unanimity of purpose.

Grass Roots Involvement

In 1983 Jay Jerman took over Foundation focalisation from François. During his three years in the job little changed in terms of decision making and management. Two groups were added: the Land Commissioners to oversee the right and non-exploitive use of the Foundation’s properties, and the Village Environment Group (now called Park Planning Group) to act as the Community equivalent to the Planning Committees that are found in local governments throughout the western world. Whereas François had had to devote the majority of his time to sorting out the Foundation’s finances and arranging the caravan park purchase, Jay was able to focus much more on the membership which, following the successful fundraising campaign, resulted in a strengthening of our sense of collective identity and purpose. Community meetings did not occur very often and still tended to be relaxed affairs; Park Family Meetings functioned nearly as much as tea and scone “socials” as formal meetings.

Developments which had commenced in the mid 1980’s, such as the Design Studio becoming a privately run business, and the shifting of profit oriented departments such as the Phoenix into the separate New Findhorn Directions Ltd, continued[4]. These developments as they multiplied resulted in a manifold increase in social and organisational complexity. No longer was it possible for many members to talk knowledgeably about every area of the Community. Additionally those former members taking businesses into the private sector also wanted to maintain some form of connection with the Foundation which was often symbolised by the wish to continue eating in the Community Centre. There were also an increasing number of individuals moving into the area who wanted to associate themselves with the Foundation yet were not willing to become full-time members. These two groups formed the core of what was to become the Associates of the Foundation.

In 1986 Jay released the Foundation focalisation which was taken on by Craig Gibsone. Craig did not initially acquire the unanimity of support that François and Jay had received, and partly as an experiment he encouraged others to move into this role as well. Craig, Roger Benson and Joan Jerman created a joint three-way focalisation for a while. Though this idea worked well, for the first time Community decision-making had become more overtly political. There were two contributing social factors that tended to encourage this:

1. a number of long term members who had been here since the early 70’s and provided stability and continuity returned to North America; and
2. the Foundation’s own internal education programme had focused progressively less on its own history (particularly its organisation and its ideas) allowing several generations of new members entry with little, even rudimentary understanding of how it had been working with the issues of authority and power for the previous fifteen years.

Decisions were no longer educational opportunities, but matters that almost took on life and death importance. From this point through 1993 a relaxed community meeting became a rare event.

In this difficult period Craig’s long association with the Community helped give him the confidence to experiment. He encouraged the dissolving of part of the Foundation’s boundaries, allowing the Community to expand beyond them. In 1989, the Core Group was selected by the membership for the first time and its executive powers and responsibilities transferred to the Management Committee. It was to become a meditation group, responsible for “holding” the spiritual vision of the Community. Out of this process came the concept of the “mandate”; meaning that all important positions such as Education, Administration, Foundation Focalisers as well the members of Personnel all had to have community-wide approval before they could take up their positions. The vacuum of experience and education had resulted in a form of participatory democracy that did not often give authority. Increasingly those members sitting in leadership positions complained of being given lots of responsibilities but no authority to carry them out. Consequently, the number of community meetings exploded such that by 1990-91 schedules of community meetings were drawn up a year in advance.

Foundation and Community

By 1990 the identity of the “Community” had outgrown the Foundation: it was simply too small to contain it any longer. This “open” Community contained many different parts such as NFD, private businesses and individuals working closely with the Foundation, and the Foundation itself. As businesses shifted into NFD members became employees and the Foundation membership slowly declined towards 120 (it sometimes became necessary to hire employees to fill positions that could not be filled from the membership), the tensions of a mixed employment system simmered. In late 1990 and throughout 1991 they broke into a full boil where in numerous meetings many members complained of their loss of privileges (the average new member paid up to £4,000 for the first two years of membership) to employees and associates who were either paid or paid little for their “membership” in the Community.

The creation of the Development Wing and Building Department with its special rates and agreements further fuelled the debate. The beginnings of a resolution began during the Planetary Game held in the Hall in December 1991. By playing the Game together, the associates, members and employees of the Foundation and NFD got, for the first time, a sense of their essential, collective identity. In the two years since then this particular debate has virtually ceased and long term associates, employees and long term subscribers of the Open Community “programme” have been welcomed into the “selectorate[5]” of Community members who choose the Foundation focaliser and ratify important decisions.

In early 1991, based on the success of the Development Wing[6] and on the need to get the lumbering, politicised and increasingly diffuse organisation moving again, it was decided to reorganise the Foundation structure into three “wings”; Education, Development and NFD. The focaliser of each together with the Foundation focaliser and the General Secretary were to meet fortnightly as the Admin. Group. An added factor was that Craig Gibsone had released Foundation focalisation at the beginning of the year. Judith Bone took it on in a caretaking capacity as the focaliser of Core Group. For the first time in its history the Community had a group leadership with no one strong individual guiding it. The next Foundation Focaliser would be Judy Buhler-McAllister who took it on in late spring 1992 after returning from sabbatical.

Admin. met for two years and its members, for the most part, established a good working relationship with each other. But this tended to mean that the communication between the different parts of the organisation took place only at the top. Thus if there was a problem between the Building Department and the Education Branch Committee, the focalisers did not talk directly to each other, but rather handed it on to their Wing focalisers who took it to Admin. This round-about communication was frustrating as it sometimes meant that a focaliser would first hear of a problem only after someone else had taken it to Admin.

In early 1993, there was a general feeling that the “Wing System” had fulfilled its function but that a more thorough re-organisation was necessary in order to encourage continued development of the educational programmes. In the resulting shake-up Administration (Personnel, Finance & Accounts, Asset Management, Building, Public Relations, etc.) was separated from Education so that its staff could concentrate on its own administration (brochures, programme co-ordination, logistics, etc.), income making programmes (Guest Department, workshops, trainings, Outreach, etc.), and its “campuses” (Cluny, Park, Hall, Erraid, etc.). Admin. was replaced by a new Management Committee which consisted of the Foundation, Administration, Education focalisers, the NFD managing director and the focalisers of Cluny and the Park.

As the year progressed Patrick Nash, its first focaliser, was able to pull Administration together and start to give it a sense of coherency and focus. Education proved more intractable[7] as it became apparent that though the old structure had been disposed of nothing much had really changed. The people who still worked in it merely continued with the “organisation in the mind” much in the same way the citizens of the re-united Germany have to deal with what they call the “wall in the mind”. The clearest example of this was the new Faculty Group which quickly became a clone of the old Education Branch Committee assiduously ploughing through its agenda and just as assiduously ignoring its brief to revitalise the Foundation’s internal and external educational programmes.

Further impetus was provided by David Spangler in a lecture given to the Community in late July where he warned, among other things, of institutionalisation, passivity, and of becoming a retirement home for the new age. His comments lent support to those critical of the current status quo within the Foundation; particularly within Education. Within five weeks Loren Stewart, the Education focaliser, called together a group of members from mostly outside the Education edifice (although including some from within it) to address this. This group met from September through the winter, revamping the organisation and giving it more flexibility and much more focus on internal education, both formally (lectures, classes) and “living” (regular work departments). At the time of this writing the question of who will fill which roles is still being worked out, but the changes are already being implemented. What long term effects these changes will have remains to be seen.

As the writer concludes this document in late March 1994 change is in the air, the future direction of the Foundation finely balanced. Peter Caddy’s death in an automobile accident near his home in Germany a month ago marked the end of an era. The Internal Conference in February was one of the most harmonious in several years: a de-politicisation of decision making appears underway. The membership is changing yet again with something of a mini-exodus, as has happened so often in the past, taking place. The vital growth of the wider Community; the strengthening of NFD, the evolution of former Foundation departments such as Trees For Life and the Holistic Health Centre into separate organisations; the continued challenges of providing excellence in education; and the difficult relations with many of the residents of Findhorn Village illustrate that many of the Foundations old structures and customs are out of date. The era of the Founders is drawing to a close. The membership of today faces the task of redefining, re-articulating and, most importantly, learning to embody the Foundation’s vision and purpose.

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[1] The north-west corner of the Findhorn Bay Caravan Park where the ‘original caravan’ came to rest.
[2] In line with the Community’s education culture, Dick created an Admin study group, known as the Red Group. Though it met only for six months, it conducted the first essential theoretical and planning discussions on how we might run Cluny Hill Hotel in the event we purchased it. Its members shared their deliberations with friends and in work departments, thereby supporting the discussions about the possible Cluny purchase going on in the Community.
[3] Most of whose members were not part of the administrative structure. Created in part as a response to the management failures of the late 70’s, it served as a discussion forum that provided useful feedback for François and Core Group. It met through most of 1980 and had dissolved itself by mid 1981.
[4]The reasons for this are complex. They ranged from the zeitgeist (it was the high noon of “privatisation” in the UK), through the strictures of Scottish charitable law, and Home Office requirements that only EC nationals be allowed to undertake commercial employment.
[5]The list of those on the selectorate is being kept up-to-date for future Core Group selection procedures and as a guide to those eligible to attend certain community meetings. It is essentially made up of members of the Foundation plus a number of long-term Community members living in the locality
[6]Its focaliser Patrick Nash had turned it into a minimally structured, smoothly functioning department, so it was hoped that the same thing could be done with the Education apparatus including all the Foundation work departments.
[7] Most of its structures and working culture dated back to the mid 1970’s. In nearly twenty years there had been close to ten almost complete changes of personnel. This regular change of generations had resulted in a highly structured, institutionalised mechanism which lacked the flexibility to perceive and respond to the needs of the membership, focusing primarily on visitors education instead.