Some time ago, I paraphrased an old adage on e-list M-Pol: "The first casualty of a political agenda is truth." In the course of reconsidering that statement, I changed my view on it substantially.
Political agendas, often hidden, all seek to convert dissenting views to the view of the person or body that proposes the agenda. When I gave consideration to examples with which I was familiar and had encountered within Mensa, I discovered that for the most part these were less Machiavellian than I had at first thought. Most of the examples I remembered had less to do with achieving hidden objectives than they had to do with not achieving any objectives at all, whilst providing the apparent diligence of a task well done.
The most recent example of this phenomenon is the review of the International Constitution, undertaken by Mensa International, Ltd. (MIL), which failed on its first attempt but was resurrected in its second and is at present ongoing. This review has no context. We are uncertain whether we are to visit the International Constitution to check it for spelling errors or to improve its grammar. We have no means of knowing what the outcome of such a review might be, so we'll have no means of knowing if we have completed the task successfully — or not.
In any case, the problems in Mensa International do not lie solely with the Constitution or even initially with it; and so reforming the Constitution without addressing the related issues will achieve very little, apart from giving the appearance of addressing the problems.
If we are to achieve anything substantial, we must look at three issues that are related:
- The organisation structure
- The organisation management
- The Constitution
At present, the structure is one of a multiplicity of legal entities unrelated in law. MIL, BML (British Mensa, Ltd.), AML (American Mensa, Ltd.) and all the other National Mensas, Provisional Mensas and Emerging Mensas are not in any sense related except by sentiment. Therefore, the various management groups and, in particular, the international one, become fragmented and ineffective. The Constitution makes promises that it cannot keep because each of the Mensas is an independent body, whose first allegiance is to the law of the particular land in which it resides and whose second allegiance is to the membership within that territory.
British Mensa, Limited is a company limited by guarantee. This means that the company — and, therefore, the society — is owned by all of the members of British Mensa, including Irish Mensa and Channel Islands Mensa. This company may not be governed by, or dictated to, or have its policies set by people who are neither owners nor directors of it. Similar constraints are established over other National Mensas.
The problem with this establishment is that it is neither one thing nor the other — "not fish nor fowl nor good red meat." It may work as a franchise or as a multi-national organisation, but it cannot work as a franchised structure with a multi-national management. The Constitution at present does not mandate what organisational structure must be in place other than nominating the title of four officers; however, it does support a loosely defined form of a federation of National Mensas. And it is this fact that lies at the heart of the dichotomy between the structure extant and the International Constitution.
For Mensa to ever amount to anything beyond the present static-to-dwindling establishment, it has to get its act together globally — unite as a single entity, which is Mensa. We are not British Mensans or Australian Mensans or American Mensans; we are simply Mensans.
Toward this end, we could establish a single holding company — Mensa
International Ltd. (MIL) — a company limited by share guarantee;
and every Mensan on the planet would be an equal shareholder of that company. In
each location, or
sensibly established geographic region, separate companies that would
be wholly owned subsidiaries of MIL could be established to address local
and regional issues, much in the way that BML presently manages British
Mensa matters. This would mean, however, that BML was not owned by British
Mensans but wholly owned by MIL.
The management of MIL would be much as it is today, with membership records and subs collection being administered within each region (although I'd be inclined to have, for instance, Mensa Europe be administered from Wolverhampton). Think of it as a bit like IBM. The New York headquarters sets global policy and the various IBM companies around the world set local policy.
Once this structure was set and the management of it resolved, we'd need a Constitution that reflected that reality. Then we could have a Constitution that was enforceable by law. It also would allow us to address the issues relevant to critical size of regional Mensas.
At present, the staff goes hopping around the globe trying to start up new national Mensas; but, as soon as one gets off the ground with a half-dozen volunteers, it then gets abandoned because MIL can't provide enough development help for provisional or national Mensas. Unless those groups rapidly reach the critical size to afford professional administration, they atrophy. Indeed, other than in the USA and UK, Mensa has a negligible presence anywhere. This is because our organisational structure and our management structure are useless for a global society. It is not due to flaws in our Constitution; it is because our Constitution does not reflect the organisational structure or the organisational management our society has assumed.
This review is the result of a political agenda, yet there is no great nefarious purpose behind it. It is simply an exercise in wheel spinning: One keeps looking for the hamster.