Leisure in the Age of Technology

I was nine years old and a computer had just found me a friend.

This was 1988, at World Expo in Brisbane, and the computer in question was one of the Telecom touchscreens I remember were scattered around the site. I don’t remember what I typed. I remember that it matched me with a girl from somewhere in Scandinavia, Sweden or Norway, my memory can’t be sure, and that within a few weeks we were writing actual letters to each other. Pen on paper, stamps, more than one on a letter! We kept it up for a couple of years.

I’d completely forgotten about her until I started thinking about this blog.

The reason I mention this is that it had a slogan I was thinking about. Expo 88’s official theme was “Leisure in the Age of Technology.” Not productivity. Not efficiency. Not innovation, disruption, synergy, or any of the words we’d use now. Leisure. The organisers of a world exposition in 1988 looked at the arc of technology and concluded that what it would give us, above everything else, was more time to enjoy ourselves.

Brisbane in 1988 was not the city it is now. People who were there will tell you it was dead after five o’clock. You could fire a cannon down Queen Street on a weeknight and hit nothing but nocturnal pigeons. Expo changed that. Eighteen million visits in six months. The monorail. Laser shows over the river every night. A Japanese pavilion with 3D films. The whole city suddenly discovering it could stay up past dark and have a good time. For a nine-year-old, it was the future arriving all at once, and it was spectacular.

I touched a screen and it responded. This was, I should point out, before anyone had seen or used a touchscreen. I flew a fighter jet in a simulator. I conversed with a car that could talk. I rode a monorail. Every single one of these things promised the slogan: technology was going to make life more fun.

And then I went home and wrote letters to a girl I’d never met, on the other side of the world, because a machine had decided we might get along. She liked skiing and I liked swimming. Sports beginning with S. Perfect match.

That, right there, is the promise working perfectly. A computer doing something a nine-year-old couldn’t do for himself, connecting two people across oceans, and then getting out of the way. The technology did its job and the humans did theirs.

I keep turning this over. We got everything Expo 88 promised. Every single exhibit I saw that day, I now carry in my pocket. The touchscreen. The simulator. The talking car, more or less. The 3D films. I can video-call someone in Scandinavia right now, for free, in high definition, without leaving my chair.

John Maynard Keynes (my second favourite economist- yes I have a ranked list), writing in 1930, predicted that by 2030 his grandchildren would work fifteen-hour weeks. The technology would be so productive, he reasoned, that the main challenge would be figuring out what to do with all the free time. He wasn’t wrong about the technology. He was wrong about humans.

By most measures, leisure time in developed countries hasn’t meaningfully increased since the 1980s. We have machines that can write our emails, manage our calendars, file our taxes, and order our groceries. We work the same hours. We commute longer. We spend our evenings answering messages from the office on the same device we use to watch films. The technology arrived. Where’s the leisure?

Nine-year-old me would find this baffling. He’d look at the phone in my hand, with more processing power than everything at the whole Expo site combined, and ask one question: “So you’ve got all this... and you’re busier?”

Fair question, kid.

Old me works with croquet clubs. Volunteer-run, mostly older membership, often operating on committee structures that haven’t changed much since the clubs were founded 100 odd years ago. Good people, whole-heartedly committed, giving their time because they love the sport.

Here is what a lot of that time goes to: bookkeeping. Bank reconciliation. Typing up meeting minutes at eleven o’clock at night. Writing agendas. Distributing agendas. Chasing responses to agendas. Filing receipts. Updating spreadsheets. Renewing registrations. Formatting newsletters. None of it is croquet.

A treasurer spends hours a week on the books. A secretary types minutes on Sunday mornings when she’d rather be doing almost anything else. These are retired people who joined a croquet club to play croquet, and a meaningful portion of their volunteer hours goes to tasks that a computer could handle, or at least reduce to a few minutes of oversight.

This is where I come back to the slogan. “Leisure in the Age of Technology.” What would it actually look like if we took that seriously? Not as a nostalgic idea from a world fair, but as a design principle for running a sporting club/organisation in 2026?

Imagine the minutes just... happened. Someone records the meeting, the transcript gets structured, the action items get pulled out, the document appears in the shared folder. Sunday morning croquet instead.

The books balance themselves overnight. Transactions matched, reports generated, the treasurer reviews a summary instead of reconciling line by line. She checks it with her coffee on Monday. Four hours a week becomes ten minutes.

A new person in the area who fancies a hit finds the nearest club, sees when they play, and books themselves in. No committee member receives a phone call. No organisation needed, the person turns up with a smile, a hat and a pair of flat shoes.

This is 2026 and it isn’t science fiction anymore. The technology exists. The gap isn’t capability of the machines. It’s the gap Keynes missed- having the tools is not the same as making the decision to use them for leisure.

I don’t know if my pen pal remembers me. I don’t even know her name anymore, which is a strange thing to admit about someone I wrote to for about two years as a kid. The letters stopped at some point, the way things do when you’re eleven and the world keeps moving.

But that’s the version of technology I want for croquet clubs. The version that handles the minutes so the secretary can play on Monday morning, and connects a curious person with a club near their house, and then disappears. Technology that does its job and leaves.

The slogan said “Leisure in the Age of Technology.” Not technology in the age of technology. The leisure was supposed to be the point. Are we missing that?

Harvard economist Michael Jensen calls the profit motive a “single-valued objective function.” When everyone in an organisation is playing a game where success is measured by the same underlying metric, it is easier to cooperate. Profit is like gravity because we are familiar with it as a basic principle. It is the underlying current that keeps even the most politically fractured, messy companies moving forward. It even kept the Soviet Union running past its use-by date through the black market economy system known as blat.

Now, think what happens when the profit motive removed.

When volunteer organisations and not-for-profits are formed, the profit motive is stripped out and nothing is put in its place to serve that singular aligning role. We keep the org charts, the committees, and the monthly meetings, operating under the assumption that the machinery will just keep running on good intentions of those operating it.

Instead, the profit motive vacuum is filled by fragmentation.

Without a singular, universally agreed-upon ideal, aim or goal, every volunteer naturally drifts toward their own personal definition of what matters most to them. This is where the trouble starts.

These are all rational, well-intentioned people who care deeply about the game or their club. And yet, they end up pulling the organisation apart.

The dysfunction is not a personality issue; it’s an architectural one.

Photo by Amsterdam City Archives on Unsplash

Without a shared bearing on a direction, every discussion and decision devolves into a proxy war over what the fundamental purpose of the club is. As Peter Drucker famously observed, without a bottom line, non-profits will inevitably substitute busyness for actual results.

The framework I proposed uses the IDEALS to mimic the assistance that businesses get by default from the profit motive. For croquet they are:

1. Enjoy Croquet,
2. Keep It Simple,
3. Hit Our Aims, and
4. Co-operate for Croquet.

While all four have their own purposes, one of them specifically does the heavy lifting of the profit motive: Hit Our Aims.

“Hit our aims” is the single question every committee member should be able to hold up against any decision: Does this specific action move us toward the destination we all agreed on?

But there is a catch. This surrogate profit motive only functions if your aims are actually sharp enough to settle an argument. A broad mandate like “be a great club” is practically useless because factions simply project their own desires onto vague language and you are back in year 8 doing definitional debating.

To work, an aim must be definitive and universally agreed. Noosa Croquet Club provides a perfect, pragmatic example of this. They decided their club exists for one measurable reason: so people renew their membership.

It is beautifully blunt. Do new people join, and do existing members stay? Every operational decision is suddenly in service to that single metric.

When Noosa’s president explained how they operated I saw is as perfect structural replacement for profit. Under the Noosa model, competitive players require high-quality lawns because that is what guarantees their renewal. Social players require a welcoming atmosphere because that is what guarantees theirs.

The competition and the social sections are no longer adversaries. They are two parts of the same team, utilising different methods to get the same outcome. Minor disputes over things can now be filtered through a dispassionate lens: Does this help us attract or retain members?

If “Hit Our Aims” provides the destination, the remaining three IDEALS ensure the club survives the journey. Enjoy Croquet ensures that the pursuit of goals doesn’t stop the volunteers burning out. Keep It Simple prevents bureaucratic bloat, prioritising time on the lawns over time in meetings. And Co-operate for Croquet establishes the baseline for resolving the inevitable disagreements without them calcifying into grudges.

A commercial enterprise gets all of these aligning forces from a single result on a financial statement. A volunteer organisation needs to build and agree to them for its purpose.

The next time you find itself locked in a forty-five-minute debate over a matter, step back. You are arguing from a place of unaligned priorities and are cage fighting instead of discussing.

The fix is sitting down, stripping away the assumptions, and agreeing on exactly what your organisation is trying to achieve in language sharp enough to point to the direction you want everyone to go.

He didn’t. He meant the way Bamford looked.

“Your body language, Reg. What you look like is appalling.”

Over dinner that evening, the coach gave Bamford a list of twelve or thirteen things to change. None of them involved croquet. Get a proper haircut. Shave before every match. Iron your shirt. Wear a belt. Clean your shoes. Walk onto court like you belong there. When you play a bad shot, don’t drop your mallet and let your opponent see it.

Two weeks later, Bamford played the British Open at Surbiton. He put on his Springbok blazer as he got out of the car. People came up to him that first morning and said he looked smart. That had never happened before.

Bamford played fantastic croquet that week. He credits a significant part of that success to a dinner conversation that had nothing to do with how to hit a ball.

Look sharp, play sharp.

Iron your shirt. Wear a belt. Clean your shoes.

From player to club

Bamford was talking about himself. But the principle works in exactly the same way for the place.

A croquet club is a physical space that people walk into and form an opinion about within thirty seconds. Before they pick up a mallet. Before they meet a member. Before anyone explains the rules. They’ve already decided whether this feels like somewhere they want to be.

Most clubs don’t think about this. They think about lawns and hoops and scheduling. The clubhouse is glorified storage shed. The honour board hasn’t been updated since 2021. The loan mallets are splintered and the grips are held together with electrical tape.

None of that matters to the people who are already members. They don’t see it anymore. But a visitor sees everything fresh.

The promise clubs make

Seth Godin, the marketing writer, puts it simply: a brand is a promise you made. Consistency means you keep that promise. When you don’t, the brand falls apart.

When a club runs a Come and Try day, or puts an ad on Facebook, or gets mentioned in a local paper, it’s making a promise. The promise is: come to our croquet club and have a good experience. People hear “croquet club” and they picture something. Green lawns, coloured balls, a pleasant afternoon. Something a bit refined. Something worth their Saturday.

That image is doing the selling before the visitor arrives. The ad got their attention. The sign-up system made it easy. But the club has to deliver what was promised.

If someone clicks on a polished ad, fills in a form on a professional-looking website, drives twenty minutes to a club, and finds a faded sign, weedy lawns, a dark clubhouse, and a mallet that looks like it survived a flood, the promise is broken. They might stay for the session out of politeness. They won’t come back.

You’re on a first date. You don’t get a second one if you show up in tracksuit pants.

What “yes, this is a croquet club” feels like

A visitor pulls into the car park. There’s a sign that’s clear and readable. They know they’re in the right place. The path to the clubhouse is obvious. They can see the lawns from the entrance.

They walk in and it feels like somewhere people care about. The noticeboard has this month’s fixtures on it. The kitchen is clean. The clubhouse smells like tea, not neglect. Someone says hello before they’ve had time to feel awkward.

Then they pick up a mallet. It’s got a fresh grip. The head is smooth. It feels like a piece of sporting equipment, not something rescued from a shed. I’ve written about this before: your loan mallets are your teacups. You wouldn’t serve a first-time guest tea in a chipped mug. You’d bring out the nice china. The mallet a visitor holds is their primary connection to the game. A good one tells them this club takes croquet seriously.

That feeling, the whole thing, is what “be a croquet club” means. It’s the feeling that people are here because they want to be, and they look after the place because it’s theirs. You can sense it the moment you walk in. Members who care about their club create a space that visitors want to join.

None of this costs much. Most of it costs nothing. Its the club enjoying its clubhouse and enjoying croquet.

A fresh, clean functional clubhouse.

Club Proud McIlwraith

McIlwraith Croquet Club in Brisbane grew from 17 members to over 70 and stayed there for 25 years. Their Come and Try conversion rate is close to 100%.

One of the reasons is that McIlwraith treats its club like a home. Members are encouraged to take ownership of the space, not just use it. The clubhouse is clean. The lawns are maintained. When a local MP visits or a new member comes to try croquet, the club makes its case without anyone saying a word.

As the McIlwraith members put it: a well-kept club is somewhere people actually want to spend time. They turn up more often, stay longer, tell friends about it, invite people they know with confidence. Nobody has to sell the club. It sells itself.

The functions they host for corporate groups and birthday parties are repeat bookings because the setting is attractive and the experience matches what people expected when they booked.

Does your club look like somewhere you’d want to bring a friend?

A place people look after because it’s theirs.

The challenge

Queensland croquet is spending real money and real volunteer hours to get new people through club gates. Digital ads. A statewide Come and Try system. Articles, videos, and social media. All of it designed to put croquet in front of people who didn’t know they were looking for it.

That work gets people to the gate. What happens after they walk through it is on the club.

Reg Bamford changed twelve things about how he presented himself and played the best croquet of his career. He didn’t change his technique. He didn’t practise more. He just looked like someone who took the game seriously, and that changed how he felt about it and that changed how everyone responded to him.

Go and stand at your gate. Look at your club the way a stranger would. Ask yourself: if I’d never been here before, and I’d just clicked on an ad that promised me a croquet club, would this be what I expected?

If the answer is yes, you’re keeping the promise to be a croquet club. People want to join croquet clubs. They will want to join yours.

Queensland croquet needs more members. They are extremely valuable economically.

Every new member is three things at once:

1. paying customer,
2. an unpaid worker, and
3. a public health investment.

To croquet our members are both our customer and our employee. And we have the government who pay for the delivery of health benefits to our members..

A croquet club stacks 3 very valuable economic activities together.

Once we ourselves understand the value and need for membership to be a primary priority croquet can begin to focus on improving the wiltering game and prevent it from a future we dread to think about.

The subsistence line

Most Queensland croquet clubs have about 30 members.

At 30 members, every available volunteer hour goes to keeping the club running. Lawns need mowing. The clubhouse needs maintaining. Sessions need coordinating. Equipment needs replacing. Someone has to buy the milk for tea and coffee.

Once all the must-do chores are done there’s nobody left over. No excess capacity. The club can maintain itself, but even that’s a struggle. It can’t grow, improve, or try anything new. There are no spare hands because every pair of hands is already full.

This is subsistence. The club exists to keep itself existing. All energy goes to maintenance. Nothing goes to growth. And because nothing goes to growth, the club stays at 30 members, which means nothing goes to growth. The loop closes. Everyone gets old and nothing changes.

Gregory and Howard called it the Starvation Cycle in the Stanford Social Innovation Review: organisations feel immense pressure to direct every resource to front-line delivery, which starves them of the capacity to grow. For a croquet club, front-line delivery is keeping the lawns playable and the sessions running. Growth would mean marketing, onboarding new players, running Come & Try programs. There’s nobody spare to do any of that because everyone is already busy keeping the lights on.

Australian research on small voluntary organisations calls the same dynamic the liability of smallness. All-volunteer groups lack the internal surplus to access external resources, plan for succession, or step back from daily firefighting to think strategically. A broken mower or a sick treasurer consumes 100% of a small club’s capacity. And there is always something like this, one problem to the next.

The financial version of this trap is just as tight. A club’s fixed costs don’t shrink when members leave. Insurance, water bills, lawn care, equipment maintenance: the bill is the same whether the club has 40 members or 20. The per-member burden goes up, which makes raising the fees at the AGM the only way to survive, which pushes more people out, which raises the burden again. Nobody notices at first. It just gets a little harder to balance the books each year…then the numbers stop working.

Most Queensland croquet clubs sit on council land. The lease exists because the club exists. A council looking at four lawns used by 25 people three mornings a week sees underutilised public space. The conversation at lease renewal is very different when the club has 50 active members gathering five days a week compared to 15 members playing Tuesday and Thursday mornings. Nobody at council openly says they’re thinking about repurposing our croquet courts which sit on prime land near centres of cities and towns. Until a consultant’s plan comes through turning the club into a dog park.

The maths at the margin

Queensland has about 40 clubs. If we all co-operate and find five hundred new members across the state that would average out at about 12. per club. So for ease lets say 10.

A 30-member croquet club probably has eight to ten people doing all the operational work right now. That sounds adequate until you realise those eight people are in their 70s and 80s. Victorian research on volunteer capacity repeats the message: the same few people do all the work. In a croquet club, they’ve been at it for a decade or more. Our clubs are rapidly aging out. Croquet’s membership drop off looks to be approaching 10% per annum. We aren’t replacing our numbers.

If the average age of a club’s helpers is 75, in five years they’re 80. A club which has eight operational volunteers now but no growth has three or four people left doing the work by 2031. Too few people to believe things can get better. From here this club will likely find no more volunteers and the club finishes.

Researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute found that an idea will not spread without a critical mass of support. A club that only has a few committed people is mathematically doomed. They will wallow so badly that even the belief that things can improve won’t be able to spread. Without intervention this club is waiting to die.

Centola and colleagues, in experiments published in Science, found the threshold of 25%. When a committed group reaches 25% of a community, it triggers a cascade that flips the group’s behaviour. Below 25%, efforts to change are rejected by the majority’s current culture and the status quo is maintained.

In a 30-member club, 25% is eight active volunteers. In my experience most clubs hover around there. 6 to 9 people in their 70s and 80s doing everything, including activities they’re no longer fully capable of.

Our clubs are sitting on the edge. Every retirement pushes the committed group further below 25%. Below that threshold, the research says change can’t take hold. The club just drifts.

But if we can get 10 new members in who share the attitude of the original eight, the committed group climbs above 25%. That’s when the culture flips. Above 25%, the club becomes positive, attractive, self-reinforcing. People want to join a club that believes in itself.

That’s what the club membership meetings are for. I want to find the people in our existing membership who are ready to be part of that core group and get them fired up. We don’t need everyone. We need 25%.

The money numbers in clubland.

Here’s the value of 10 new members on one club.

First, the fees. Queensland croquet memberships range widely: $400 a year at some clubs, $800 or more at others. Ten new members is $4,000 to $8,000 in annual revenue. But annual fees understate what a member is worth. Because that member is around for longer than a year.

No data exists on croquet membership patterns, but croquet shares a demographic profile with golf and lawn bowls. Queensland golf clubs like Headland report average membership tenures of 10 to 12 years. Bowls clubs use the same benchmark. Over a decade, those ten new croquet members will provide each of their clubs $40,000 to $80,000 more revenue.

Second, the labour. In most sports, the ASC’s Clearinghouse puts the volunteer-to-member ratio at about 11.7%. But that national figure is dragged down by junior-heavy sports like soccer and netball, where parents treat clubs as drop-off services and hundreds of under-18 members skew the average percentage downward. Croquet is different. Our membership base is almost entirely over 55, and AusPlay data on older Australians shows that this demographic takes on non-playing roles at much higher rates. Bowls Australia, the closest parallel, reports volunteer ratios of 25% to 30% volunteerism.

Using bowl’s rate, of ten new members, about three will actively contribute. Three people who mow, greet, coordinate, or sit on a subcommittee. At a conservative $30 per hour replacement wage, five hours a week each, that’s $23,400 a year of labour who’s benefit isn’t usually accounted for anywhere.

So 10 new members contribute to their clubs up to $80,000 in revenue and $235,000 in volunteering over the next ten years.

Third, the compounding. The ASC notes that one volunteer creates the capacity for 8.5 players. Three new volunteers from those ten members increases the possible capacity for the club by 25 players. Each new thing the club can now do (a Come & Try session, a social event, a tidied-up entrance) makes it a place more people want to join.

So more people join. Another three volunteers sign up in that group and the club goes from an aging eight core people to a mixed fourteen, and suddenly it’s doing things that were impossible eighteen months ago with a really enthusiastic core of members. The club has momentum with self fulfilling and self sustaining growth.

Our clubs’ growth will be compounding. The same mechanics as interest on savings. The first bits of growth are the hardest and looks the least impressive. But it is the dedication to the unglamourous beginning that croquet needs.

The dress without a party

Here’s what I hear at planning sessions across Queensland.

Interstate competitiveness. Under-30 development pathways. Schools programs. Lighting for evening play. Outer-suburb expansion. State centres. High-performance coaching. Liverstreaming.

All good ideas. Every one of them assumes a base of members and volunteers that Croquet Queensland don’t have. Every one of them is an outcome. Membership is the strategy writ to get there.

Lighting is the one that comes up most often, so let’s use it. A club installs lights so members can play in the evening and attract working-age players who can’t make daytime sessions. Sensible in theory. But the club currently has 25 members and can barely fill its existing sessions. The lights go in. Nobody books the evening slots because many of the current members don’t drive at night and nobody organises any play.

The same logic applies to every aspirational project. Schools programs need clubs with enough people to host groups of children. Interstate teams need clubs producing competitive players & coaches. New sporting facilities in outer suburbs will be build for sports that are growing . A state centre requires affiliate fees to maintain.

Grow members until lights become obvious. Lawns fill up, evening demand appears, and lights are the natural next step. You grow the sport until its obvious croquet is such a great game and new areas need courts. The infrastructure follows the membership. It is hard to make a compelling game wide case when major clubs operate at a fraction of their capacity.

Research on community sports club capacity confirms the order. People come first. Money, infrastructure, and planning all depend on having people.

Every item on every wishlist depends on membership. Until there are members, all of those things are at best a distraction and at worst the latest reason why croquet membership isn’t growing.

That’s a hard thing to say to someone who’s spent two years championing a schools program or a lighting proposal. Their goal is valid. The sequencing is wrong. We will get the new courts, the lights, the upgrades. We get them when we have the members. At the moment croquet barely deserves the current clubhouses and lawns they are used so little.

What 500 members means

Five hundred new members is more than 30% growth statewide. I think it’s doable if we all work as one singular movement. It will only happen together because we need all our limited resources for this to work.

The fee revenue from the 500 member increase in numbers will be $200,000 to $400,000 a year across the game. Probably more when you add competition fees, social levies, and the other ways members spend at their clubs. A board that sees a new member as a single annual transaction is thinking about one year. If the average player stays for ten years (and the golf and bowls data says they will), their lifetime value is $4,000 to $8,000.

Five hundred new members over a decade is $2 million to $4 million in total revenue flowing into 40 clubs. We badly need that.

The money matters, but that those 500 people are also potential ‘employees’/volunteers. This is even more impactful.

At croquet’s demographic volunteer rates, 500 new members means roughly 125 to 150 new active contributors spread across 40 clubs. At clubs where eight or nine exhausted people do everything, those new members can begin to reinforce our clubs before the current group ages or burns out.

The volunteer hours keep the grass mowed and the clubhouse painted. The ABS replacement cost for volunteer work $40.37 per hour. Those 125 to 150 new volunteers, each contributing four hours a week across 48 playing weeks, represent close to $1 million a year in labour value to our clubs.

Over the same ten-year membership horizon, that’s $10 million to $12 million in new volunteer capacity. $2 million to $4 million in fees funds the clubs but the bigger benefit is the volunteer labour which will keep our clubs running.

Then there’s the value that’s a little bit more intrinsic, but it helps provide the government grants. Health economic modelling by Deakin University estimates that one person going from inactive to active saves the healthcare system $300 a year in direct medical costs. For older adults, the savings are higher. KPMG’s assessment of community sport infrastructure in Victoria valued falls prevention benefits at $33 million and mental health and social isolation benefits at $848 million statewide. Croquet members are exactly this demographic. Five hundred new members staying active and connected at the very small $300 baseline is $150,000 a year in avoided healthcare costs. Factor in falls prevention and reduced social isolation for a population averaging their late 60s and 70s, and the real figure is multiples of that.

Our clubs are running underfunded public health facilities. We need to make more a point of this to governments. Our game has to grow large enough to be impossible to ignore when we take these arguments to them.

The funding gap

Bowls Australia, which serves the exact same demographic, received over $2.6 million from the Australian Sports Commission in 2024–25, roughly $16 per registered member. The ASC officially classifies Croquet Australia as “Unfunded”. Zero recurrent federal money for participation growth, high performance, or national administration goes to croquet.

Because there is no federal safety net CAQ is the only aid to clubs with the vast majority of the burden of maintaining the game falls on club volunteers and member fees.

Croquet can’t grant-write its way out of a subsistence trap. This has been tried and it hasn’t worked. It can’t illuminate ground and escape subsistence membership. Croquet must grow its way out. Five hundred new members bring fees, volunteer hours, and the critical mass to finally make the case for the recurrent funding that croquet will deserve.

Lights make sense when lawns are full and there’s demand for evening play. Youth programs are great when clubs have people to run them. Interstate competitiveness improves because clubs are producing more players & coaches. The wishlist items happen when there is excess volunteer hours to achieve them.

Noosa is already doing this

Noosa Croquet Club has one goal: get more people to take out memberships. Everything they do serves that goal.

[This section is deliberately left at 2 sentences long.]

It is critical croquet singularly focuses membership growth.

What does it look like for Croquet Association Queensland to treat membership growth as the single priority?

Every decision this committee makes before the end of its tenure should be evaluated against one question: does this help clubs cross the subsistence line?

Every initiative that doesn’t directly serve that goal needs its importance considered.

New members bring more benefit to the gam than it costs to market to them. Investing in growing the membership is only way to save the game.

We don’t need to be single minded forever. Just until the base exists to support everything else that croquet would love to do.

The Come & Try pipeline is being used and providing encouraging results. The East Brisbane pilot proved what a modest spend can do.

A thousand letterbox flyers cost $135 and brought six enquiries, $22.50 per lead. Ten more people came through word of mouth. Of the sixteen who started Come & Try, six have joined. Membership went from 27 to 33 in 6 weeks.

The lifetime value of those first six new members over their likely membership will be, $48,000. Total marketing spend was $135.

The tools exist for us to get the members and they work. Web advertising started today. The question is whether the organisation is wanting to point all our minimal resources in the same direction at the same time to use them to maximum benefit.

Five hundred members would be a thirty percent growth. $2-4 million in lifetime fees. A hundred and fifty new volunteers. Close to a million dollars a year in labour value. A hundred and fifty thousand dollars in healthcare savings the government would otherwise have to fund. Dozens of clubs crossing the line from survival to growth.

The membership drive is a game critical project. Historically critical. It offers a juncture to choose where to go and to secure the future of the sport in an era where society may need places like croquet clubs more than ever in the game’s history.

Now say 30% can do a second, unrelated task. Also a healthy percentage of the whole population.

And 20% are available at a specific time. Reasonable.

How many people in the group can match all three requirements?

Multiply. 0.4 × 0.3 × 0.2 = 0.024.

2.4%

.

Three perfectly reasonable requirements that aren’t too hard to meet individually. Because the skills are independent of each other, their chances multiply when combined. Each new requirement doesn’t subtract from the pool. It divides it.

This is the multiplication rule for independent events, and it has a consistent, uncomfortable consequence: stacking unrelated requirements onto a single position compresses the eligible pool exponentially.

AND vs OR

The compression happens because of how the requirements are joined.

When a job description says you need Skill A AND Skill B AND availability on Tuesdays, it’s running a Boolean AND operation. AND is restrictive. Each condition filters out everyone who doesn’t meet it, and the filters compound.

The alternative is OR. Instead of one role that demands all three skills, create three roles that each need one. The Excel role draws from 40 people. The phone role draws from 30. The time restriction draws from 20. Some of those people overlap. The person comfortable with Excel might also be available on tournament days. That’s fine if they want to nominate for both roles. Each role only needs to be filled once, and each one independently draws from the base instead of demanding all three traits from the same individual.

Same work with the same volunteers but different grouping. One way has 2 or 3 potential volunteers, the other 90.

The compression curve

The effect accelerates as requirements stack.

By the time something carries four or five different requirements, the pool that can fill them is tiny.

The US Air Force learned this the hard way. In 1950, planes were crashing at an alarming rate and nobody could explain why. Lieutenant Gilbert Daniels measured 4,063 pilots across ten physical measurements used to design the cockpit: height, chest circumference, arm length, and so on. The cockpit had been built for the “average” pilot on all ten measurements. Daniels checked how many of the 4,063 actually fell within the average range on all ten measurements. Zero. The average pilot didn’t exist. The United States was making a cockpit that not a single pilot could fit.

The Air Force’s fix wasn’t to find better proportioned pilots to fit the cockpits. It was adjustable seats, adjustable pedals, adjustable helmet straps. They made the planes fit the pilots because no single pilot can fit the plane.

What actually correlates

The multiplication rule only applies when skills are independent. If two skills are strongly correlated, asking for both barely affects the pool. So the question is: which skills actually go together in real people?

Personality psychology gives this biological grounding. The Big Five model describes five broad, largely independent trait dimensions. Conscientiousness (detail orientation, systematic thinking, comfort with structured work) and Extraversion (social energy, comfort with strangers, persuasive communication) are separate dimensions. They don’t predict each other. A person high in one is no more likely to be high in the other.

This matters because when a role bundles spreadsheet work (which draws on conscientiousness) with club liaison (which draws on extraversion), it’s stacking tasks that recruit from statistically independent personality pools. The multiplication rule applies in full.

When a role bundles spreadsheet work with calendar planning, both draw on conscientiousness and systematic thinking. Those skills correlate. The pool stays wide.

The grouping determines whether the maths works for you or against you. Bundle tasks that draw from the same personality trait into one role and the pool barely shrinks. Split tasks that draw from different traits into separate roles and each one fills from its own pool. Correlated skills go together. Independent skills go apart.

Now look at your org chart

Here’s a typical event coordinator role :

• calendar planning,
• tournament draw creation in Excel,
• club liaison by phone,
• referee coordination,
• conditions of play drafting, and
• on-site venue management.

Read that list through the lens of the maths above.

Calendar planning and draw creation correlate. Both are structured, systematic, solo tasks. Bundling them costs almost nothing in pool compression.

Club liaison and referee coordination correlate. Both are interpersonal, reactive, social tasks. Bundling those also costs little.

But bundling the first pair with the second pair stacks independent traits. Conscientiousness AND extraversion. The pool compresses. Add on-site availability on specific days, a third independent requirement, and the maths delivers its verdict: 2.4%.

The organisation hasn’t asked for anything unreasonable. Every individual task is doable. The combination is what makes the role impossible.

So why does every committee design roles this way?

The filing cabinet

Because the brain groups by topic, not by skill.

The categorisation heuristic makes us group things in particular ways subconsciously. We want to group things by topic because feels complete and logical. Unfortunately its the wrong organising principle for matching humans to work.

Organisational psychologists call this functional fixedness: the inability to see a container as anything other than its traditional form. The work gets shaped to fit the same old box, instead of the box being shaped to fit the work needed.

Mel Conway observed the same pattern in software engineering in 1967. Conway’s Law states that organisations design systems that mirror their own communication structures. Four person teams produce a four-module system, regardless of whether four modules is the right architecture. The shape of the organisation determines the shape of the output. The problem doesn’t get a say.

And there’s an aesthetic bias reinforcing all of it. A clean org chart with four symmetric roles looks right. Breaking one into four smaller, skill-based roles makes the chart look messy. Fewer roles feels simpler. In practice, a tidy chart with one impossible role is far harder to operate than an awkward chart with four roles people can actually do.

What this does to people

Volunteers run on a psychological contract: the unspoken agreement about what they’ll give and what they’ll get in return.

Someone puts their hand up for event coordinator thinking: I’ll contribute my spreadsheet skills, and I’ll get the satisfaction of doing something useful. Three months in, they’re on the phone to a club president explaining a venue change, mediating between referees, and carrying equipment at 7am. None of that was the deal. Most of it isn’t enjoyable for this single person who much prefers dealing with spreadsheets not drama.

Hackman and Oldham’s Job Characteristics Model saw Task Identity as a core driver of satisfaction: the ability to complete a whole, identifiable piece of work from start to finish. A volunteer who can build the draw but can’t manage the venue never achieves Task Identity. They can see the part they’re good at and the part that’s keeping them down. Researchers validated this specifically for volunteers: deliberately designed tasks led to higher motivation, higher satisfaction, and significantly lower intent to quit.

Volunteering Australia’s research found that autonomy and productive contribution are the strongest predictors of whether a volunteer stays.

Bundled roles destroy both.

Juggling unrelated tasks leaves no room for autonomy, and lacking skills for half the role makes it impossible to feel effective.

More than half of Australians who stop volunteering cite “lack of time.” The ABS data says something more specific. They can’t fit around a role that demands the schedule of a part-time employee. Someone tasked with organising the draw working for two hours on a Tuesday night has a very different time commitment from an event coordinator expected to be available across all five functions of the role. The expectation is for an impossible volunteer.

The cost organisations never measure is exclusion because of design. People don’t put their hand up for roles even when they’re perfect for the core task. They opt out of the bundle. The organisation never sees this volunteer.

Bus factor: one

In software engineering, the bus factor measures how many people need to disappear before a project stalls. Bundle all tasks into one role and the answer is one. One person and that’s it.

The hero volunteer who knows the passwords, the undocumented processes, which is the best way; is a single point of failure. Think of it as an inverted Swiss Cheese Model. In risk management, you stack multiple defensive layers so no single failure can pass through all of them. Bundling collapses those multiple protecting layers into one. Every hole aligns. When the hero burns out, the entire system fails at once.

Split the role into four and the bus factor goes from one to four. If the draw coordinator leaves, the tournament still has a calendar, a manager, and a venue coordinator. One skill set to replace, not five.

Unbundled roles also force hand-offs. The draw coordinator sends the draw to the tournament manager. That transaction creates documentation. Institutional memory that outlasts any single volunteer, because the structure made it inevitable.

The expectation is for an impossible volunteer. Only hero volunteers are wanted.

The fix

One role: Event Coordinator. Calendar planning, player rankings, draw creation, club liaison, referee coordination, conditions of play, on-site management.

Bit much don’t you think?

Really it is four tasks:

• Season Planner. Plans the season calendar and tournament dates. Needs organisational thinking. Works from home.
• Draw Creator. Builds tournament draws and manages rankings in Excel. Needs spreadsheet skills. Works from home, on their own schedule.
• Tournament Manager. Handles club liaison, referee coordination, conditions of play. Needs communication skills and confidence with people. Works by phone and email.
• Venue Manager. On-the-day logistics at the host club. Needs to be present and practical. Works on tournament days only.

Each role matches a different skill profile. Each has a contained, flexible time commitment. The system isn’t relying on a single person. People can commit to smaller, well defined roles.

Organisational psychologists call it job crafting: allowing people to shape their role around their actual strengths rather than squeezing themselves into a predetermined container. Evolutionary models confirm it from the other direction: generalists only thrive when the cost of each task is very low. As work becomes complex, systems favour specialisation.

Adam Smith figured this out in a pin factory in 1776. One worker doing all eighteen steps to make a pin would make two pins a day. Divide the steps by skill and the same number of workers produce tens of thousands across a factory.

Start with the tasks

The old question is “who can we find to do all this?” That question starts with the role and goes looking for a person to fill it. The maths shows it’s a fool’s errand.

The better question starts from the other end. List the tasks. Group the ones that draw on the same skills. Then ask who can do each group.

Season planning and draw creation go together. Club liaison and referee coordination go together. On-site logistics stands alone. Three groups, three skill profiles, three separate (t)asks. Each one is a task that a single person can say yes to because it is bounded to the area they want to volunteer in.

That’s the whole fix. Stop grouping tasks that need different skills into one role. Start designing tasks that can then be grouped into matching skills.

“Which rook should you move to the centre of the board?“ she asks. “It’s actually oftentimes not that important because both of them are good moves.” She calls it the wrong rook problem.

She finished her analysis and arrived at two options that are roughly equal. “You have to trust yourself,” she says, “and say that because they’re both good, then I can’t really make a huge mistake. So instead of spending more time on this decision, make a move, choose a rook, and go on to the next decision.”

Most people hear this and nod. Of course. Don’t overthink it. But the real question is what has to happen before you earn the right to stop and force the decision.

The scientist and the advocate

In 2004, cognitive scientist Michelle Cowley-Cunningham and psychologist Ruth Byrne ran a study on chess players. They recruited ten experts (averaging around 2240 Elo) and ten amateurs (around 1500 Elo), gave them the same position, and asked them to think aloud while they analysed it.

The difference wasn’t in how many moves they considered. It was in how they tested them. The experts kept trying to break their own ideas. They’d find a promising move and then immediately ask: how does my opponent refute this? They generated tests designed to destroy their own plan. The amateurs did the opposite. They’d find a move they liked and then look for reasons it was good.

Cowley-Cunningham called this the difference between falsification and confirmation. Shahade, writing about the study on her Substack Thinking Sideways, frames it as the scientist versus the advocate. The scientist tries to prove the hypothesis wrong. The advocate tries to prove it right.

The critical line from Shahade: “Trouble comes when we believe we are engaging in strategic decision making while we’re really just advocating for our first instinct.”

Two modes, one sequence

The study points to something more practical than “don’t overthink it.” It gives the idea a sequence.

First, the scientist. Take the options and try to break each one. Don’t be gentle on your idea. Question it: what’s the strongest argument against this? Where does it fail? If an option breaks under scrutiny, that’s a good outcome. One fewer thing to decide between.

Then, the executor. Some options survived. Not all broke. This is the ‘wrong rook” threshold, the point where further analysis produces nothing new. The options have been stress-tested. Continued deliberation past here is wasted.

The sequence matters. Skip the scientist’s work and land directly on “both seem fine, I’ll just pick one,” and that confidence is unearned. That’s an advocate who ran out of patience, not someone who tested their options. Stay in scientist mode forever, hunting for some flaw and the lesson inverts. Rigour becomes a disguise for paralysis.

Why equal feels harder

There’s a reason this is difficult. A 2022 study in behavioural science found that when people faced two equal tasks, they made worse prioritisation decisions than when the options were clearly unequal. Equal options didn’t make the choice easier. They made people freeze, spread effort thin, and commit to nothing.

The researchers called it a “Buridan’s Ass dilemma,” after the 14th-century philosophical paradox of a donkey placed perfectly between two identical bales of hay. Unable to choose, it starves.

Perfect symmetry between options doesn’t simplify the choice. It exposes a flaw in how we think about “deciding correctly.” When no analysis can separate two options, the right move is an arbitrary tiebreak, it doesn’t matter.

Analytical thinking is expensive. It’s meant to be switched on for hard problems and switched off once the answer stops changing. The wrong rook trap is what happens when thinking isn’t switched off.

So what does switching off actually look like in practice?

The moves

Here’s the framework, stripped down:

1. Enter scientist mode. Take your options and try to falsify (disprove) each one. Think “in what situations does this fail?” If an option breaks under honest scrutiny, discard it.

2. Recognise the threshold. When you’ve tried to break your remaining options and couldn’t, you’ve arrived. Whichever option remain are fine. They carry acceptable risk. Further analysis won’t change this.

3. Pick and move. Choose one. The basis can be gut feel, a coin flip, or a slight personal preference. The quality of the choice between two surviving options matters far less than the opportunity cost of not choosing at all.

4. Resist the pull back. After you’ve chosen, the temptation is to re-litigate. To wonder if the other option was better. The work’s been done. Trust the process and move to the next decision.

The common mistakes sit at the edges. Skip step one and you’re just an advocate who picked fast. Refuse to leave step one and you’re using thoroughness as an excuse to avoid commitment. The transition between modes is where people get stuck. Knowing when to test & when to chose is the whole skill.

The next move

I’ve been thinking about this because it maps onto the kind of decisions that come up in my work all the time. Which tool to use. Which statistic to target over others. Which approach to take with something that could go either way. The options that actually stall me are rarely “good vs bad.” because that’s an obvious answer. The ones that get me are “good vs also good.” The habit of treating every choice as if there’s a correct answer waiting to be discovered, if I just think a bit harder, is one of the most expensive habits I’ve had to resist in life.

Shahade’s framing is useful because it makes the trap visible. Picking the wrong rook was never the problem. The problem was sitting at the board, hand hovering, waiting for certainty that was never going to come while eating up time on the clock.

Pick a rook. Either one is fine.

P.S. On the lawn

This maps directly onto croquet tactics, and most players already do a version of it without naming it.

The scientist’s question on a croquet lawn is: what does my opponent do after this shot I plan on playing?

Not what I hope happens next. What the opposition actually do. Play the shot from their side of the game.

The better version of this is a single question that experienced players learn to ask themselves before every shot: what would my opponent least like me to do?

That question is falsification applied to croquet. It forces you out of advocate mode, where you’re building a case for the shot you already want to play, and into scientist mode, where you’re testing your plan against what the other side will actually do with it. Sometimes the answer confirms your instinct. Sometimes it changes the shot entirely.

The players who do this well don’t necessarily win with the best technique. They’re the ones who’ve learned to see the game from a more enlightening perspective.

In 1980, Sydney had 210 bowling clubs. By 2022, that number was 128, with 51 closures in the past decade alone. Professor Robert Freestone, who led the UNSW study, put it plainly: “As more disappear, we lose not only a significant part of our cultural landscape, but also another space that is important to many people.”

RSLs are closing across Queensland and NSW. Community halls are disappearing from regional towns. Country towns that once had an RSL, a bowls club, a community hall, and a church now have only a few. The places where people used to gather without spending money are disappearing.

Ray Oldenburg coined the term “Third Place” in his 1989 book The Great Good Place. Home is first. Work is second. Third Places are the informal public gathering spots beyond both: cafes, pubs, sporting clubs, the places where people go to be around other people. Oldenburg argued these spaces are essential to civic life and community health.

But Oldenburg himself noted a problem. Third Places have become overwhelmingly commercial. You pay to be there. The cafe requires a purchase. The pub expects a tab. Shopping centres are designed to extract money, not build community. The Third Place, as a concept, has been captured by commerce.

Which raises the question: where are the places you can go and not spend money?

Fourth Places. Non-commercial spaces like croquet. They’re the spaces Oldenburg was really writing about, the ones that predate the commercial version: community halls, church groups, clubs where the activity was the point and nobody was selling anything.

Many of them are gone.

Bowling alone

Robert Putnam documented the decline in his landmark 2000 book Bowling Alone. Civic participation, community group membership, informal social gathering, all of it fell sharply from the late 1960s onward. The causes were multiple: television, suburban sprawl, longer working hours, generational change. Society ended up with fewer places to be together and fewer reasons to be there.

In Australia, the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare reports that 15% of Australians experienced loneliness in 2023. The Queensland Government’s own 2024 Social Isolation and Loneliness Survey found that 62.5% of Queensland adults feel lonely at least some of the time. Beyond Blue’s research found loneliness is more strongly associated with anxiety, depression and suicidal thoughts than financial stress. Beyond Blue’s chief executive described loneliness as an “epidemic” and pointed to a “declining sense of community” across Australia.

Researchers at Curtin University estimated the health cost of loneliness at $2.7 billion annually, with the Treasury’s Ending Loneliness Together submission putting the per-person cost at roughly $1,565 per year. Lonely Australians aged 65 and over average roughly four more visits to the GP. A meta-analysis by Holt-Lunstad and colleagues found that social isolation increases premature death risk by 29%. One in five older Australians in retirement villages report loneliness. For those in residential aged care, the figure is between 35% and 61%.

These numbers describe people who don’t have a place to go.

Queensland’s population aged 65 and over is growing at 3.7% annually, nearly triple the rate of the rest of the population. By 2046, one in five people in Greater Brisbane will be over 65. The demand for places where older Australians can connect, stay active, and belong is growing faster than the supply. Actually, the supply is shrinking.

Croquet clubs are Fourth Places

A croquet club charges membership fees. Beyond that, there’s no expectation to spend money.

“This is the cheapest sport after walking,” Sandy from McIlwraith put it.

A croquet club is the definition of a Fourth Place. A non-commercial space where people are allowed to just be.

Croquet clubs aren’t the only ones left. Some bowling clubs still operate this way. Some men’s sheds, which the Australian Government now funds through the National Shed Development Programme precisely because they recognised the health and community value these spaces deliver. A handful of community gardens with attached social groups like at West End. But the list is short and getting shorter. The bowling clubs are closing. The RSLs are closing. Churches are emptying. Croquet clubs, for the most part, are still standing. They have clubhouses. They have lawns. They have tea and cake.

They have a reason for people to arrive and to come together. Croquet is the anchor. People come because they enjoy the game, and while they’re there, connections are formed. Activities creates the gathering. The gathering creates the belonging and enjoying company makes clubs good places to be.

Eighty people who are glad to see you

A member described how the croquet club as a 4th space impacted her life:

“When I joined, I knew four people. The people in this club I wouldn’t have met, and now I consider them to be really great friends. They’re friends I want to be with. And it’s all through the sport.”

She made a sharper observation about why this matters “Here you’ve got access to 80 wonderful people. We become part of each other’s lives.”

Croquet clubs have many members live alone or would like varied social interactions. The club is their reason to leave the house, to enjoy being around people who are glad to see them.

More than mallet storage

Most croquet clubs think of themselves as sports clubs. They talk about lawns, competitions, equipment, pennants. The committee meets to discuss hoop placement and session times. The clubhouse is where the mallets are stored.

This is like a library describing itself as a building that stores books. Technically accurate. Completely missing the point.

The clubhouse is the community asset. It’s the space where the Fourth Place happens.

Clubs that have agreed on what they want to be can see this potential. A club that says “we want to feel like a community that is built around croquet” has told its committee something useful. A club that only thinks about the sport on the lawn is wasting the clubhouse, and everything positive it enables.

This matters because the clubhouse is what distinguishes a croquet club from a park with hoops in it. Aphysical space where people can be just because they want to.

The cubby house for grown-ups

When you were twelve, a cubby house was the best thing ever. Your space, your mates, your rules.

This is ours. We built it. We decide what happens here.

Environmental psychologist David Sobel spent years studying why children do this. In Children’s Special Places, he documented how kids aged five to twelve seek out or build private spaces where they control the environment and make the rules. Forts, tree houses, cubbies. The need is consistent across cultures and generations. Children are practising ownership, boundary-setting, and social negotiation. They’re figuring out what it feels like to have a place that belongs to their group.

For older people, having places they can contribute to and own is important. Retirement removes the workplace. Children move away. Neighbours change. Researchers studying aging in place argue that territorial attachment to spaces matters more as people age, and that losing access to places where they feel ownership contributes directly to social exclusion.

A croquet clubhouse where members decide what happens, where they enjoy mahjong, start a book or a movie club, have drinks after pennant training, their club is a cubby house for grown-ups.

A different door for funding

Government health departments and community services departments fund programs for social isolation, falls prevention, and active ageing.

The evidence that physical activity and social connection reduce health costs is study after study after study. One example: research using Medicare records found physically active older women had 40% lower GP costs than inactive women. Croquet delivers balance, coordination, low-impact exercise, cognitive demand, and social connection in one activity. Croquet Queensland’s policy brief pulls the broader evidence together.

When croquet clubs apply for funding, they apply as sports clubs. They ask for money for lawns, equipment, and facilities. They make a case about the sport.

With the Brisbane 2032 Olympics approaching, Queensland sports funding will increasingly favour Olympic disciplines. A non-Olympic sport like croquet could struggle for funding. The smarter move is to step into a different segment entirely: community health, social isolation, active ageing.

What if the strongest case a croquet club can make has nothing to do with the sport?

The stronger case, the one government departments are set up to respond to, is about community. “We’re a community space that keeps people connected, active, and out of the health system. We’re delivering social isolation and falls prevention with volunteers on a shoestring. Every dollar you give us saves multiples in avoided health costs.”

That’s the Fourth Place argument. Not every sport can make it as strongly as croquet. The Men’s Sheds programme is proof that government will fund community spaces once the health and social case is made clearly enough.

Open the clubhouse

Seeing the clubhouse as a Fourth Place changes what’s possible.

A club that understands it’s a community space can open the clubhouse for activities beyond croquet. Mahjong. Book clubs. Anything. None of these threaten the sport. They bring more enjoyment, more often, for more reasons. They make the clubhouse a place members go, not solely a place for croquet.

The conversation with government changes too if talking to different deportments. “We’re not asking for money for a sports facility. We’re asking for support for a community hub that serves 80 people a week, most of them over 65, many of them living alone, all of them active, connected, and out of the health system because of their croquet club.”

A Fourth Place without enjoyment is a chore. A Fourth Place without cooperation falls apart.

But repeat that interaction, and co-operation becomes the winning strategy. This is also mathematically provable.

The maths has been tested and the answer is always the same. Co-operation wins the repeated game. And if a small group of co-operators find each other in a world full of defectors, not only can they survive. They will take over.

The game

Selfishness is always the rational choice in a one-off interaction. 70 years of maths repeatedly shows it. Even when both sides would be better off co-operating, the logic of self-interest entraps them into betraying.

Two housemates. Both would prefer the dishes got done. But for each of them, the best personal outcome is the other person does them. So both leave them. The sink fills up. Both are worse off than if they’d just split the job.

Nobody’s going to do the dishes first. So the sink fills up.

In 1950, two mathematicians at the RAND Corporation built a formal version of this problem. They called it the prisoner’s dilemma. It’s been studied in thousands of academic papers and the game turns up everywhere, from world-ending nuclear standoffs to who takes out the bins.

The repeated game

Repeat the game, and co-operation becomes the winning strategy. The logic flips completely. The dishes need doing every day, not just once. Co-operation becomes a lot more beneficial now.

Fortunately for us, most real-world problems don’t happen once. The housemate is still there tomorrow. The committee meets again next month. The club down the road will be at the next regional event. These people are going to see each other again.

In a single game, defecting is rational because there are no consequences. Screw the other person and walk away. But play again tomorrow, and the other person remembers. They can retaliate. Suddenly, the short-term gain costs more than it was worth and co-operation becomes wise.

What you did yesterday ripples into tomorrow.

How to win the game

The best strategy for the repeated game has two principles.

1. Co-operate first.
2. Then copy whatever the other player did last time.

In 1980, a political scientist named Robert Axelrod ran a computer tournament. He invited game theorists from around the world to submit programs that would play the repeated game against each other. Some of the submissions were elaborate, with complex logic designed to probe opponents and exploit weaknesses.

The winning straategy had two moves. It co-operates on the first move, then copies exactly what the opponent did last time. Co-operation is met with co-operation. Defection is met with defection. Simple as that. It was called Tit-For-Tat.

Axelrod published the results and ran a second tournament. This time everyone knew what had won the first time so some submitted nicer strategies getting on the co-operation bandwagon. Others submitted nastier ones, hoping to exploit all the extra juicy nice ones. One had 77 sections of logic trying to be clever.

Tit for Tat won again. The super simple strategy. Co-operate and mirror.

Two moves. Co-operate, then mirror.

The strategies at the top of the leader boards in these competitions all shared four qualities.

1. They were nice (never the first to defect),
2. forgiving (didn’t hold grudges),
3. retaliatory (struck back immediately if provoked), and
4. clear (easy for opponents to read).

Simple, consistent, and decent. The complicated, sneaky strategies all finished at the bottom.

How to take over the world

A small group of co-operators, starting in a world full of defectors, will eventually take over.

Axelrod proved this with a simulation. A world full of different strategies, all interacting with each other. The successful strategies grow in number and unsuccessful ones go extinct.

The nasty strategies do well at first. They have the opportunity to prey on weaker strategies and grow quickly. But as the strategies they depend on exploiting go extinct nasty strategies also die out.

After a thousand generations, only nice, co-operative strategies survived.

A small crack is all co-operation needs.

Take a world that’s a terrible place where almost everyone defects. Always. It’s hostile and selfish and there’s no reason to co-operate because every interaction ends in exploitation.

But tucked away in one corner, there’s a small group of co-operators. They interact with each other often because they’re closely grouped together. They co-operate, accumulate better outcomes, and grow. Slowly at first, then faster as their numbers increase. Axelrod showed that if a small island of co-operation can emerge it will eventually take over an entire population.

Co-operation wins because, in a repeated game, it produces better outcomes than defection. The maths doesn’t care about motives. Nice guys finish first.

A small cluster of people doing the right thing, in a world full of people doing the wrong thing, will eventually win. Not by fighting the defectors, defectors fight and consume their own. Nice guys win by repeatedly playing the game and co-operating with each other.

The medieval Jewish rabbi Nahmanides had a phrase for this person: “a scoundrel within the bounds of the law.” Technically compliant. Morally absent. Does nothing wrong on paper. However everyone, including themselves, know they’re working against the spirit of the group.

You’ve watched this person in a meeting, quoting clause 14(b) while everyone else knew the point had been missed. Where do they come from? Are some just wired that way?

Some probably are. But the environment is built for that behaviour to thrive in. The more specific the rules, the more undergrowth is habitable for them.

The scoundrel is ancient

Jewish scholars identified this problem at least two thousand years ago. This story is used as illustration:

A man named Rabbah bar bar Hanan hired porters to carry barrels of wine. They dropped a barrel and broke it. Rabbah was furious. He seized their cloaks along with all their pay for the damage.

The porters went to a judge. The judge told Rabbah to give the cloaks back.

Rabbah protested. The law was on his side. He’d hired them, they’d broken his property, and he was entitled to compensation. By the letter of the contract, he was correct, the wine was worth more than their wages.

The judge agreed he was correct. Then told him to pay the workers their wages.

The reasoning wasn’t found in any specific clause. The judge pointed to a broader principle: act the way a decent person would act, or lifnim mishurat hadin. The contract covered property damage. It said nothing about whether it was fair to leave your workers standing there with no coats and no pay. The specific rule had a gap.

Rabbah followed every rule and produced an unjust result. The fix was a broader principle, one that sat above the specific rules: “Do what is right and good.”

How detail feeds the scoundrel

When a broad statement is followed by specific examples, the broad statement gets consumed by the specifics. A contract that says “I cover all losses, specifically fire and theft” sounds comprehensive. In practice, it covers fire and theft. The word “all” dies the moment you list examples, because the examples define the boundary. Anything not on the list is out.

This is why detailed policies feel thorough but behave badly. I touched on this in the previous article: added detail creates gaps, technical definitions, edge-case exclusions, clauses that contradict other clauses. Every specific clause defines what’s covered, and by omission, what isn’t. The scoundrel lives in the omissions.

Tax codes work the same way. The more detailed the code, the bigger the tax avoidance industry that grows around it. Accountants make their living in the negative space between clauses.

The modern legal world has a Latin phrase for this: Expressio unius est exclusio alterius. The expression of one thing is the exclusion of the other. List 50 things that are covered, and you’ve implicitly excluded the 51st. Jewish scholars got there centuries earlier.

Specificity invites evasion. Generality invites responsibility. Give someone a 100-page policy and the scoundrel looks for gaps. Give them a simple, short but broad agreement and everyone is left engaging with the spirit of the outcome itself. There’s nowhere to scurry.

What this means for organisations

Organisations with strong cultures need fewer rules. Replace culture with policy and you build the exact environment where people follow the handbook and miss the point. Over-governance is habitat for the scoundrel.

A 50-page volunteer handbook tells people exactly what they must do. It also signals, by implication, that anything not in the handbook is someone else’s problem. A broad, shared agreement about “this is what we’re about and how we treat each other” puts the responsibility back on the actually fully grown and matured humans to to engage with the spirit and purpose of the thing. There is no loopholes in shared values.

Civility precedes law. Character comes before policy. If the disposition isn’t there, no amount of detailed rules will fix things. And if the disposition is there, you don’t need 47 clauses to get people to behave well.

How many policies exist because someone once did something annoying, and the response was to add a rule? How many of those rules created their own new gaps? Would things be simpler if they could be replaced by a clear, shared understanding of what “right and good” looks like here?

Strong culture needs fewer rules for co-operation.

Nobody asked for these things. They arrived, marketed as improvements.

Every button promises something. Most of them just add confusion.

More buttons, better product

Put two products side by side, one simple, one loaded with features, and most people reach for the loaded one. More capability feels like more value. More buttons feels like more control. That feeling is often wrong.

Psychologists call it complexity bias: the tendency to prefer complex explanations, solutions, and products over simple ones, even when the simple option works just as well or better. Anne-Laure Le Cunff’s work on this bias points out that we associate complexity with sophistication. A 20-point policy feels more thorough than a 2-sentence one. A process with twelve steps feels more rigorous than one with three. A committee with six subcommittees feels more organised than one with none.

There’s a related idea called complexity matching: we expect solutions to be as complex as the problems they solve. If laundry feels like a complicated task, then a washing machine with 30 cycles feels like the right machine for the job. A machine with 6 cycles feels like it’s just not taking your laundry seriously enough. The complexity matches your expectation, and that match feels like quality. Whether it actually washes your clothes any better is a another question.

Sold, not demanded

Most of the complexity in your life wasn’t something you went looking for. It was given to you. When was the last time you asked for something to be more complex?

Marketing defaults to “more” because more is easy to sell. “Now with 12 new features” is a straightforward pitch. “We removed 8 things you didn’t need” is a but harder to sell, even when it’s the better product. The person selling you the complex version benefits from you supposing that complexity equals quality. People are out to get you but the incentives in the interaction just cause the situation to play out that way.

Another example is insurance policies. The more detailed and specific they get, the more thorough they seem. However, added detail creates gaps, technical definitions, edge-case exclusions, clauses that contradict other clauses. Simpler contracts with broader language often protect you better. The complexity didn’t improve things because it created gaps due to specificity.

Or software. The program with 40 features and a confusing interface is less useful than the one with 5 features you can actually operate. Software with more than 20 features sees a measurable drop in how quickly people can complete basic tasks, because users spend more time navigating menus than doing what they came to do. Having lots of functions is a different thing to being functional. That distinction gets lost when complexity is doing the marketing.

The more detail in the fine print, the more room to argue what it means.

Why selling us complexity works

We’re wired for it. I wrote about this in The Painter and the Sculptor, looking at Leidy Klotz’s research into additive bias. When people face a problem, they overwhelmingly default to adding rather than removing. Even when subtraction is simpler, cheaper, and more effective. Adding feels like progress. Removing feels like giving something up.

It goes further than habit. Research from 2024 found that at an implicit level, people associate the concept of “adding” with pleasant feelings and “removing” with unpleasant ones. We don’t just default to more. We feel good about more. The person designing your washing machine knows this, even if they’ve never read that study.

Lots of unneeded buttons. Top quality dad joke.

So we’re predisposed to add, and we’re being marketed to by people who know that. We end up buying a washing machine that has 14 cycles because someone in product development knows I’ll stand in the shop, compare it to the one with 7 cycles, and assume the 14-cycle machine is superior. That assumption isn’t challenged. The complexity made the purchasing decision for them.

Did you demand the extra wash cycles? They were supplied, and you were convinced into believing you needed them. Supply crossdressing as demand.

Now that you know, what changes?

When you’re choosing between two options, one simple and one complex, give yourself pause before assuming the complex one is better. Does the complexity solve a problem I actually have? Does it make my life easier or harder? Did I ask for this, or was it offered to me as something I should want? Do I want it?

Sometimes the complex option is the correct choice for you when extra features do improve the product because you will use them. But if you never consider asking yourself those questions, complexity will be chosen by default. The people selling it to you are counting on exactly that thinking continuing.

The simplest version of something that just works is usually the one that gets used. And the thing that gets used is the thing that has value. Everything else is just buttons that never get pressed.

A painter has a blank canvas. Nothing exists until the artist puts it there. Colour by colour, layer by layer, the image appears. Paint added to the canvas.

A sculptor has a block of marble. Everything that will make the sculpture is already inside the block. The job is to remove what doesn’t belong. Chip, carve, take away until what’s left is the artwork.

The sculptor removes what doesn’t belong.

Two ways to make something. Two completely different questions. The painter asks: what should I add next? The sculptor asks: what should I remove?

Most of us, when we’re thinking through a problem or making a decision, default to painting. We brainstorm. We gather options. We pile up information, ideas, possibilities. We add until we hope something takes shape. It feels productive because stuff is accumulating.

But there’s another way. And getting comfortable with it is one of the most useful things you can do for the quality of your thinking.

Train your thinking

We accept that physical health takes work. Nobody expects a healthy body to just happen. It takes considered effort.

Thinking is the same. Good decisions, clear priorities, the ability to cut through noise and find what matters: these are skills. They improve with practice and they deteriorate without it. The quality of your thinking shapes everything, from how you scroll your phone to how your meetings are spent.

One of the most useful exercises for your thinking is learning to subtract. Not because adding is wrong, but because almost everyone defaults to it without realising. Practising another method of thinking doubles potential solutions.

Experiments into subtractive thinking

Leidy Klotz is an engineering professor at the University of Virginia. A few years ago, he watched his toddler son playing with Lego. The boy needed to level a bridge between two uneven columns, one tall, one short.

Klotz expected Ezra to add a block to the short column. That’s what every adult in the room would have done.

Instead, Ezra removed a block from the tall one.

Adults instinctively want to add a block.

Klotz took this observation to his colleague Gabrielle Adams, a psychologist. Her response was the same as every other adult’s: she would have added. What would others do?

They designed a series of experiments, published as a cover story in Nature in 2021. Across eight different tasks, stabilising Lego structures, improving essays, optimising travel plans, participants overwhelmingly chose to add rather than remove. Even when subtraction was objectively simpler, cheaper, and more effective.

One experiment demonstrates this clearly. Participants had to stabilise a Lego structure so it could support a heavy brick. Adding pieces cost money. Removing pieces was free. The most efficient solution was to remove one unstable block. Nearly 60% of people paid to add blocks instead.

The reason is straightforward. Adding is a one-step mental process: think of something, add it. Subtracting takes two steps: think of something, then inhibit the impulse to add, then consider what to remove instead. People can subtract perfectly well. The additive idea just arrives first, feels good enough, and the brain moves on before the subtractive option gets consideration.

Klotz puts it well: “Subtraction is the act of getting less to do, but it is not the same as achieving less.”

The accumulation of complexity

Think about how committees work. Someone raises a problem, and the instinct is to add: a new subcommittee, a new policy, a new process, another agenda item. Each addition makes sense in isolation. Over years, they accumulate into a tangle of complexity that nobody designed and nobody can easily undo.

Each addition makes sense in isolation. Together they become a tangle noone designed.

The subtractive question is different. Instead of “what should we add to fix this?” it’s “what could we remove to fix this?” Which rule is creating more problems than it solves? Which process exists because someone added it five years ago and nobody’s questioned it since? Which meeting could disappear without anyone noticing?

Nassim Taleb, the risk researcher and author of Antifragile, calls this approach Via Negativa: the principle that we know what’s wrong with more clarity than what’s right, and that knowledge grows by subtraction. You might not know the perfect solution to add, but you can often see what’s causing the problem and remove it.

Naval Ravikant, the entrepreneur and investor, applies the same idea to decisions: “I don’t believe I have the ability to say what is going to work. Rather, I try to eliminate what’s not going to work.”

Chopin applied subtractive thinking to music: “Simplicity is the highest goal, achievable when you have overcome all difficulties. After one has played a vast quantity of notes and more notes, it is simplicity that emerges as the crowning reward of art.”

Removing the wrong things is often more effective than adding the right things. Dropping a confusing rule might get more benefit than adding three new clarifications.

What could be removed?

The most useful finding from the Klotz research is also simple to implement..

When they prompted participants “removing pieces is free,” the number of people choosing subtraction increased 50%. A simple prompt, reminding people that subtraction is an option, was enough.

You don’t need to rewire your brain. remember to consider the subtractive thinking possibilities too.

Sometimes the most useful thing is to trim something back.

Gardeners already know this. Prune a fruit tree back hard and it comes back healthier, with more fruit. The act of cutting away produces growth. The same principle applies to organisations, calendars, and decisions. One good question is the pruning shears.

“Have we considered removing something?”

Ask it at a committee meeting. Ask it when you’re planning an event. Ask it when your on your phone scrolling. Ask it when a problem seems complicated and the proposed solutions all involve more.

Some community organisations have started building this into their process: a standing agenda item that requires the team to identify one thing to stop doing before any new project gets approved. It sounds small. The research says it works. It is also a good way to manage a wardrobe- one item in, one item out.

Sometimes the right answer is to add. But if you never ask the subtractive question, you’ll never know what you’re missing. And the research is clear: left to our own devices, most of us never ask.

What’s left when you stop adding

There’s a famous line attributed to Michelangelo about sculpting David: “I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.”

It’s probably not his exact words. Quotation scholars classify it as widely attributed but unverified, one of those lines that’s been polished by centuries of retelling. But Michelangelo wrote in his letters that the sculptor arrives at the finished work “by taking away what is superfluous.”

It isn’t what is added, its what is taken away that makes a sculpture. Photo: Pexels

One of CAQ’s four IDEALS is Keep It Simple and Play Croquet: use the simplest solution that works, outcomes over complexity, croquet people doing croquet things.

Subtractive thinking is ‘the sculptor’s question’.

The next time you’re buried in options, not just in croquet but life, try the sculptor’s approach. What could be removed? What’s superfluous? What would be left if everything that wasn’t needed was carved away.

Most clubs describe the treasurer role something like this: maintain the books, issue invoices, reconcile the accounts, prepare financial reports for committee meetings, manage the bank account, handle petty cash, chase up unpaid fees.

That’s a lot of tasks. But the treasurer doesn’t have to personally do all of them. Take any single task on that list and there are options for how it gets handled.

To see what I mean, step sideways to the grounds coordinator for a moment. One of their tasks is mowing the lawn surrounds. The grounds coordinator could do it themselves. They could find another member who enjoys mowing. They could decide some areas don’t need mowing as often and reduce the frequency. They could get a robotic mower. They could pay a contractor, or negotiate with council to include it in the lease.

Five options for one task: do it yourself, find someone else, stop doing it, automate it, or outsource it.

Every task has options. The job is making sure it’s covered. Photo: Pexels

Now go back to the treasurer’s list and apply the same thinking. The treasurer might do the bank reconciliation themselves because they’re good with numbers. They might ask someone else to chase unpaid fees because that person knows everyone. They might pay a bookkeeper to prepare the financial reports because life’s too short. Each task gets its own answer. The treasurer doesn’t have to pick the same option for all of them.

So what’s the treasurer’s actual job? Making sure the club’s finances are handled. How they’re handled is a series of decisions about individual tasks, and each decision has options.

The same thing, everywhere you look

The secretary doesn’t have to take the minutes at every meeting. Someone else could do it on a rotating basis. The club could record meetings and use a transcription tool. The secretary makes sure the minutes exist. The method is flexible.

The Come and Try coordinator doesn’t have to be at every session. They need to make sure someone welcoming is there when visitors arrive. Maybe they do it most weeks. Maybe they set up a roster. Maybe they send a message the day before and ask who’s available.

Every position at a croquet club, when you pull it apart, is the same thing: a collection of tasks that need to be coordinated. The person in the role makes sure the tasks are handled. They don’t have to handle all of them personally.

Why this matters right now

Clubs across Queensland can’t fill positions. At AGMs the chair reads out the list of roles and the room goes quiet. The same three people divide the unclaimed positions between themselves. The usual explanation is that people don’t want to volunteer. But most members are happy to help. They’ll set up chairs, put the kettle on, show a visitor where to stand. What they won’t agree to is taking on a role that reads like a job description.

And that’s what most position descriptions are. A list of tasks one person must do, indefinitely, with no clear boundary. A retired person who joined a croquet club to enjoy their Tuesday afternoons reads a list like the treasurer one above and thinks: absolutely not.

The room goes quiet. Not because people don’t care, but because the ask is too big. Photo: Pexels

But “can you handle the petty cash?” is a different ask entirely. That’s one task. It’s small, it’s defined, and it ends when someone else takes it over. People say yes to that. Volunteer management consultant Tobi Johnson makes the same point in Are Your Volunteer Roles Too Big?: when volunteers balk at a big job, the answer is to redesign the role, break it into smaller tasks, assess which ones can be shared or simplified, and build new position descriptions around what’s left. The act of redesigning, she writes, converts what looks like a people problem into a process problem.

The two asks

Think about the difference.

“We need a treasurer. You’ll need to maintain the books, issue invoices, reconcile accounts, prepare financial reports, manage the bank account, and handle petty cash.”

Or:

“We need someone to make sure the club’s finances are handled. Here are the tasks involved. Some you might do yourself, some you might hand to someone else, some we might not need at all. Your job is to make sure it’s covered, not to do it all.”

The actual work might end up being identical. But the second ask changes who’s willing to take the role on, because the weight feels different. You’re not signing up to do everything. You’re signing up to make sure everything gets done. And once you’re in the role, you can break the big job into small asks. Small asks get answered. The workload spreads across the club instead of sitting on one person.

Same work, different weight. Reframing the ask changes who says yes. Photo: Pexels

A club that’s already doing this

Noosa Croquet Club restructured their governance late last year. Their secretary, Brian, separated the committee of nine into coordinators and decision-makers, then created twelve support roles sitting outside the committee. Tournament manager, social committee, assistant treasurer, various operational positions. The support role holders aren’t committee members. They attend meetings to give updates, but they don’t participate in every decision.

Brian reviewed all the role descriptions and reframed them as guidance rather than instructions. The descriptions clarify what’s expected without locking people into rigid task lists. The committee coordinates. The support roles execute. And because each support role is a defined, bounded piece of work, people actually put their hand up for them.

Define the handoff and people step up. Photo: Pexels

When Richard, the tournament coordinator, needed help running a four-day Regional Championship, he put out a message and had volunteers for grounds, catering, and IT almost immediately. He didn’t ask anyone to take on a massive role. He asked for specific help with specific things and got volunteers.

Most of this doesn’t need a committee

There’s a secondary point worth making. Clubs default to putting everything through committee. The grounds need attention? Committee agenda item. The social calendar needs planning? Committee agenda item. Someone needs to buy milk? You get the idea.

Most of the operational work at a club doesn’t need committee approval. It needs someone to coordinate it. Someone who knows what needs to happen, has the freedom to work out how, and can ask for help when they need it. The committee sets the direction. The coordinators make things happen. Volunteering Australia’s meta-analysis on volunteer turnover found that autonomy and burnout are among the strongest predictors of whether volunteers stay or leave. Volunteers who have freedom in how they carry out their work stay longer. Volunteers who feel overloaded quit. Coordination framing gives people both: freedom in how they handle each task, and a natural boundary around what’s theirs to handle.

One position, pulled apart

If you want to test this at your club, pick one role. Ideally one that’s either vacant or held by someone struggling under the weight of it.

Write down every task that sits inside that position. Then, for each task, run through the five options: who does this now? Could someone else? Could we stop doing it? Could we automate it? Could we outsource it?

You’ll find tasks that are critically important. You’ll find tasks nobody’s doing because they fell between roles. You’ll find tasks that have been done the same way for years because nobody questioned whether they’re still needed. And you’ll find tasks that a member would happily take on individually but would never have volunteered for as part of the whole role.

Then rewrite the position description as a coordination role. “This person makes sure the following things are handled. How they’re handled is up to them.”

Pull it apart, see what’s there, then rebuild it as a coordination role. Photo: Pexels

Permission provides the compass to guide committees.

I see the same pattern across croquet clubs in Queensland. The committee wants to do something, buy a TV for the clubhouse, change the session times, spend money on advertising, and they hesitate. Someone will say “What if members don’t like it?” or “We should probably ask everyone first.” The idea stalls, or worse, the committee pushes ahead and then spends months defending itself against a handful of people who feel they weren’t consulted.

This happens in volunteer organisations everywhere. Committee members cite fear of member backlash as a primary reason for inaction. The problem is rarely that committees lack good ideas or the ability to execute them. The problem is they’re making decisions alone, without a clear sense of what the membership actually wants the club to be.

That clarity is what I call permission.

What permission actually is

Permission is the membership saying, out loud and agreeing together: “This is what we want our club to be.”

Once that’s defined, every committee decision gets simpler because now they have permission to do things from the membership. Does this move us toward what the club wants to be? Do it. Does it not? Don’t. The committee works from a mandate to pursue a direction, and individual decisions don’t need individual approval.

I think of it as a casual constitution. A shared agreement about what "right" looks like for this club, what kind of place it is, what kind of people enjoy it here, what the vibe should feel like when someone walks through the gate. The word "casual" matters. People remember it because they helped create it, and it evolves as the club does. When the members change what they want their club to be, the club changes with them.

There’s a useful parallel in how cooperatives operate. The International Co-operative Alliance’s guidance on member participation emphasises that the strongest co-ops are the ones where members have defined the organisation’s identity together, and the board’s job is to pursue that identity with confidence. Volunteer-run sports clubs work the same way. The committee’s job gets easier when everyone has already agreed on the destination.

Where the IDEALS fit in

For CAQ, there are four IDEALS that describe how everyone in croquet should behave. I’ll write about them in more detail separately, but they’re part of this story because the permission meeting is where a club first encounters them.

• Enjoy Croquet. We’re all here to enjoy this, whether you’re playing, helping out, or organising. If someone stops enjoying their involvement, something needs to change.
• Keep It Simple. The simplest approach that actually works. Less admin, more croquet. Croquet people doing croquet things.
• Hit Our Aims. Spend your energy on things that actually make the club better.
• Co-operate for Croquet. Work together, communicate openly, tolerate differences, and forgive honest mistakes. When things go wrong, address the issue, learn from it, and go again.

The two that matter most for members are Enjoy Croquet and Co-operate for Croquet, with a dash of Keep It Simple.

A club where everyone agrees they’re here to enjoy the game, that cooperation takes effort and tolerance, and that simple means more time on the lawns is a club people want to belong to.

Shared ideals bring everyone together.

Permission defines what a club wants to be. The IDEALS describe how everyone behaves while getting there. Growing a club from 20 to 40 members needs both. Without a clear identity, growth feels chaotic. Without a healthy culture, even a clear identity can be pursued badly. A club that has permission and operates by the IDEALS grows in a way that's sustainable and enjoyable for everyone involved.

How the club identity meeting works

The meeting is a standalone session, separate from play days. Nobody should be convinced to come. The people who make the effort are the ones whose input matters, and self-selection is a feature, not a flaw. Robert Putnam’s research on civic engagement in Bowling Alone found that the people who show up to voluntary community sessions are overwhelmingly the ones who care most about outcomes. Apathy is fine. Apathy plus complaints is not.

The questions focus on identity rather than action:

• What type of people would enjoy being at our club?
• What’s our vibe?
• When we have 40 members instead of 20, what does that look like?
• How do we want people to feel when they walk through the gate?
• What would make someone tell a friend they should come along?

These questions sound simple, and they are. But they produce surprisingly specific answers. A club that says “we want people who enjoy a competitive game and a good morning tea” has told its committee something useful. A club that says “we want to feel like a member’s club that happens to have croquet lawns” has told its committee something different. Both are valid. The point is that the members have defined it together, and now every decision the committee makes can be measured against that definition.

Putting the pieces together: a shared agreement solves the puzzle.

By the end of the session, the agreement becomes the ‘casual constitution’ mandate from the club members. The committee takes it from there.

Two-way permission

Permission flows both ways, and that’s what makes it more than a one-way governance exercise.

In one direction, members tell the committee: “We’ve told you what we want the club to be. Now you have permission to make decisions that get us there.” In the other, the committee tells members: “You have permission to own this club. If you want to start a herb garden, do it. If you want to organise a movie night, do it. This is your club, we are here to help co-ordinate.”

Volunteer management research consistently shows that people contribute more when they feel ownership rather than obligation. Committees that hold all decision-making authority end up overwhelmed and resented. Members who feel like visitors rather than owners stop volunteering. The permission meeting creates club ownership on both sides.

At one of the clubs I work with, a member mentioned she missed her garden after moving into the area. She wanted to do some gardening around the club. In a traditional club structure, this would go to committee, get discussed, maybe get approved, maybe not. Six months later, nothing would have happened. In a permission-based club, the response is: “You’re in charge of that. What’s the plan?” She just needs to know that contributing is welcomed and expected. The herb garden happens because the committee welcome co-operation.

When members feel ownership they grow the club themselves.

The complaint shield

One of the most practical benefits is how it changes the way committees handle complaints.

Someone says: “Why did you buy a TV? That’s a waste of money.” Without a casual constitution, the committee is on the back foot: “Well, we thought it would be nice, and the committee voted, and...” Defensive. Weak. With a casual constitution , the response changes entirely: “The club decided we want to use the clubhouse more for social gatherings. The TV supports that. If you’d like to put on a classic movie night, you’re welcome to organise one.”

The difference is that you’re pointing to a shared agreement rather than defending a committee decision. And you’re inviting participation rather than just fielding criticism. The complaint becomes a non-event because the complainer is arguing with something the membership decided together, and they’re being offered a way to contribute instead of just object.

This matters because complaint-handling is one of the biggest energy drains in volunteer committees. Research on the great volunteer resignation notes that burnout is a primary driver of turnover, often exacerbated by organisational conflict. A casual constitution doesn't eliminate complaints, but it gives committees something to stand on when they come.

What changes when a club has this

From the outside, the club looks the same.

But the committee can make decisions with confidence because they know their direction matches what people want. Members help out more, or act independently to improve the club, because they know what fits. The person who loves gardening does the gardens. The person who’s great with people greets the newcomers. The person who just wants to play croquet plays croquet, and that’s fine too. Everyone finds their space more easily.

When the direction is clear, everything works like clockwork.

Cooperation happens more naturally when there’s a shared agreement on what the club “is.” You’re not pulling in different directions. You’re not arguing about whether the club should be social or competitive, because you’ve already agreed it can be both. The energy that used to go into internal debates now goes into actually running the club.

How much of your committee’s time currently goes to managing disagreements about what the club should be doing? What would change if that question was already answered?

What’s coming next: Toombul, next Wednesday

Next Wednesday, I’m sitting down with Toombul Croquet Club to run exactly this kind of session.

Toombul has 20 members, a new committee full of energy, and four lawns that could support 80 members long-term. The immediate goal is to double to 40. But before we start marketing and running Come and Try sessions, we need to know what Toombul wants to be. The club has a fantastic clubhouse that’s underused, and my sense is that it’s the kind of place that could appeal to people from the local library and the sports club alike, social and competitive, with room for both. But that’s my read. What matters is what the members say.

Members who care about the club’s future will come together and answer those questions. What kind of people would thrive here? What does the club look like with 40 members? How should someone feel when they walk through the gate? Once they’ve agreed, the committee has its mandate, and we can start building the membership program around what Toombul actually wants to be.

I’ll be writing about what happens. Stay tuned.

A few years ago, a national sporting body rolled out a new membership management platform to its state associations. It could do many things. On paper, it was the answer to every administrative problem the sport had ever had.

One problem: the volunteers who were supposed to use it couldn’t navigate it. The interface was confusing, the training requirements were significant, and the ongoing support was a hassle. Clubs that had been managing their memberships perfectly well with spreadsheets were now being asked to adopt a system that made their admin lives harder, not easier. Login rates were negligible. The data sitting inside the platform was incomplete because it is getting entered haphazardly.

All the function in the world, gathering dust. Photo: Pexels

The platform had enormous function. But it is hard to use. And that means it has significantly reduced value.

The equation

This is something I keep coming back to in my work with clubs. Usefulness isn’t a vague quality. It’s not a feeling. It’s closer to a formula:

Function x Usage = Value

Function is what something does. Usage is how often people actually use it. Value is what you get when you multiply the two together. The multiplication matters, because if either side is zero, the whole thing is zero. A tool that does everything but sits untouched is worth exactly as much as a tool that does nothing.

Clayton Christensen’s “jobs to be done” framework makes a similar point from the demand side. People don’t adopt tools because of what the tools can do. They adopt tools because they have a job that needs doing, and the tool fits that job in their actual life. The function is only relevant to the extent that someone has a reason to use the thing.

The noticeboard principle

Consider the club noticeboard.

A handwritten note pinned to a corkboard has almost no function in the modern sense. It can’t search. It can’t automate. It can’t sync across devices or send reminders. It’s a piece of paper with a thumbtack through it.

But if every member stops and reads it on the way to the lawns, its usage is high. And that usage makes it valuable. People know what’s happening this week, who’s away, what time the pennant team leaves on Saturday. The information flows because the delivery method fits the audience perfectly. Low function, high usage, high value.

Now compare that to the digital platform that can do everything but nobody logs into. It’s technically superior in every way. It can generate reports the noticeboard could never dream of. But if the login rate is zero, the value is zero. It’s expensive digital dust. High function, low usage, low value.

Usage is the multiplier. And usage only comes from one place: demand.

The supply trap

This is where most projects in volunteer organisations go wrong, and I’ve watched it happen repeatedly across croquet clubs in Queensland.

Someone gets excited about a solution. A new website platform, a booking system, a digital communication tool. They build it or buy it, configure it carefully, maybe spend months getting it right. Then they launch it and go looking for the problems it might solve. “Now that we have this, we should use it for X, Y and Z.” The logic runs backwards, from supply to demand, and it creates a predictable pattern. The people who built it love it. The people who are supposed to use it don’t, because they never asked for it in the first place.

Forcing usage is exhausting. It requires constant reminders, training sessions, complaints about adoption rates, and eventually guilt. Research on technology adoption in volunteer organisations consistently finds that tools imposed without demand create resentment and contribute to burnout. Volunteers already feel stretched. Asking them to learn a new system they didn’t want is a reliable way to lose them.

That said, function obviously matters. You can’t run a membership program on a noticeboard alone. The point is that function without usage is wasted investment, and the way to get usage is to start with the demand, what people want.

When nobody asked for it, every push feels like rolling a boulder uphill. Photo: Pexels

Recognised demand

Instead of building a solution and hunting for problems, identify the problems that people are already feeling. The ones they talk about at committee meetings, the ones that keep coming up in conversations after a game, the ones that make volunteers sigh and say “there has to be a better way.” When the demand is already there, recognised and felt, the solution doesn’t need selling. The gap between “where I am” and “where I want to be” is already established. People are waiting for the bridge.

People are waiting for the bridge. Build the one they’re looking for. Photo: Pexels

At Southport Croquet Club, the committee didn't start with a technology wishlist. They started with a specific frustration: collecting money for lawn fees was a nightmare of envelopes and IOUs. The demand was there because they wanted the problem solved. So when they introduced a simple card reader, adoption was instant. No training sessions needed, no guilt campaigns about using it. The tool solved a problem the club already had, and they used it immediately because they wanted to.

How many tools or systems has your club adopted in the last few years? How many of them were responses to problems people were already feeling, and how many were solutions looking for a problem?

Starting with demand

The strategy is simple to state and requires discipline to follow: don’t launch supply to find demand. Identify the demand to justify the supply.

Before committing volunteer hours and club funds to any new system, tool, or process, the first question should be: who’s asking for this? If the answer is “nobody yet, but they will once they see it,” that’s a warning sign. If the answer is “the treasurer has been complaining about this for six months and three committee members have independently suggested we fix it,” that’s demand. That’s where usage comes from. Usage proves its value.

There’s a second benefit to starting with demand that’s easy to miss. When people ask for something and then get it, the whole relationship with whoever builds it changes. They’re not being sold to. They’re working together. The supplier knows what’s needed because the users have said so, and the users are invested in making it work because it’s solving their problem. That’s cooperation, not compliance. Nobody needs to be convinced, trained, or guilted into using it. They want to, because the tool is theirs, because it solves their problem.

Supply is only a fraction of what’s needed to create usefulness. What’s crucial is demand. When something is demanded, it becomes useful because it’s used. When it’s merely supplied, it becomes one more thing volunteers have to be convinced to do. And in a world where volunteer time is the scarcest resource a club has, that’s a cost most clubs can’t pay.

Demand turns the relationship from compliance into cooperation. Photo: Pexels

There’s a moment in every Come and Try session that everyone dreads. The new people have been playing for a few weeks. They seem to be enjoying themselves. And now someone has to ask them if they’d like to become a member.

Nobody wants to do it. The volunteer who drew the short straw hovers around the edge of the group, waiting for the right moment, trying to work out how to bring it up without sounding like a salesperson. The new people, meanwhile, have no idea the conversation is coming. When it arrives, it feels sudden. Some say yes. Some say they’ll think about it and never come back. The whole thing is awkward because it was never set up to be anything else other than awkward.

This is the problem with treating membership conversion as something that happens at the end of a Come and Try programme. When there’s no structure leading up to it, the ask comes out of nowhere, and your volunteers are left carrying a weight that shouldn’t be theirs.

Standing at the edge, wondering how to make the ask. Photo: Pexels

Permission marketing, applied to croquet

Seth Godin coined the term “permission marketing” in his 1999 book of the same name. The core idea is straightforward: before you ask someone for something, you earn the right to ask by getting their agreement at each step along the way. Every interaction builds on the previous one, and nobody is ever surprised by what comes next.

The opposite is interruption marketing: the cold call, the unsolicited email, the billboard. Most clubs run their Come and Try sessions as interruption marketing without realising it. The new people come, they play, and then one day someone interrupts the fun with a sales pitch they weren’t expecting. It doesn’t matter how politely it’s done. If the person on the receiving end didn’t see it coming, it feels like a pitch.

Applying permission marketing to a Come and Try programme means building the membership conversation into the structure from the start, so that by the time anyone asks “would you like to join?”, the answer has already been forming in the person’s mind for weeks.

Each step leads naturally to the next. Photo: Pexels

How the three weeks work

The structure is simple, and that’s the point. Each week ends with a small, clear statement that sets up the next week’s conversation. Nothing is hidden. Nothing is sprung on anyone.

Week one is about playing. The only expectation for new participants is to have a go at croquet and see if they enjoy it. At the end of the session, the host says something like: “If you enjoyed today and think being a member is something you might be interested in, come back next week.” That’s it. No forms, no fees, no pressure. The people who didn’t enjoy it filter themselves out, which is exactly what you want. The people who return for week two have given you their first piece of permission: they’re interested enough to come back.

Week two shifts slightly. The participants already know they like the game, so the host can start talking about how the club actually runs. What days people play. What the social side looks like. How much membership costs. At the end of the session, the host says: “If you come back next week and you’re still enjoying it, at the end of the day we’ll ask you if you’d like to become a member.” This is the critical moment, and it’s completely invisible to most people watching. By telling participants in advance that the question is coming, you’ve removed the surprise. When they turn up for week three, they’ve already decided they’re comfortable being asked. They gave you permission by showing up.

Week three is the easiest conversation any volunteer will ever have. The person came back knowing they’d be asked about membership. They’ve played three sessions. They’ve heard about how the club works. When the host says “would you like to join?”, the answer has been building for three weeks. There’s no cold pitch. There’s no awkwardness. There’s just the natural conclusion to a process that everyone understood from the beginning.

Why this is easier for volunteers

The reason most volunteers dread the membership conversation is that they’ve been asked to do something socially uncomfortable: approach someone they barely know and try to convince them to spend money. That’s a sales interaction, and most people, especially retired volunteers who joined a croquet club to enjoy their afternoons, don’t want to be salespeople.

Permission-based Come and Try removes that burden entirely. The host doesn’t need to convince anyone of anything. They don’t need to read the room or find the right moment. The structure does the work for them. All they need to do is say the right sentence at the end of each session. The words are pre-planned, the timing is built in, and the participant has already agreed to hear them.

Research from Volunteering Australia consistently shows that volunteers disengage when their roles create social discomfort or feel like they extend beyond what they signed up for. Asking someone to play a sales role when they volunteered to help with croquet is a fast way to lose good people. A structured process keeps the volunteer role small and comfortable.

Open hands, not a hard sell. Photo: Pexels

The psychology underneath

There’s a reason this works beyond just good manners. Robert Cialdini’s work on commitment and consistency shows that when people make small commitments, they’re significantly more likely to follow through with larger ones. Each week of the Come and Try programme is a small commitment. Signing up is a commitment. Showing up is a commitment. Coming back is a commitment. By the time someone reaches week three, they’ve made three successive decisions that all point in the same direction. The membership question aligns with the trajectory they’ve already set for themselves.

This also explains why the people who leave after week one aren’t a problem. They’re a feature. You want early self-selection because the people who return are genuinely interested, and your hosts’ time is spent on the people most likely to join. Every club has limited volunteer capacity. Spending it on people who’ve already demonstrated interest is a better use of everyone’s afternoon than spending it on people who came once out of curiosity and won’t be back.

Small commitments, stacked one on top of another. Photo: Pexels

What changes when you adopt this

Think about your club’s current Come and Try process. How does the membership conversation happen? Is there a defined moment for it, or does it depend on whoever happens to be around that day? Do the new people know it’s coming, or does it land without warning?

When you move to a permission-based structure, several things change at once. The conversion rate goes up because people aren’t blindsided. The volunteer stress goes down because the conversation is scripted into the programme. The people who don’t want to join leave earlier, which means your volunteers spend less time on people who were never going to convert. And the overall tone of the Come and Try shifts from “we hope you’ll join” to “here’s how this works,” which feels more confident and more welcoming at the same time.

The whole process becomes a series of small, agreeable steps that build on each other. The invitation leads to the game. The game leads to returning. Returning leads to joining. By the time anyone signs, everyone reached that point together. You’re not selling. You’re following through on what everyone already agreed to.

I’ve watched this happen more than once in volunteer organisations. Someone builds something good, a new website, a communication platform, a booking system, and then announces it to everyone at once. Big email. Agenda item at the AGM. Maybe a presentation with screenshots. The message is: look what we’ve built, come and use it.

And then almost nobody does. The people who do show up arrive cold. They’re responding to the announcement, not to a need they already felt. They poke around for five minutes, don’t immediately see the point, and leave. The handful of enthusiasts who helped build it are left wondering why nobody cares. The sceptics, who showed up specifically to find fault, now have ammunition: “See? Nobody wants this.”

The problem isn’t what was built. The problem is how it was introduced. A big launch invites everyone at once, which means the room is full of people at different levels of enthusiasm, different levels of understanding, and different levels of willingness to invest effort. The enthusiasts get drowned out by the indifferent majority, and the sceptics set the tone.

The room is ready. Nobody’s coming. Photo: Pexels

Release, don’t launch

There’s a useful distinction between launching and releasing. You launch a rocket. You release a bird. The rocket needs everything to be perfect at the moment of ignition, because the whole world is watching and there’s no second chance. The bird takes flight when it’s ready, finds its own way, and nobody needs to be impressed by the first wingbeat.

Taking flight happens naturally, when the time is right. Photo: Pexels

Seth Godin makes this point in This Is Marketing: the most effective way to grow anything is to start with the smallest viable audience, the people who already want what you’re offering, and let them carry it outward. “People like us do things like this” describes how ideas actually spread through communities. People adopt things because the people they trust have already adopted them.

A release works with that dynamic instead of against it. Instead of announcing to everyone and hoping for the best, you start with the people who are already interested and let them bring in more people like themselves. Each new person arrives having been personally invited by someone they know, someone who’s already using the thing and can explain why it matters. They arrive warm, not cold.

The invitation as a filter

This is the part that feels counterintuitive. Restricting access seems like it would slow growth. In practice, it accelerates it, because every person who arrives through a personal invitation is pre-qualified.

When a volunteer invites someone they know, they’re doing something a mass announcement can’t do: filtering for quality. They know the person. They know that person will appreciate the purpose of what’s been built. They know that person will contribute rather than just observe. The new arrival doesn’t need to be convinced or trained or sold to. They’ve already been told by someone they trust that this is worth their time, and that they belong here.

Access given personally, not broadcast to everyone at once. Photo: Pexels

Compare that to the big launch, where everyone shows up at once and the room includes enthusiasts, the mildly curious, and the actively hostile, all given equal weight. The enthusiasts can’t build momentum because they’re spending their energy managing sceptics. Everett Rogers’ research on how innovations spread through communities found exactly this pattern: early adoption succeeds when it happens within trusted networks, not through broadcast announcements.

How Facebook did it

Facebook’s early growth is the most famous example of this approach in action, and it’s worth understanding why it worked.

When Facebook started in 2004, you needed a Harvard email address to sign up. Then it opened to other Ivy League universities. Then any university. Then workplaces. It took years before the general public could join. At every stage, new users arrived and found a community that already worked, people they knew, conversations already happening, a reason to stay.

Facebook understood something that most organisations miss: a network is only valuable if the people like you are already there. If you open the doors to everyone on day one, the network is empty and nobody has a reason to come back. If you build it in layers, each new layer arrives to find something worth joining.

The staged rollout wasn’t a limitation. It was the strategy. Growth was exponential precisely because it was controlled.

What this looks like for ClubHub

ClubHub is in its early phase right now, and we’re deliberately taking the release approach rather than the launch approach.

The first people using it are the enthusiasts, the club committee members and CAQ volunteers from pilot clubs who see the value of having a shared space for club-facing resources, discussions, and operational support. These people don’t need to be convinced. They’re already in because they want to be, and they’re willing to put up with the rough edges that come with anything new. They’re building the conversations, testing the tools, and creating the content that the next wave of users will find when they arrive.

This is the embedding phase. The enthusiasts set the tone. They create the norms for how ClubHub is used, what kind of discussions happen there, what’s valuable and what isn’t. When the next group arrives, they don’t walk into an empty room. They walk into a working community with established patterns, useful content, and people who can show them around.

Think of your own club. When a new member walks in and finds an active, welcoming group already playing, they settle in quickly. When they walk in and find an empty clubhouse with a sign that says “members wanted,” the experience is very different. ClubHub works the same way.

The three waves

Every gradual release follows roughly the same pattern:

1. The builders. The enthusiasts who arrive first, invest effort, and create the value. They tolerate imperfection because they believe in what’s being built. They set the example for everyone who follows.
2. The middle wave. The people who arrive and find something that already works. They didn’t need to be there from the start, but they can see what the builders have created and they want in. Their arrival validates the builders’ effort and adds momentum.
3. The last wave. The sceptics. They need to see a system that’s already proven, already populated, already obviously useful. They won’t jump over barriers, but they don’t need to, because the barriers have been removed by everyone who came before them. The benefits are demonstrated, not promised.

Each wave reaches further than the last. Photo: Pexels

The sceptics aren’t a problem in this model. They’re the final confirmation that the release worked. When the people who would never have joined early are joining because they can see it’s working, that’s the end game.

The discipline of patience

The hardest part of a release strategy is resisting the urge to announce. It feels slow. It feels like you’re leaving people out. Every instinct says “if we just told everyone, we’d grow faster.” But the evidence says otherwise, and the Facebook example is only one of many. Gmail launched as invite-only in 2004 and stayed that way for years. Slack grew through team-by-team adoption, not enterprise-wide announcements. The pattern repeats because it works.

Growth that lasts starts small and steady. Photo: Pexels

For ClubHub, the discipline is the same. Invite the people who want to be here. Let them build something worth joining. And when the time is right, the next wave will come because someone they trust told them it was worth their time.

That’s how you grow a community. Not with a bang, but with a steady, widening circle of people who chose to be there.