The Concepts Made Simple: Concept 2
The Concepts made Simple: Concept 2
Concept 2: “The General Service Conference of UK has become, for nearly every practical purpose, the actual voice and effective consciences of our whole society in its world affairs.”
One of AA’s greatest achievements is introduced in Concept 2: it is the thing which made AA’s so called “inverted pyramid” structure a permanent feature. Since AA’s early days we have had this inverted structure. At its top we have always had ourselves, the AA groups. However the bottom has changed over AA’s history. In the old days it was Bill W and Dr Bob together with the General Service Board (GSB). Although the GSB were responsible for much of the day-to-day running of AA’s national unified services, they were only able to do this because of the trust that the groups had in Bill and Bob. The groups placed final trust and responsibility in Bill and Bob, and Bill and Bob passed on a lot of this to the GSB. But not all of it.
Once Dr Bob got terminally ill with cancer, it became clear that Bill and Bob were not immortal. What was to become of the “bottom of the pyramid” once Bill and Bob passed on? Dr Bob and Bill W were the two most well known members of AA. All AA members owed these guys their lives directly or indirectly. Who would their natural leadership function be inherited by?
It would have been the most natural thing in the world for Bill and Bob to say to the Fellowship, “Folks, here’s two other AA members, Fred and Sam. They’re good sober people and we’d like you to view them as you’ve viewed us. To trust them to provide the leadership services we’ve done for you the last few decades.” If you look at other organisations, after their initial leaders have passed on, they normally pass on the mantle to a new set of leaders. Alternatively, Bill and Bob could have passed it on to the GSB Committee as a whole, saying perhaps: “Look folks, we give the GSB our full support. We’d like you folks to trust them after we’ve gone, and allow them to act for you as a whole. Treat them with the same trust that you treat us with.”
Although it may seem obvious to us now that this would not have worked for AA, it is a method which has been used again and again in well-known organisations throughout history. We can see now that such a system would have failed within AA. If Bill and Bob appointed another 2 members to take over from them, eventually these 2 members, or perhaps their successors, would have lost the trust of the Fellowship over some controversial issue. How would the groups get to know and trust these 2 people as well as they had known Bill and Bob? In fact, after a decade, a good percentage of the groups might not have even heard of these 2 new people! (Think how many groups have not heard of Conference.) Even if Bill and Bob has passed their inheritance on to the GSB, how long would it have been before a rift developed between the GSB and the groups? Anyway, how many people in AA know who the members of the GSB are? How many of us have met them? Imagine the publicity campaign that would be required to make the new leaders of AA known and trusted throughout the fellowship. It would obviously clash with the humility and “non-personalities” required by Tradition 12: the spiritual foundation of all our Traditions.
So Bill and Bob were in the situation where they knew that they needed to hand over their leadership to someone/something, but it could not be to 2 new people, or even to the well-established and important GSB. After Bill and Bob had gone, what was to sit at the bottom of the pyramid in parallel with the GSB? Who would the groups trust and follow? Bill’s insight, which cut through all these problems, was essentially to hand over his and Bob’s authority and responsibility to the groups themselves! Actually this is a slight over-simplification. Bill’s exact solution was to create another larger committee, or “Conference” of about 100 people, which would be so connected and accountable to the groups that they would have a very large degree of natural trust in it. This Conference would be placed at the bottom of the pyramid, joining the GSB, and replacing Bill and Bob. The Conference would be given the authority to speak for the Fellowship, and the responsibility to guard it. It would have authority even over the GSB, thus making them accountable, and keeping them linked safely to the Fellowship. It would be the “group conscience” of the whole fellowship.
A great deal of work was done designing a structure which would make the Conference trusted and strongly linked to the Fellowship. The key point was: the vast majority of people who attended Conference would be voted in by and known to the groups. In 1955 the groups in America accepted the structure, and Bill and Bob stepped down from their positions of leadership, letting the Conference replace them. The structure has stood the test of time after Bill and Bob died, and survived and is functioning almost half-a-century later. In 1966 the UK implemented a similar structure and the first UK Conference happened in that year. The UK Conference has continued to function next to the UK GSB for almost 40 years.
One interesting issue which has been raised over the last 10 years in the UK has been the people that attend the UK Conference. The original Conference structure was designed so that most of the people who went to Conference were chosen by the groups, thus creating the strong bond of natural trust between the groups and Conference. In the UK the people who go to Conference are not actually chosen by the groups, they are chosen by the Intergroups. There has been much discussion over whether this extra level of separation between UK Conference and the groups leads to less of trust of the Conference and the GSB. No doubt this topic will continue to be debated, and it will be interesting to see how it develops over the next few years.
The well known and respected author Aldous Huxley once called Bill W “The Greatest social architect of the 20th Century”. There can be little doubt that Concept 2 is central to one of Bill’s greatest acts of “social architecture”. Although there is often a lot of healthy debate, controversy and questioning with the UK Conference and the UK GSB, it is amazing the degree to which we unify behind these two bodies. It is thanks to these two bodies that we can actually talk about AA UK, “AA as a whole” in the United Kingdom. Without them we would just be a bunch of disparate groups or intergroups probably printing our own literature and running our own phonelines, and probably arguing over who ran which bit of the town or county! Thanks to Concept 2, although we are no longer united behind Bill and Bob, we remain united and we remain prepared as a whole to help the newcomer to AA in the UK on a national, regional and local level. And this preparation has saved many many lives.
AK, Road to Recovery Group, Plymouth, Aug 2013