How many times have you been to a meeting that didn’t go well? Did it seem that the chair didn’t keep order? Was there a feeling that something was “railroaded”? Did it take an interminable amount of time to settle the simplest things? What was wrong?
When people want to do something as a group, they must first agree on exactly what it is they want to do and how they want to go about it. In other words, they must work together to make some decisions. Sometimes it may take some zeroing in even to get at the “what?” At other times, the “what?” may be generally understood and the necessary decisions may involve the “how to?”
If there are only three or four persons in the group, you are right if you wonder why they should need a book like this. Common sense tells us that all they need to do is sit down in one room as people bent on working out where they want to go in a courteous spirit without wasting anyone’s time. They should all try to agree; but if they can’t and a majority want to go ahead with something, the group may want to have an understanding that the majority’s will should prevail. Whoever is taking the lead may want to note down what has been decided and provide each person with a copy.
But make it even a half dozen people who are meeting in this way, and you will soon see the need for at least some formal control. Too many people may try to talk at once. Some may not be able to get a word in edgewise. People may wander off the subject—or may even lose sight of what the proper subject is. And if things aren’t handled right, they may come out of the meeting with different understandings of what was or was not agreed to.
To prevent this, you will need to pick one person to “chair” the meeting—to designate who may speak at any given time and to see that the discussion narrows down to specific, precisely worded proposals. These should be recorded, and should be voted on unless there is obvious total agreement.
When the gathering reaches a size of about 12 to 15 persons, another threshold is crossed. At that point, the meeting becomes essentially “full scale,” with a need for tighter, more formal, more carefully developed control. A certain paradox appears. In order to preserve its freedom to act, the body must impose regulation.
The needed control must not only “keep order.” It must of course be geared to getting the business done and resolving any issues that may arise along the way. But—even more important—it must do these things in a way that’s fair to everyone taking part in the process. And in this there’s more than may meet the eye.
Control of this kind naturally must be imposed by the person who conducts the meeting—generally called the chairman. There are a multitude of details that must be determined through him or her. Who gets to speak when? How is the meeting to be kept on track? What if discussion tends to go on forever? How is intense disagreement to be handled? How can business best be put through when there is no disagreement? What if a proposal appears to be not yet in shape for a yes-or-no decision? And in a group like a club that has a continuing existence, how is business to be carried over from one meeting to the next if that seems desirable? All these things and many more are potential stumbling blocks when a large number of people are involved.
Whoever is chairman will soon come up against a significant fact of life related to gatherings of this kind. In them, it is virtually impossible for any human being to perform the function of chairman fairly under all the situations that may arise, without a considerable body of established rules to go by. No one can do it just out of his or her own head.
Parliamentary procedure is a tradition of rules and customs for dealing with these problems. A bit of it goes back as far as the ancient Greeks. But its basic content was mainly formed by centuries of trial and error in the English Parliament, from which the name “parliamentary procedure” comes.
Not everyone may realize that the organizations most of us get involved in at some time or other are essentially similar to great legislative assemblies in an important way. They all meet to consider and decide on actions to be taken. For this reason, they are all known as deliberative assemblies.
Major law-making bodies usually develop their own particular rules. This is largely impractical, however, in ordinary organizations as far as rules of meeting procedure are concerned. Each group of this kind obviously must work out its own structure. But things work best if most of the rules for making decisions in meetings are the same from group to group. It would be worse than burdensome if one had to use different rules for deciding matters every time he or she took part in a different organization. By general understanding in our culture, parliamentary procedure fills the role of supplying this needed common body of rules.
Although originally derived from practices in the English Parliament, parliamentary procedure as it exists in America today has gradually evolved somewhat differently. Henry Martyn Robert (1837–1923), a distinguished engineer who retired from the U.S. Army as a brigadier general, had considerable influence on this development. A self-taught, in-depth student of the subject who was active in many organizations, he first published his Robert’s Rules of Order while a major in 1876. It rapidly became accepted as the standard authoritative work on meeting rules—so much so that when people talk about using correct procedure in a meeting, they often speak of doing it “according to Robert’s Rules.”
As Henry Robert first conceived his book, he wanted it to be brief and simple enough to serve as a guide in the hands of every meeting-goer. He thought it might run to about 50 pages. By the time the first edition was published, he found he needed 176. Following its publication, letters asking questions about parliamentary situations not clearly answered in the book began to pour in—by the hundreds through the years.
Consequently, over time, he was obliged to add more and more pages to answer the most common of these questions. Robert himself repeatedly revised his 1876 book. In accordance with his expressed wishes, his son, his widow, and his daughter-in-law all carried on the work after his death. His grandson Henry M. Robert III was, until the latter’s death in 2019, among the team of parliamentarians (as experts in these rules are called in this country) chosen by his descendants to continue the updating and revision of the book. The manual is now in its twelfth edition, under the title of Robert’s Rules of Order Newly Revised—commonly abbreviated RONR.1
RONR, the complete rule book, now contains 633 pages of text, plus tables and charts. All of its content has to be there because it may be needed, and has at some time come up as a question of procedure somewhere. RONR is designed as a reference book providing, as nearly as possible, an answer to any question of parliamentary procedure that may be met with.
But the average person doesn’t have to know all this to be able to function effectively in most ordinary meetings, or even to chair one. At least 80 percent of the content of RONR will be needed less than 20 percent of the time.
For one who will brave it, RONR is written to serve as a self-explanatory text that can be read through, with topics presented in an order that will best convey an overall understanding of the entire subject matter. You need not apologize, however, if you find that to be a bigger project than you would like to take on at this point. If you simply want to know how to get by in a meeting or as a club president, this brief book is for you.
The commonly needed basics of parliamentary procedure are well within the grasp of any person of ordinary schooling. By reading this book, you can learn them easily, step by step. For those to whom parliamentary procedure has seemed something of a mystery, this book should quickly bring that to an end.
It is important to understand, though, that this introductory book is not itself the rule book. Only the complete Robert’s Rules of Order Newly Revised—RONR—is that. To keep to the framework of a simple guide, this book omits a great many rules, avoids certain subject areas altogether, and doesn’t get into many exceptions to the rules it does include. It is the rules in RONR that govern, and nothing in this book may be cited instead of or in conflict with RONR. To help ready reference to the complete rules, each subject covered here is cross-referenced to its fuller treatment in RONR. By reading this book you will learn how to find the additional rules in RONR if you need them.
Because this book is only an introduction and guide to RONR, it is not itself suitable for adoption by any organization as its “parliamentary authority”—the book of rules the group names to govern its meeting procedure. If any organization designates this book as its parliamentary authority, it actually adopts the current edition of Robert’s Rules of Order Newly Revised.
A prime value of parliamentary procedure is that it provides processes through which an organization, large or small, can work out satisfactory solutions to the greatest number of questions in the least amount of time. It can do this whatever the detail or complexity that may be involved. It makes meetings go smoothly when everyone is in agreement, and allows the group to come to decisions fairly when issues are bitterly contested.
A chairman should never be stricter than is necessary for the good of the meeting. But, within that pattern, parliamentary procedure should normally be followed as a matter of course if it is to work well. It’s not something to look to only when you get into trouble.
Robert’s Rules of Order has brought order to millions of meetings. Yet it has more to offer us if the core of its content can penetrate more deeply into our culture. Every parliamentarian has heard many stories of meeting participants finding themselves helpless in the face of badly, ineptly—even unfairly—run meetings. All this need not be! Effective meetings could become the universal rule, if an elementary knowledge of the accepted rules that govern them were to become the common property of most people, as—for example—are the rules of baseball. The authors hope this brief book will play some part in bringing about that result.
Now let’s start at the beginning, with what happens in a meeting.
1. This is the standard abbreviation parliamentarians use to cite Henry M. Robert III and others, Robert’s Rules of Order Newly Revised, 12th ed. (New York: PublicAffairs, 2020). The standard citation to particular paragraphs in the current edition is, for example, “RONR (12th ed.) 13:1” [referring to the first paragraph in section 13] or “RONR (12th ed.) 13:1–6” [referring to paragraphs 13:1 through 13:6 in section 13].