A Small Number Of People Are Doing Most Of The Work

Every group knows who they are. Very few groups have a plan for what happens when one of them stops.

In a group with a few staff and several dozen volunteers, the distribution of effort is never even and is rarely close to even. A handful of people carry a disproportionate share, not because others are unwilling, but because capable people attract work and because it is faster to ask the person who already knows than to bring somebody new up to speed. Over time the pattern hardens. The reliable few become the default for anything urgent, anything sensitive and anything that has to be right. Their competence becomes the reason for the overload, which is a difficult thing to raise without sounding ungrateful for it.

The concentration is usually invisible in the group's own account of itself, which tends to be told in terms of total numbers. A truer picture emerges from a simple exercise: list the tasks that must happen for the organisation to function, and write beside each one the name of the person who would do it if nobody else stepped forward. When the same few names fill the column, the group is looking at its real risk register. It is also looking at the reason its recruitment of volunteers keeps failing, because a group organised around a few indispensable people offers newcomers very little to hold.

Spreading the load is harder than it sounds, because the barrier is rarely willingness. It is that the work exists only as habit in one person's head and has never been described well enough for anyone else to take it. The remedy is unglamorous. Pick the two or three functions the group could least afford to lose, write down how they are actually done, and have somebody else do them at least once while the usual person is still available to ask. That single practice converts an unwritten dependency into a transferable task, and it is worth more than any number of appeals for extra hands.