First I’ll assume you agree with me that auto-scheduling is not something you want in your club.

Your best bet is that if someone wants to introduce it to your club and you don’t have it already, push back. Just because an excited member touts some new project doesn’t mean you have to sit silently and accept it.

Suppose your club auto-schedules already and you don’t like it. The most direct path, though a lot of work, is to become the Vice President of Education (VPE). The VPE is responsible for scheduling. This happened to me. The former VPE had setup auto-scheduling a few months earlier, I hated it, and when I became the VPE the next term the first thing I did was make an executive decision that auto-scheduling was finished. It’s never come back.

I was lucky because we’d only had auto-scheduling for a few months anyway and it wasn’t popular. The fact I can be hyper-aggressive when needed helped, too.

If you’re in a club where it’s entrenched, it’s trickier but not impossible to make auto-scheduling go away as VPE. Here’s how I’d do it - I would float out as an “experiment” that you want to try having people manually schedule themselves. You may end up deciding that I’m full of crap and that auto-scheduling is the way to go, in which case you can come back to this site and lay into me. But if you decide I’m right after a few months, don’t bring up auto-scheduling again. Just let the “experiment” become the de facto policy. If anyone ever wants it back, see second paragraph above.

If you can’t be VPE to push this through, try to convince whoever is the VPE that you/I are right and then let them run with the “experiment.” As I discovered when I saw a club where someone tried to throw a bean into a jar at every uhm or ah, there were a lot of people not happy with the decision but not a lot of people standing up against it until the first person (me again) complained.

You too can be the hyper-aggressive obstructionist in your club!

If someone argues with you and wants auto-scheduling back, things can get really touchy. Toastmasters are process geeks and there are people that love auto-scheduling as much as I hate it.

Assuming it’s not clear cut which side has the majority, I would think that the only fair way to do this would be to put it to a vote of the membership. You can actually turn this into an interesting experience by having a meeting where both sides are debated and then voting after. My smart ass argument against auto-scheduling is if you relied on the auto-scheduler alone to try and schedule the debate, you could be waiting for years until it happened to put you and your debating opponent on the schedule on the same day. Then I’d just walk through the steps I laid out initially.