President's Blog I think you are right that many towers and branches are blindly doing what they've been doing for years, a model that clearly doesn't work otherwise we wouldn't be having this discussion. I don't believe that the majority of ringers are averse to change, and I don't think age has all that much to do with attitudes. I think the issue is that there's often a big disconnect between "bog standard" ringers and the people who are branch/association officers - it's not that nobody's hungry to improve, it's that what's on the menu is not suitable for them.
For example, I've had an email via one of the associations I'm a member of announcing a series of fortnightly surprise major/minor practices - but as far as I can tell it's a standalone effort, rather than something coming from the association. Whilst it's great for me as I'm just starting to ring Surprise, there's nothing on offer to help people cross the gaping chasm between PH and Surprise, and those people make up the
majority of ringers. As
@Phillip George said, the potential of most ringers is not being realised. Yes we need new recruits but if we can't meet the aspirations of the ringers we already have, what's the point? Improving the support for and skills of existing ringers must surely be the first step - we don't have to recruit them and for goodness sake they can already ring!
A good question is "What would it take to start to change things?" I think it's less than you might expect. It's easy to be daunted by the size of the problem, but unless you start somewhere, things will never improve. I'm not a great fan of "big strategy" approaches to problems, much better I feel to pick something small, get things rolling, see what works and what doesn't and to use that experience to iterate towards a fuller solution.
I think the question we should be asking is "What things can we can do quickly that would start to improve matters?", not "How do we draw up a master plan to fix all of ringing's issues".