Sometimes it takes stepping back from a problem to realize the solution. This happened to be a couple days ago at a meeting of one of my groups and made me think, “Do I give up or do I try and solve the problem?”
The situation is this – our group is going through a serious problem, changing locations. With a highly contested vote, we (barely) agreed to rent this location that will be difficult to pay for. Meanwhile, we’re still operating out of our old location, in order to keep paying the bills. So we’re meeting weekly to discuss concerns and address what needs to be done.
So far, so good. So the meeting location suddenly gets moved to the new location, and the president only bothers to tell about… oh, seven people. Considering twenty are supposed to come to this meeting, this comes as a bit of a shock when I come in the old location and find only three bewildered people wondering where the rest of the officers are. Thankfully, we’ve already set things our meetings to be hybrid–both in person and online–so I fire up my computer and connect to the meeting.
This is where things really start to fall apart. The president uses his phone to connect in, because we don’t have wifi up at the new location. The connection was so bad that (at its best), we were barely hearing the folks on the other end. Then it decides to occasionally glitch out, so now we’re only hearing every other word. But what came through clearly at one point was one of the (younger) officers decrying, “Why are we the only ones here? Why are we doing this alone?!”
And that’s when the answer occurs to me. The reason no one’s helping out is because no one asks for help; they just assume you know they need it. This meeting was a case in point. They just decided to go to the new location because it would easier to show everyone the changes that needed to be made before we could move in, rather than rely on diagrams. Good idea. The problem is they didn’t tell anyone they were going to do it. The officers who had arrived early at the old location just told everyone there, “Let’s go,” and they did. They didn’t even consider that more people would be coming.
Which led me to three answers to this situation. One, all the people they considered important were already there, so it didn’t matter telling anyone else. (This is a sin of com-mission.) Two, they didn’t remember that other people were going to show up. (A sin of o-mission.) Or three, it never occurred in their minds to tell anybody else. (Just being stupid.) I’m more inclined based on Hanlon’s Razor that it’s just being stupid.
So this leaves me with a problem of my own, since I’m the communications officer for this group. Do I assume that a) they don’t think I’m important enough to tell me? b) don’t think my work is valuable? c) they’re just clueless. The problem with what I believe is the actual answer is that if they’re clueless, they’re never going to improve. In a way, it also tells me that they don’t think I’m important enough or that my work is valuable. On other hand, they’re not being mean. If this had been the first time this happened, I would understand, but it’s a pattern. Ironically, it was the problem I was brought in to solve, so I guess I failed at my mission.
This reminds of a scene in a autobiography called Outwitting History by Aaron Lansky. He was going to Yiddish groups and asking for their books to help preserve them. Him and his young friends were in basement while the elderly remnant was upstairs blaring, “Where are the youth?!” It never occurred to him to check the basement. It never occurred to him to ask his grandkids or his friend’s grandkids to join. To him, if they were important, they’d already be at the meeting, because after all, he knew it was happening. We are blinded by our own bubble.
So I’m hoping in a couple days I will have calmed down enough to decide let’s fix this problem. But more likely, I’m guessing I’ll just quit… because I don’t think the people in charge are likely to do the changes I think are necessary to fix it, which basically boil down to “When something happens, you tell me, and I tell everyone else.” If they haven’t done it yet, I doubt they’ll do it in the future… but I should give them a chance to try.
Albigensia Press 