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Whose Job Is This?
There are lots of details about ThatCon I’d enjoy getting deeply involved with, but it turns out that, as con chair, most of those details are not my job. It’s more important to make sure that someone’s on top of them and get myself out of the way of the process, thereby leaving myself free for the few things that no one else can do.
This turns out to be easier to say than to put into practice. For all kinds of reasons, I’ll resist delegating a task.
I’m guessing that overall the two biggest obstacles to delegating are “no volunteer for a job” and “lack of trust in someone who’s volunteered but with whom I don’t have a track record of success”. Close behind this is “I don’t understand the thing that needs delegating well enough to make a job description.” But yesterday’s delegation difficulties were more subtle. I found myself being the go-to person in a bunch of small decisions when really any of a number of solutions would have sufficed. Why me, I wondered, how did I get here?
- It was something I was interested in and actually have strong opinions about though not necessarily expertly informed ones. So, when asked, it was gratifying to put in my two cents and see the ideas put into practice.
- Relatedly, it was something where I could see the ideas in practice. There was a direct result between decision and result, whereas many of the things I am doing for the con are more about influencing the shape of events and setting up processes where people can work.
- At first I wasn’t sure that there really was someone in place to delegate this topic to in the future. After thinking about it for a while, I realized that there was a person, P, nominally in charge of this area but not engaged in the conversation. That’s interesting!
That last point led to a whole other set of questions.
- How did P get left out of the discussion? Well, theyd originally been included but never responded, and eventually wound up dropped from the cc list.
- Is P interested in this conversation? Does P think that the outcome of this decision is part of his job? I realized that I was assuming that the answers to both of these were “no” but that I didn’t know that for sure.
It’s hard to ask those kinds of questions in email. So I picked up the phone and, luckily, reached P right away so that I could ask for what I wanted, support in getting myself out of the loop of future decision making on this topic. Confirmation that we agreed about the scope of the job responsibilities, and that we agreed P should follow up in the future.
And so after the phone call, I answered the pending question, having my own little bit of fun in molding the universe to the Whim of the Con Chair, but made it clear I’d defer to P for future decisions in the same area.
Totally Like Whatever, You Know?
Just a pointer to Taylor Mali’s poetry today:
A good reminder to me not to be too tentative when I speak.
It’s a beautiful Saturday and I’m going to get out there and enjoy it.
Metaphor of the Day
Being conchair of ThatCon is like being head magician of an amazing machine. Of which I do not know all the incantations to use all its miraculous capabilities and besides it has a mind of its own. And talks back.
Learning from Last Year
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: facilitation, having fun is important, meetings, rituals
Comments (2,975) Every year the staff of ThatCon ends the year with a pile of notes about what to change for next year. And then the notes go in a file and we completely forget them.
Wait, not really. The formal meeting that we call “the debrief” is not that effective a way of fixing the institutional anything. Three or four hours of sitting in a room hearing reports one division at a time and getting little bullets of feedback in three minute increments with no discussion time is, in and of itself, not a good way to fix anything. I suspect that far more real change gets accomplished in the informal small-group dinners that inevitably follow.
We keep doing it because it serves a purpose. A couple of purposes. First of all, by having a meeting, we have a due date when the written copies of all of those reports are due. We have about a dozen standard questions about what went well, what went badly, and what needs to be changed for the future. Sum total of those reports, posted to our staff web site, are a great resource for those that follow.
Second of all, many volunteer organizations have trouble with giving thanks and recognition, and we’re no exception. It’s insufficient, but necessary, for those people who led the organization to get a chance to stand up and say, this is what I did.
Third, it’s kind of a closing ritual.
Still. Three or four hour of sitting in room hearing three minute reports, Madame Conchair, how does that jibe with your New Year’s Resolution a month ago about no boring meetings? It’s hard to do much with this format.
You can:
- make it run on time
- take good notes so that people who can’t be there or can’t stay for the whole thing have access
- make the meeting available to remote participants and let people with laptops write down their comments in real time
- have a little bit of humor and a little bit of audio-visual
- have name tags so we stop pretending that we all know everyone, and making the new folks feel even more out of the loop. I could write a whole little post about that alone.
We did all those things, and the best I can say for it is it wasn’t a horrible meeting.
The best thing we did was make a reservation down the block for a bunch of pool tables for afterwards. The fun and conversation there made up, a little bit, for our yearly exercise in trying to cram a summary of thousands of hours of work into an afternoon.
But wait! I have an idea. For an Experiment. Of how to do this better, more productively, and a lot more fun next year. I’ll save that for another post though.
Staffing up
I skipped writing about the debrief from the last convention, and there’s a lot to say about that. Right now I’m deep into the process of staffing next year’s con — talking to lots of people on staff, asking them to take various jobs on my convention, and juggling the org chart like a bowl of fruit at a clown convention.
I’ve liked the process to building a tower out of blocks. Living blocks with their own agenda who regularly decide they don’t want to be where they are any more and wander around switching places.
We’re having trouble finding staff in many areas of the con, and somewhat paradoxically, my response to this is to break a lot of jobs into smaller pieces. Smaller, more manageable pieces seem to increase the pool of people willing to tackle them and even more, increases the pool of people I’m willing to trust with them.
The downside is that I’m growing the number of conchair direct reports to a number that I definitely can’t handle on my own. I’m planning to ask my as-yet-unappointed assistant conchairs to take groups of divisions and provide oversight to them. This is adding a whole additional level of challenge as I figure out what groups logically belong together, what groups only belong together because of the personal talents of the staff members, and what people just can’t work together, sending me back to the drawing table again.
Isn’t It Ironic?
Within a couple of days of posting the last blog post, The Pursuit of Perfection, a new and shiny opportunity came up. It seemed like something that would be worth creating a whole host of new details and running around and changing things at the last minute — all the things that I was aware would stress people out. Nevertheless, there’s a balance and responding to new situations is part of the balance.
Somewhere in one of the several things I have been reading recently about organizational culture and change management, I read the statement that change is more accepted when there is respect for existing roles and responsibilities. Keeping that in mind while I made an (in the end futile) attempt to change the plans already in motion meant that at least this adidn’t do more damage than good.
The Pursuit of Perfection
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: change management, people differ, timeline
Comments (5,023) I sometimes describe ThatCon as “ambitious”, by which I mean that we’re constantly trying to do better, bigger, and more exciting than we’ve done before. One-upping our own past performance is part of the fun. Of course there’s a downside to this.
There’s a time in the convention timeline when we have to just execute what we’ve already committed to and not subject people to more shifts and adjustments in their plans. No matter how awesome a new idea is, its cost in terms of stress and potential communications problems gets magnified as we get closer to the event. I’m noticing that different people have different thresholds for when that moment has arrived. For me, it was about two weeks ago. For Mr. Enthusiastic (not his real name, of course), it’s possible that moment wont be here until we’re sweeping up at the end.
ThatCon will be live in less than a week. Right now, the pursuit of perfection is causing frayed tempers and tired staff. It’s true that every detail we get right now can save us a significant amount of time not fixing problems at runtime. But no NEW details, please!