Adding a bit to your comments on how the lack of support can decrease the capacity of the organization: Consider the situation where the person responsible for something has fallen behind and, although they haven't reached burnout, plodding through the guilt is taking up so much of their effort that they make very little progress and fall further behind. The lack of support removes many of the ways that this could get resolved; it means that they don't feel safe admitting how far they are behind, they don't feel comfortable asking someone else to help, and when people do notice, they often make the situation worse rather than better. It also means that the only thing they feel safe saying is "I'll get to this as soon, I promise!" which means other people can't accurately plan on when it will happen.
(In the case of one organization of my experience, this was particularly happening with addressing reports of member code-of-conduct violations, so the effects can be pretty bad -- and there, because of confidentiality, nobody even saw how bad the problem was except the people who'd filed reports and never heard back, and they only saw that this was systemic when they started comparing notes. So, like the missing stair problem, this can lead to significant harm.)
I've also seen cases where there has been a much more direct way that the cultural problems have led to a reduced capacity of the organization, which was simply that the cultural problems meant that the organization's leaders had to spend a good bit of their capacity defending the things that they had already done and why they did them.
One of the things that feels particularly difficult with conventions and similar organizations that exist to facilitate a community (especially a community with paying members) is that there is no clear dividing line between the volunteers and the people who expect to be served by the organization -- and, in particular, you get people who don't contribute positive service but also expect their complaints to be addressed because they are members, and they can make the "everyone needs to engage productively and positively" part of a healthy community very difficult to achieve.
no subject
(In the case of one organization of my experience, this was particularly happening with addressing reports of member code-of-conduct violations, so the effects can be pretty bad -- and there, because of confidentiality, nobody even saw how bad the problem was except the people who'd filed reports and never heard back, and they only saw that this was systemic when they started comparing notes. So, like the missing stair problem, this can lead to significant harm.)
I've also seen cases where there has been a much more direct way that the cultural problems have led to a reduced capacity of the organization, which was simply that the cultural problems meant that the organization's leaders had to spend a good bit of their capacity defending the things that they had already done and why they did them.
One of the things that feels particularly difficult with conventions and similar organizations that exist to facilitate a community (especially a community with paying members) is that there is no clear dividing line between the volunteers and the people who expect to be served by the organization -- and, in particular, you get people who don't contribute positive service but also expect their complaints to be addressed because they are members, and they can make the "everyone needs to engage productively and positively" part of a healthy community very difficult to achieve.