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Of Toxic Service and Missing Banisters
Anyone who knows me knows that I am involved with many, many volunteer organizations -- that's what I do with much of my time.
This past week, I wound up in a conversation in one of them that was pointlessly hurtful to me, and the result is that I'm going to be reducing my involvement in that organization. I don't think anyone was intentionally trying to be harmful, but it was kind of my breaking point.
(We're not going to talk here about which organization, or the details of the incident -- they're not especially relevant, and would likely just derail the more interesting conversation. Suffice it to say, I've written to the leadership of that organization to give them my thoughts on the matter.)
The whole thing led to a lot of soul-searching and introspection, and as is my way, some philosophizing about what's going on there. None of this is unique to the group in question -- I've observed similar in many clubs -- so let's talk about some basics.
This is half-philosophizing, half a necessary diary entry to get my head straight, so it'll be a bit of a wander. Bear with me -- it'll get to the point. Hopefully others will find it useful / interesting.
In the heat of the moment, I focused on a few individuals who, being extremely focused on their own problems, made mine much worse. This put me in mind of the concept of Toxic Service.
"Toxic Service" is an idea that I learned from the Order of the Silver Crescent, in the East Kingdom of the SCA. We might well have invented the term, decades ago, but it's hard to be sure.
The Crescent is the Order that recognizes Service to the Kingdom. Its definition doesn't say anything about behavior, and some people take that to imply that behavior is absolutely irrelevant. (As opposed to the higher-level Order of the Pelican, where good behavior is an explicit requirement.)
Over the years, we decided that wasn't quite right. The Crescent doesn't demand that you be a role model of politesse, but is concerned with net service -- not just the gross amount of work you're doing, but the overall effect.
And the thing is, your behavior can affect the service of the people around you. "Role model" may not be a requirement, but if you are driving others away from doing service -- because you're too perfectionist or hectoring, or too self-sacrificing to be near, or simply an asshole -- that becomes Toxic Service, and gets subtracted from the work you're doing. While it's not common, it's not rare for someone to be held back from recognition because of this.
After some reflection, though, I realized that thinking of this as Toxic Service was off-base. This wasn't a problem of one or two badly-behaved people; instead this showed itself as a more pervasive cultural problem.
In retrospect, it shouldn't be surprising: the organization is overloaded and under-resourced (as are many volunteer organizations these days), with the result that lots of people are burnt out and crabby. Everybody knows it, but it's rare for people inside the organization to talk about it.
Which put me in mind of the Missing Stair Problem.
For those who aren't familiar with it, a "missing stair" is a person inside an organization who is dangerous: most often a sexual predator, although other forms happen.
What makes this person a missing stair is that they are charismatic and/or productive, so nobody particularly wants to confront them or talk about their bad behavior publicly. Instead, they become the topic of whisper networks, so that all the experienced members know to steer around them.
Which is kind of okay -- except that new members sometimes don't hear those whispers until it's too late, and wind up badly hurt. Hence "missing stair": easy to avoid habitually if you know about it, but extremely dangerous if you don't. The fact that there is a problem that nobody talks about publicly makes the problem much worse.
On further thought, though, I realized that the missing-stair analogy was poorly suited to the problem at hand as well. Not only is that metaphor also focused on individual bad apples, it's much more serious. A collectively-grumpy culture is harmful to the organization, and might be emotionally somewhat harmful to the members, but nobody's likely to get sexually assaulted.
So instead, let's shift the metaphor a bit, and think of this problem as Missing Banisters.
It's not just one stair that is super-dangerous: it's that the entire staircase is just a bit less safe than it should be. Going down it is slower and scarier than it should be, more emotionally draining, and it doesn't matter how long you've been going down, it still kind of sucks, because it isn't supportive.
And that gets to the heart of the matter. In a Missing Banisters situation, everybody is more isolated than they should be. Everyone is doing their best, but they are tending to feel overwhelmed, and many wind up resenting anything that sounds like it could possibly be a demand on their time. It drains the camaraderie and joy.
That lack of mutual support can be downright deadly to a volunteer organization, because it steadily erodes the volunteer capacity of the organization, in several different ways.
- First, it leads to individual burnout. Many folks -- often including the high-achievers and leadership -- keep plugging away out of a dreary sense of guilt, accomplishing a lot until they just plain snap, and have to leave for their own health.
- Second, it hurts recruitment. Volunteers can smell this sort of unhealthy environment, when the existing members are already over-tired, and tend to be sensible enough to stay far, far away.
- Third -- subtlest but actually most important -- it reduces the capacity of the active members. Folks running volunteer orgs tend to think of each person as having a set amount they can do, but that's over-simplified. If the environment is isolating and combative, the emotional labor needed to get anything done increases, and that person just can't accomplish as much as they would in a more-supportive environment.
It's an easy trap to fall into. It tends not to be due to one event or one person -- rather, it's usually a long process of things going a little wrong. Folks wind up nitpicking, over-interpreting, and getting defensive, and that gradually becomes a pattern of habit that others pick up on. Since nobody calls it out and tries to turn it around, it slowly worsens.
It's a spectrum, of course, not a simple "toxic vs healthy". And it goes the other way as well: if you can create an environment that is positive, people tend to stick around, it's easier to recruit, and members tend to be much more productive because of that mutual support. It's easier to do things with more company, and folks tend to fill in each others' gaps so that they focus on their strengths.
That doesn't mean a Pollyanna-ish denial that there are problems, mind (there are always problems), but it does mean that everyone needs to engage productively and positively, acknowledging those problems and working together to find and enact the best solutions.
Which in turn means that the first step is noticing and acknowledging the missing banisters, and working together to build them.
Of course, that isn't easy. I've been involved with clubs that have turned around toxic cultures, but it's required a ton of hard work, cooperation, and sometimes some very scary gambles on radical change. There's no guarantee of success -- heaven knows, I've been in enough clubs that have simply crumbled. But you don't have any chance if you don't seriously try.
Anyway, that's my current thinking. I'm hoping that the organization that triggered this line of thought can turn things around. (I'm not entirely stepping away, just reducing my own exposure for my own health.)
Hopefully folks find these ideas (and terms) at least somewhat useful.
Thoughts? Please, no speculation about the specifics, but ideas about how to recognize problems in the cultures of volunteer organizations, discuss them productively, and turn things around are quite welcome.
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The most successful turnaround -- Wiscon 20 in 1996 -- reduced a lot of scope, and also billed itself as the last event. I wonder if that latter made the former easier, or more difficult. On the one hand, if the event is dying anyway, it's easier to kill parts of it. On the other, no one is thinking about sustainability.
What distinguishes Wiscon from other 1990s convention scope-reductions like Boskone and Minicon is that it wasn't aimed at making the con smaller. The things that remained were bigger, but because there were fewer of them it was less work. I don't know if Wiscon did this but in their place I'd also have considered which things had volunteers who loved them and which were just being done out of habit. Certainly some curious, non-core things survived the pullback, and those were things that by the time I started attending Wiscon a decade later definitely had volunteers who loved them.
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Anecdotally, culture was the biggest factor for the teams I was on throughout my career. A spunky little overloaded team with good teamwork and the right attitude did way more than a larger team faced with a crippling corporate culture squishing us. While the details are different for volunteer positions, I would expect culture to be a factor there too, as you said.
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(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.
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(I see myself in this comment and don't like it.)
Yeah, absolutely a common syndrome, that I've been through more than once myself. Indeed, I'm currently trying to remove several of my hats (across several organizations) in order to get it under control.
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Yes, something I've seen happen. And for people that notice a non-volunteer complaining, it's considered rude (at least in the USA and/or regions I've lived in) to make note of that publically, so the complainer isn't likely to be called on the problem.
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This resonates, and "missing banister" seems like a key factor that I hadn't thought about before. Volunteers, and volunteer-run organizations, are all over the map in terms of how well they do what they set out to do, but knowing you're part of a supportive group versus fearing that it's all on you to sink or swim is a huge psychological factor that has to affect both the work and the people around you.
Yee yes yes. And the flip-side: in a supportive environment, people can often do more than they thought they could in a "normal" one, let alone where there's a missing banister. I see this on Codidact; we're a tiny team with way more that we want to do than we have cycles to do, but we all believe in what we're doing and the result is that people try harder to pitch in. I did not expect to be writing code on this project -- not much of a developer any more, didn't know Ruby at all, didn't have dev tools... -- but I care, we're understaffed, I can at least fix small UI bugs right?, and now I'm doing more, because the people who already know how to do those things are there to help me. I'm learning a ton, I think I've gotten to the point of being a net contributor rather than when I was more of a time-sink for others, I know I'll have more questions and need more help, and I know that's ok. Without that visible support in place, I never would have started down the path to server code because it would have been too frustrating, even for a baseline volunteer team and not even considering the obstacles of a more problematic culture.
This is a long-winded way of saying that a missing banister doesn't just reduce capacity, but also throttles and prevents more and better capacity from those same people in the future (assuming they stick around at all).