What happens when progress to repair a damaged organization is stymied by a lack of responsiveness by some of the members of the leadership?
Of course, there could be many reasons that some on our leadership committee might choose to "silently filibuster" efforts to move forward. Much like in regular politics - the minority party may feel that the majority don't take their views seriously so they stall in order to force compromise. Maybe they have chosen to focus their efforts somewhere else and simply don't care whether our problems ever get resolved.
In our case, it appears to me that the latter is true. We as a group can not simply wait until the next time for elections for change to happen. It must happen now. In the grand scheme of things GOWT's problems are relatively minor. As many people have noted, we can continue to hunt and place geocaches without any formal organization. I will not document in this entry what I perceive our problems to be. I laugh when I actually think how this all started.
As my friend and founding president of GOWT, spencersb, noted a comment to an earlier posting - "GOWT will survive, maybe in a reduced form, but it will survive". I agree with this sentiment and have observed that within the group that I have contact with we are stronger and closer than ever. I will also note that it is not just a core of the Memphis members that are making it better, the many members scattered throughout west Tennessee also play a very important part in our success!
Will we have to reboot? Will there be a GOWT 2.0? We shall see. The vast majority of our members care about our direction and the future of our organization. They will not let GOWT go gently into that good night. They will not give up without a fight.
2 comments:
Gotta mull this one over for a little bit. After all, I'm the one that was hollerin "we can't just do nothin" for a month.
The good news is...for now, anyway, there's no urgent need to do anything. The bills are paid, the site is running fine, members are meeting, eating, CITOing, finding and hiding caches, and new members are joining.
As I've stated before, this happens all the time in my other favorite type of organization. Anytime you see a church called "Greater (or New) something-or-other," that was a split. A friend related to me that there are THREE Church of Christ churches in his small town, that all used to be ONE! My favorite one was "Little Hope [snip denom] Church!"
Most of the time, destructive energy refocused in a constructive direction is a positive thing. The building of a new house does not by itself accomplish the destruction of the old one. Anyone with an internet connection can still see our forums, warts and all. Anyone can still join that's willing to pay $5 a year. You don't even have to pay to register in the forums, and you don't even have to register to read them. I'll let folks decide on their own who considers people "outsiders."
Good points, Steve. When I say that I think we need to do something now, I am referring to what we saw on the forums yesterday where a new member basically discovered we have problems within our group. It is hard to see simply by reading old posts what progress we are making to resolve issues. If the problems were not in the Executive Committee itself, it would be easier for me to sit back and see how it all plays out.
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