In the grand scale of things I am a new-ish member having joined DMS in early 2018. I love this place and the eclectic gang that belong. I want to see it prosper. I think the rest do to. We don’t agree on what that looks like or how it should operate, and that’s okay … provided we appreciate the differences and work together to move forward.
I’m not a spring chicken; I am a grey headed old man with less hair than I used to have. My DOB explains part of that, but living with and living through plenty of wrong headed decisions and actions played a part as well. I had my youthful mistakes, I had the “young and still stupid” chapter, and I had the benefit of mentors who helped me recover and learn from a lot of that stuff. Along the way I gradually became a student of why individuals (me included) misinterpret information and why groups and crowds behave the way they do. I found it a fascinating world to study and can recommend some outstanding resources should anyone be interested (PM if you want the list). One negative to this is that it feeds a serious character flaw of mine: an overwhelming urge to counter misinformation and the spread thereof.
This is relevant in light of the current turmoil at DMS around governance and how monies are distributed. It starts with realizing few if any of us have ever been a part of so large a group of very unique, creative and passionate souls. The majority of us were not captain of a team, most popular classmate, or outgoing social butterflies. Many of us don’t exactly fit into the “normal” jigsaw puzzle of folk and we willingly pay money to be a part of DMS where we see others a bit more like ourselves. The aggravations we have with things in that “normal” world are not something we want to pay to endure when we get to DMS. So, sometimes that makes us overly prickly when things are not going the way we prefer.
I wonder if the illusion that we are now with kindred souls makes us even more irritated when members see things differently. We may grudgingly accept those differences in real life, but maybe assume the DMS members are just supposed to share a vision. If only it worked that way.
Many of the original members long for the small cohesive group they remember in the beginning … even though some may be only remembering the positives and have long forgotten the uglies that surely happened as well. Newer members, me included, long for a more operationally structured governance that would be more in keeping with such a large organization. Both ends of that spectrum have some merit and some challenges. Still DMS must inevitably deal with evolution as time passes.
Being all volunteer and having leadership of all sorts of things elected … most as often as twice a year … means the leaders will always have diverse goals and opinions about what is important and how things should be done. Nothing really keeps a leader or a group from wandering down a stray path for quite some way before any kind of “wagon circling” can happen to get things more or less realigned. Small group independence and large group cohesiveness is a tough ask.
Okay, I’ll get to the point.
DMS members need to hit some reset buttons. Trust comes from being trustworthy. It also comes for being willing to trust. I’m not sure we have enough of either. Some members feel they can’t trust leadership because it hasn’t worked out well in the past. Leaders don’t feel like they can trust members to give them any benefit of the doubt. This “dog chasing tail” exercise has no resolution. The dog just gets tired, rests for a bit and resumes again. You can see that is the budget/honorarium issue.
The BoD took their first look at the financials and found a problem: the money in the bank was declining independent of the Expansion. When they started trying to figure out why, two things surfaced: honorariums outflow was much greater than expected and membership is not growing. To compound matters, they found the books to be difficult to navigate and didn’t feel they could trust the numbers without some significant review. The available numbers suggested honorarium expenses to the organization had grown significantly and that most of that surge began in late 2018 and continued to accelerate into 2019. With books you are not sure you can trust, very real bank balances that are declining, strong evidence that month by month honorarium expense is far greater than expected, and an expansion to finish, the BoD initiated action to conserve cash as a priority.
When faced with this problem …. and I am speculating here … they realized they needed to immediately plug the unexpectedly large leak in honorariums. Guided by angst that at least some of the members would rail loudly against any published information that wasn’t completely vetted to be as accurate as possible, the leadership publicized a single point of data (May 2019) and a conclusion that honorariums needed to be reduced significantly. Had the leadership felt they could be given some benefit of the doubt, they had and could have released “preliminary, best currently available” data that would have visually shown the number of classes was way, way up, had been going up for half a year and was skyrocketing in 1Q2019.
As it was, leadership could not trust members to give them the benefit of doubt because members didn’t feel DMS leadership was historically trustworthy and required new leaders to earn their trust which would have meant sharing information that might not be perfect which meant the data could be questioned which … see, dog/tail?
The actual data that I understand to be the best available and that has had many, many hours … voluntary hours after the day job … does show classes deemed honorarium approved are way up.
The countless electrons that have been irritated by angst over reducing classes would have been different in nature if everyone had started with this data. And to be very clear … it is my opinion it would have been just as different with the approximate numbers the BoD had available to look at a month ago.
The zeal of members to assume leaders are not acting in good faith results in members making all manner of inaccurate accusations and pointing fingers at the wrong things and at the wrong people. It is hard to look at that chart and not feel like something has gone haywire.
Point #2.
Most people have at some point in their lives, heard about the Five W’s: What, When, Where, Why, and Who. You need that information to determine the root cause of an issue and to determine the best solutions, both short & long term. The problem is that humans tend to take a shortcut … they ask W questions until they get a “Who” and then they quit delving into the puzzle. Unfortunately, that also happened in the current DMS drama. With a half dozen prolific teachers, a “Who” was easy to identify even if the person was not actually the issue at hand. When members of leadership pointed to the “Who”, members at large either agreed and pointed fingers or disagreed and pointed the opposite way.
In my opinion, there is very little of a “Who” problem. Every single class was approved by an auditor. The position of DMS as an organization was to “hold classes” and steps were even taken to push Committees to urge classes to be taught. The fact that certain members had the time and willingness to teach filled a specific request being broadcast to DMS members. There is an entirely different issue around what should constitute a class. Individual Committees made choices within the allowable guidelines to address their needs and to hold certain classes. Others outside those Committees can and do come to different conclusions, some with knowledge of the situation and others with only idle opinions and assumptions.
However DMS got to this point, everything was done in accordance with the rules as DMS set and enforced them. Too many classes is not a Who problem, it is a Why problem. Accusations that teachers are teaching instead of getting a real life job are shortsighted. DMS wanted classes. Students wanted classes. Classes need teachers. Potential teachers who also have a day job, are not available for the students. Members who can chose to teach and satisfy their financial needs are doing so in lieu of taking some other job. It’s just a job as an independent contractor that DMS says it wants on board.
DMS leadership just never anticipated that classes would eventually outgrow the pocketbook. Nothing was set up to track it or to avoid it. As a result DMS was up to its neck in trouble months later than it should have been. At least 6 months late.
Wrapping Up
If you’ve gotten this far, thank you for caring enough to read. I wrote this because I want to plead with members and leaders to suck it up and try trusting folks to do the better thing. And give the other person the same freedom to misstep and recover that you would want for yourself. DMS is a group of sometimes crazy, eccentric humans who do lots of things well and some things quite poorly. Supporting the former and lending a hand in the latter is desperately needed now and in the future.
The other reason is that character flaw of mine: overwhelming urge to address things that aren’t right.
Thanks for hearing me out.
Bert