When You Fail To Plan

This started off as a post about the hiring practices at The New York Times.

But then it took a turn.  

Meh, whatcha gonna do.  

So, next time, hiring practices at The New York Times.  This time you get the tale of a nearly invisible organizational plague that is breaking down civic machinery everywhere.

I serve on a few voluntary boards out here in the middle of Middle America, and I'm active in a number of civic organizations.  Most of them are populated by humans at the far end of the actuarial Bell Curve, and since most of these organizations never bothered to focus on developing a farm system to bring in new blood and teach them the ways of the Force, many of them are currently being kept afloat by the aggregated, specialized institutional knowledge of few key board officers.

Board officers who are leaving.  

FYI, I can tell you from the many years I spent in workforce development, this dynamic, in somewhat different forms, is also happening out there in God alone knows how many private companies, corporations, colleges and so forth.

At these organizations, there are usually barely minimally adequate records for anyone coming on-board who needs to learn, in a hurry and in detail, how things got to be the way they are.  Instead the whole thing depends on Wally remembering that when they had that problem back in '94, Phil knew a guy whose cousin was an electrician or something.  Of course, Phil retired in 2003 and moved to Boca, but they think that maybe his son took over the business?  Or maybe some cousin?  Anyway this extremely complex and technical problem is back -- or something that reminds them of it is back -- so does anybody know what happened with Phil's business, or know enough about this extremely complex and technical problem to know who else to call?

Like that.  

Multiplied by dozens of tasks, all competing for the attention of a few volunteers.  

But are these tasks critical?  Are they we-all-go-to-jail or the-building-will-collapse issues, or are they not?  Who knows?  It there a way to rationally prioritize them?  Not that they know of.  Well, couldn't one, seemingly simple task -- say, reattaching some wooden elements that had been taken down for some reason now lost to history years ago -- be done by anyone with a ratchet wrench and half a dozen lag bolts?  Just to get it off the list?

Heavens no!  This will require some highly specialized carpentry and electrical expertise that only someone like Jim could handle.  

Ok, so .... where's Jim?  

Well wouldn't you know it, Jim also retired.  To Pompano.  And, hey lookit that!  He only lives about 20 minutes from Phil!  Small world.  

However, even though the indispensable men were either retiring to sunnier climes or passing on to that Big Finance Committee Meeting in the sky, the need for warm bodies to fill the mandated, institutional ranks remains, and so raw recruits are, well, recruited with little more vetting than, "Have you ever served on a board before?  Have you ever run a meeting?  Do you know how to type?"  And so, technically, seats are filled and charter-mandated officers elected.  

But facility with Robert's Rules and MS Word cannot make up for the loss of someone with 30 years of experience and contacts as a general contractor, or 20 years as a plumber or master woodworker or a degree in non-profit management or a degree in 501(c)3 accounting.  Those are the skills which, at a minimum, are required to keep the ship from running up on the rocks, and those skills are now, almost entirely, exiting the scene.  

Oh, did I mention that these organizations usually don't have anywhere near the financial resources to hire enough experts to bridge these gaps?  Yeah, it's all volunteers.  And tensions run high.  The remaining old hands are very anxious to hand the bag off to the new people ASAP.  They're tired. They've done their bit for king and country, and have other things to do.  Fair enough.  But once the new people have a chance to really look under the hood, they are equally anxious to not take over the legally-liable leadership of the group.  They're happy to take minutes, and will gladly staff a booth at an event if someone else plans it, or swing a hammer if someone else can tell them where to swing it and why.  

I also forgot to mention that almost all of this shrinking pool of competent volunteers usually serve on a number of different boards and councils.  You know the "80/20 rule", right?   80 percent of the work is done by 20 percent of the people, which is now a lot closer to being a "90/10" rule?  Well, when that 10% starts to leave and no capable replacements are available they're absence has a cascading effect across multiple organizations.    

Like so many problems today, short of building a time machine, going back to the 1980s and 1990s and demanding that responsible people start to make the small adjustments that would avert these crises later, I have no easy solutions.  As younger people prioritize different things, soon that 90/10 rule will become a 95/5 rule.  The pews will get emptier.  The member meetings more sparsely attended.  Some traditional community events will start to fade away.  

It is a hard thing to be of the generation that will not be the first to the Moon, but instead to whom falls the responsibility for boxing once-beloved things up and closing once-vital things down.  Nobody wants to be that guy, because everyone resents that guy, but here we are.  

Because like it or not, as Harry says in The Magnificent Seven, "There comes a time to turn Mother's picture to the wall and get out."  

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