I have been letting Lila's mail stew in my brain for a little while, and I am
going to respond now having had time to think it over.
I apologize in advance for the length. There are three main sections to my
analysis and argument, and then some concluding points and implications.
First - the good. I believe most here should agree that the Wikipedia
movement, communities, projects all have had and have today major challenges.
An immense good is done by what we have all communally built, but there are
things wrong we haven't fixed.
Lila's ED statement lays out a subset of the total problems, effectively
briefly explains her reasoning on why they are problematic, and forms a vision
statement for engaging with fixing them. It's a vision statement and a call to
action, and contains the kind of leadership we need.
One can quibble about the set of problems to focus on or priorities, long and
short term goals. I am sure people will. But the Foundation needs a
leadership vision like this. It can evolve over time, but we should think in
these terms.
Second - I want to focus now on this section to explain what I see as having
gone wrong.
Quoting Lila:
In practice this means I demanded that we set standards for staff
communication with our community to be professional and respectful. It
meant transitioning people, shutting down pet projects, promoting some but
not others, demanding goals and results to get funding. This level of
change is necessary to set up our organization to address the challenges of
the next decade.
All of this means stepping away from our comfort zones to create capacity
for building programs and technologies that will support us in the future.
It is a demanding and difficult task to perform an organizational change at
this scale and speed.
For context:
I am an IT industry technical consultant in the San Francisco Bay Area with
well over 20 years experience and 18 of those consulting. I have literally
seen the insides of 100 organizations big and small.
Many of those organizations were broken or failing, and needed serious reform
to succeed. I've seen and participated in a number of restructurings,
including helping plan some. These things are sometimes necessary.
One phrase I see used quite often is "sometimes we need to break a few eggs."
For those who are not native american english speakers, this is referring to the need to
move beyond shifting things around into breaking things apart, letting people go who may
not fit in the new plan, stopping things outright, etc. The eggs - people, projects,
structures, policies, assumptions - need to partly go away - be broken - in order to
reform.
Lila's vision here clearly calls the change campaign out as having explicitly
intended to break eggs.
It further suggests strongly that this was the Board of Trustees' intention in
hiring her, and that they agreed with breaking those eggs.
These types of reforms are at times necessary. I do not know from the outside
whether they were necessary for successful at the WMF, but for now I agree this
may well have been necessary and proper. Some of those affected may disagree;
I don't seek to diminish that discussion but for now am putting it aside.
We come now to what I think went wrong with this change that I agree may have
needed to happen.
Broken eggs type major organizational changes are launched with varying degrees
of planning and vision and coordination beforehand. I have seen such launched,
in process, or the aftereffects across the range of initial planning and
communications from none at all at one extreme to clearly envisioned, planned,
communicated, and executed at the other.
Lila here and now communicated a clear vision for what was intended and why, and the
intention to "break eggs" to do it. I had not previously seen anything like
this, or even a good suggestion of this. Nobody I know of in the community seems to have
seen or guessed at it. From the comments we are seeing, a lot of current and ex
Foundation staff do not seem to have seen it. Nobody has yet admitted they had seen it,
after Lila's post.
I don't know how well it was understood before/during by more senior staff /
leadership staff, the Board, or laid out this clearly and coherently in Lila's
head.
There are undoubtedly a range of answers to those questions depending on who
you ask and what time period we ask about.
I will bound the extremes of credible answers with "clearly articulated and communicated at
high levels, including commitment to change by breaking eggs", or at the other extreme
"this was not clearly envisioned or articulated or communicated at high levels
beforehand."
I want to emphasize this: Either the senior leadership launched a major broken
eggs extent reform without communicating what was happening to major community
and staff stakeholders on purpose, or by accident, or somewhere in between with
mixed consequences of both.
I have seen these happen in industry and noncommercial organizations. The lack
of communications to stakeholders has not necessarily made reforms fail, though
it has rarely helped. If you care about success of the changes, what happened
is not best practice, but not a sign in and of itself of failure.
In terms of judging success, while there are cracks all over, I don't see that
the reform has failed or is likely to. For the sake of the argument I am
assuming it will succeed, and moving on.
Third - and finally - I want to explain why I think this is now evidently a
disaster for the overall Wikimedia movement as a whole.
Lila said this in part:
In practice this means I demanded that we set standards for staff
communication with our community to be professional and respectful.
I agree with this. It's a good statement. If's arguable we should hold all
staff and the Board to it.
That said, I have a hard time reconciling that statement with having launched a
major broken eggs extent reform without communicating what was happening to
major community and staff stakeholders either on purpose or by accident. There
was, on purpose or by accident (or varying degrees of both) a fundamental gap
in professionalism and respect in communicating the launch of the reform effort.
Beyond that, the consequences of doing so are magnified by the nature of the
Wikimedia movement. I have been trying to think of an example organization
which would be more negatively affected by having done that. I haven't found
one yet. The nature of the wide diverse community, tensions between the
Community and Foundation, Community and Ops, and Engineering; ED and Staff; ED
and Community; even the Community and Board. All of these relationships are
necessary for the movement to succeed. All are fundamentally and deeply
challenged by the nature of this gaffe.
It would help untangle this situation to get the historical perspectives and
intentions of everyone here. Board members (current and past), Lila, other
senior leaders, I urge you to publicly lay out what you were thinking and
trying to do early on and more recently.
However, as far as I can see it regardless of which way those explanations go,
the final implications are clear to me.
I don't know that the movement as a whole can trust a Board or ED who would
have either accidentally or on purpose launched this degree of changes in
secret and without communicating. Other organizations whose leadership did
this have better odds. THIS organization, as a whole, is now broken rather
severely by how you executed the probably necessary and hopefully successful
reform.
To the Board:
If the Board at the time knew and concurred - I think every board member
involved needs to consider how this can possibly be reconciled with trust
within the movement, and ultimately whether further service on the board is in
the best interests of the movement or Foundation.
If the Board did not understand the nature of the change, I think every board
member needs to consider whether their ability to manage and provide guidance
and oversight of major organizational changes is adequate for the needs of the
organization now and in the future. And ultimately whether further service on
the board is in the best interests of the movement or Foundation.
To Lila:
I assume good faith. I agree with your vision.
I do not understand why this was not just made public prior to initiation of
reforms, or once they started.
I am concerned and skeptical that you can now lead the Foundation, in this
wider Wikimedia movement, regardless of what that answer is.
This pains me especially because of the quality and on-target focus of the
vision you expressed. I am very sorry to come to this conclusion. But I don't
know how you can lead here if you launched into breaking a bunch of THESE eggs
in secret as opposed to openly, whether it was on purpose and preplanned or
evolved into that without planning and communicating it through.
It might well work at dot-com companies, but not I think here.
I believe the ED position requires someone who would have known that.
I am glad you posted that vision statement. It both provides a vision and
template the movement and Foundation should move towards. I hope it is a
successful legacy.
