Values Guiding the IOL Committee

As a committee, we have not yet formally adopted a set of guidelines or values for our work. However in all of the conversations that I've been part of around this committee, some things have become clear, and everyone seems to be coming from the same place on them. When people ask, "how are you going to go about this job", these things form the core of the story.

I'm laying them out here because they seem consistent with the teleconference the committee had on Tuesday, and they were in place before I went to the Island on Friday.

First and foremost, this committee is not going to blame anyone for what happened. We're most emphatically not going to get to a statement like "This wouldn't have happened in so-and-so had done such-and-such on this date." My feeling, reflected in our charter, is that this was a systems and process failure, hence our charge to understand how we do what we do, and how that works and does not work for us, rather than to understand who did what when.

Everyone working for Star Island, whether paid staff or volunteer, strongly wants to do the best thing for the Island. There was no failure of good will or "not my job" or people not caring about the outcome. Again, it's how we work together that raises questions.

Both of those things having been said...

It is entirely possible that we will find instances where well-meaning people, doing the best the could, made decisions that led to bad outcomes. Again, I don't think we're on a hunt for such decisions, but it is very possible that we may find them. Our reaction has to be, "How can we help this person make better decisions in the future?" ... whether those means be personnel development, better management, improved business processes, or whatever. We characterized this as the balance between accountability, which is good and constructive, and blame, which we don't see as having any purpose in this context.

The many different "constituencies" that make up the Star Island community, and the relationships among them, are key to understanding how we got here and what we have to do differently in the future. Our community and its governance have evolved over more than a century; decisions and structures that made sense in 1900 didn't necessarily make sense in 1950, and those that made sense in 1950 didn't necessarily make sense in 1985, and those from 1985 similarly don't necessarily fit 2007. Learning to think intentionally about our community and what it is we value about it versus what are just historical vestiges will probably be important in helping us shape the future.

How we communicate among our constituencies is clearly part of the problem. Communicating to all our constituencies - all parts of the Star Island community - what the competing claims and constraints are in running the island is very difficult. People seeing different pictures because they're seeing different parts of the same picture, and therefore drawing different conclusions leads to unnecessary contention. One of our tasks will be to identify how communications figured in to the problem and in to the unfolding events this summer.

Values. Different constituencies value different things about Star Island. Which leads them to different conclusions about Star Island policy issues. One of our tasks will be to understand what these different values and goals are, and how they can interact constructively, rather than dysfunctionally.

Transparency is gonig to be a key task for the committee. Hence this blog. It is important that people feel that the committee is accessible and not secretive about what we're doing.