| Accross most of the volunteer work I've done (which has definitely had the challenges you mention) usually personally as a longer term or more "senior" member of the teams, I've observed most of the work gets done by people who have a sense of personal responsibility or ownership for the task. Some people are naturally more pro-active and feel more personally entitled to basically take the power to run with doing the task without needing approval from others. I feel like this is part personality, part skill but critically also partly related to the culture/environment of the team. I've observed that fails when either people are not inclined that way (maybe more introverted people, people with a personality/habbit of not feeling such entitlement, etc), however also critically the culture of others shooting down their ideas or not giving them the freedom to work and learn for themselves can break it down. This can be bad personality on behalf of those people - some people are just naturally like this and if one person is causing problems for your organisation as a whole, you may be well served by just blamelessly getting rid of them if they are causing what I can only describe as personal conflict regardless of if they are technically capable or even technically correct. Abrasive personalities that will drive others away won't serve the organisation as a whole. But what I saw quite a bit was as these volunteer organisations got older and more senior and more experienced, the barrier of entry was now much higher (less freedom to make mistakes and learn because theres an expected quality) and those that had that experience often try to "help" with that knowledge but can have the effect on demotivating by constantly telling people why their ideas are bad or otherwise not empowering people with enough freedom to take that sense of personal responsibilty that will drive them to completion and run with it. I've never worked in management in a work environment so have no experience to draw on with parallels for how that works in real jobs. But have seen that in a couple different other environments. Another problem I've noticed is it's easy to commit to things in meetings which have scheduled times, but people struggle to find the personal time to follow up with the tasks and can easily forget the todo list, etc. Some level of todo management or having someone whose job it is to task, prioritise, remind/follow-up with people on a short term basis may be helpful for some. But I don't have a lot of experience in successfully doing that. |
We absolutely run into this issue of new people floating ideas and the old hats going 'for the 100th time that will not work because x y z' and the new person going 'jesus, ok then'. Theres a lot of history and learnings thats hard to solidify and pass on and get people into the same book, not even the same page. I still haven't cracked this nut, it feels like i should write a bunch of documentation but i suspect it will not be read.
I've been the polite but chronic reminder/nagger. It does work but its extremely wearing on all participants. I've found the best way to do it is to pair or more people up, in a physical location at the same time to do things. Body doubling is like crack to my audhd brain but it works great for most people as well. Bonus points if you feed them. However, thats a high level of organisation and it can be really tricky to pull it off with the regularity and scale the organisation might require.
I've said in other comments i'd do unseemly things for a volunteer coordinator, but i'd make the devil blush if i could pin down a project manager. Most people just need structure, thats just the long and short of it I've found. You've gotta provide it some way or another, and doing it effectively is a full role and I have enough hats as it is.
How do you combat the old knowledge vs new (naive?) ideas issue? Do you try to reevaluate that 'old knowledge'? Just let the new idea down gently and explain the history? Talk about what you havent tried that might be relevant?