dealing with problems on the spot
I figured out just the other day that there are at least two different kinds of "hey I need help!" issues that could come up to a staff member at…
What’s the name of that thing?
Today we were discussing solving attendee problems at the con, and someone very helpfully told me what that process is called -- Service Recovery. Service Recovery is a bit of…
email anti-patterns
Email is the tool we use every day. It's the basic communication medium for preparing for the con I'm running. Nothing would run without it, even face to face meetings…
Toolbox: Seven Questions of Change Management
I'm always working with my teams to accommodate change. Whether those are small changes or large, considering Peter de Jager's Seven Questions of Change Management has made me better at…
Toolbox: The Satir Interaction Model
Why is communication sometime so hard? Virginia Satir broke apart the processes that take place within our brains as we get a message and respond to it into the four…
High touch vs the System
Maybe all systems with human beings are like this to some degree, but there are tangles that can be unraveled with either a billion emails OR five minutes on the…
Thinking about the Debrief
Every year the convention has a debrief for staff after the convention in which we attempt to talk about what has happened in the organizational year and find out the…
Silent resignations
Somewhere out there is Schroedinger's Volunteer. Maybe she's doing the job and maybe she isn't, who knows because there's been total silence. No bad news but no good news either.…
Communicating about Communicating
I am wishing we could add to our "HI My Name is:" labels, some critical additional information. "Hi, my name is Rachel, I read my email about a dozen times…
Language alert
I use the word "Let's" too much. "Let's arrange things such a way." "Let's work on this project." And so on. Mostly "Let's" comes up in situations when I should…