Dear MAGFam,
Since our last announcement on December 7th, the three of us (Dom, Paul, and Tresch) have been engaged in conversations with members of the Friends of MAGFest, other members of the Board of Directors, the Executive Director, and other MAGFest employees and volunteers in order to suggest and facilitate solutions other than the default actions intended to be taken by the ED in response to recent actions by various members of the MAGFest community. Ultimately, we have failed to change that course of action.
In conversations with the rest of MAGFest’s leadership, we have attempted to explain the importance of moral authority in the eyes of the volunteer force, and the importance of restoring that authority through open and collaborative discussions on mutual accountability, with a strong focus on the various ways the leadership has created an environment that ultimately made people in our community feel unsafe.
By offering our hand in leading a collaborative process inspired by the concept of “restorative justice”, we hoped to show that there were ways to approach accountability that minimized or eliminated the risk of further rifts being torn through the MAGFest community in response to actions of leadership.
In having these conversations, we have identified among the other three voting board members what we believe to be a lack of the humility, foresight, and ultimately the leadership skills we believe are required to unite and guide a cultural organization such as MAGFest.
The three of us are ultimately writing this to declare our dissent and strong condemnation of the planned course of action to be taken by the ED, with support of the remaining three voting members of the Board of Directors.
We believe that, through action and inaction, over years, the board, collectively, has slowly lost the moral authority to take these actions without first addressing the complaints brought forth from the community. In taking the disciplinary actions they have taken, without a clear plan or show of competence in managing these or future systemic cultural issues, we conclude that the ED and the other three voting members of the board are, in our opinion, negligent in their roles as leaders in upholding the values and mission of MAGFest.
Having been unable to sway the Executive Director or any of the other three voting board members in order to force a change, we are left in a position where we have done everything we can from our current positions on the board to guide MAGFest in the direction we feel is best. Having this conflict of leadership on the board is confusing and destructive in its own right; indecision from leadership creates confusion and distrust, and we see that as a significant factor in the slow escalation to current events over the past several years. Furthermore, lack of clear direction from leadership robs the community of its ability to effectively create change, as there is no clear direction to rally behind or push against.
As a result, we will be abstaining from further involvement in regular MAGFest activity to allow the remaining leaders to succeed or fail on their own merit.
While we are no longer willing to compromise our values by taking an active role within the current board process, we are still hopeful about potential futures for MAGFest, and have offered to the rest of the board our willingness to lead MAGFest as the controlling members of the board, should they decide in the future that they no longer wish to hold their positions.
Ultimately, the leaders of an organization are accountable to the people who do the work to achieve their vision. Everyone involved with MAGFest declares their support of the vision put forward by the leadership with their participation, and with us out of the way, people will be able to more clearly make that choice for themselves.
There is so much that has gone into this decision, and there is no way to address the topic with any sort of clarity that it deserves in a summary such as this. So we have been working on putting together a document that goes into a significant amount of history and detail in how the three of us came to this conclusion. It is long, but this is a turning point for MAGFest, and for the three of us, who have been dedicating significant portions of our lives to MAGFest for 15+ years. We felt that people deserved to read more about how we got to where we are. The full document is below.
-Dusty “Tresch” Peterson
-Dominic “Dom” Cerquetti
-Paul “III_Demon” Good
A joint statement from Paul Good, Dom Cerquetti, and Tresch in regards to the cultural issues of 2020
Hey MAGFam, Tresch here.
This document is a joint statement from myself and two other members of the Board of Directors of MAGFest Inc, Paul Good and Dominic Cerquetti. While I’ve been the one at the keyboard, this will be in my voice, but for the sake of removing redundancy, we have chosen to make a single statement that summarizes all of our thoughts, instead of separate statements from each. Throughout this document, you can assume that any use of “we,” or “us,” or “our,” etc, without further context, is referring to the three of us behind this document, Paul, Dom, and myself. The intended audience of this document is the community of MAGFest staff, both employees and volunteers.
It should also be clarified that this statement is only reflective of our experiences, perspectives, and values. We do not assume to have all the information, or that our way is always the right way. For the sake of brevity, I have tried to avoid making constant disclaimers and clarifications to that effect throughout this document. It can and should be assumed that almost everything below can be prefaced with a giant, flashing “In our opinion…” sign.
What follows is a treatise of sorts. A detailed run-down of our thoughts, observations, actions, and conclusions about the current state of magfest, how we got here, and the direction we think we should be going. This is long, but we feel this is a critical moment in magfest history. For our own peace of mind, as well as for the sake of all the volunteers who have been waiting from the sidelines to see what is happening, we wanted to be as thorough as reasonably possible.
Between the three of us, this is the culmination of a combined 45 years in magfest as leaders in various capacities in the organization. Regardless of what happens next, this whole situation and the actions that follow signal an end of an era for magfest that began when we formed the non-profit, and in some ways, an end of an area that began as far back as MAGFest 4.
In order to talk about the current situation, we also felt it was important to go into a bit of history as to how the three of us felt that we got here, in order to give some clarity to some of the conclusions we are making now, and our decisions to take certain actions. Bear with us, this is going to be a bit of a trip! If you don’t have time for the whole document, we’ve included a shorter summary at the end. Even after all of these pages, there are relevant aspects to MAGFest history that go back beyond the formation of the non-profit organization MAGFest Inc. that we’re not bothering to talk about. We could go on for dozens more pages to list the history of everything and all of our ideas. Obviously that’s not practical here, but if anyone would like to hear us prattle on about such things, it shouldn’t be too hard to find us.
-Dusty “Tresch” Peterson
When the owners of MAGFest LLC transitioned the company to a 501c3 nonprofit organization, the decision was made primarily for financial reasons. It also seemed, in many regards, to be a good fit; we (here referring to the group of owners) believed in our mission, we believed that it was in service of the public good, and ultimately the goal was not for MAGFest to generate profit for investors, but to generate and nurture a positive culture; to recognize, celebrate, and utilize video games in their role of advancing humanity and human unity.
However, MAGFest had ambitious goals toward that end, and we knew that the way to achieve that was not through normal standards and practices. MAGFest was always and should always be a high-risk organization, dedicated to taking leaps of faith in finding new and better ways to operate and communicate. To find new and better ways to enable people to do all of those exciting things that we wish we could do elsewhere in life, but can’t, because it seems impractical, or risky, or costly. To find new and better ways to party.
Because of this, we knew that the standard “best practice” structure of a non-profit organization would eventually lead to a watered down, safe version of that vision. In order to do what we were trying to do, we had to be doing things that most people would consider insane, that to us seem obvious and essential. We needed to be able to continue running MAGFest as owners, with full control to take risks and make the hard decisions necessary to carry out our Vision, without direct oversight, and we set up the company and our bylaws to operate in that fashion. For a time, the leadership structure of MAGFest Incorporated, the non-profit, was more or less indistinguishable from the structure of the LLC.
As time went on, however, like with many things, an organization tends to slowly take the shape of the structure you build around it, and ultimately, differing viewpoints among the leaders, on the board, in the office, and in the community began to form. At first, the conflicts were collaborative in nature, and we all simply put in the time to work things out so that we could always arrive in a place everyone was comfortable with. As MAGFest grew, more conflicts began to arise, reducing the amount of available time to spend on each, but instead of collaborating excitedly on a series of new problems through a shared lens, the type of conflicts tended to be very similar in nature. The board wasn't struggling with the problems so much as we were struggling with each other. This resulted in the beginning of a long pattern of exhaustion among the board that has culminated in today.
To exacerbate this, Paul Good (PG), who had been the de facto leader of the organization, and the primary source of MAGFest’s vision, had been forced to take a much smaller role due to a family health crisis that lasted several years. Dom, who had been the Executive Director (ED) for some time, backed away from that role and Nick was promoted to that position, as Dom needed a break. Slowly, problems became harder to solve in a way that made everyone happy, and the result was often some form of stalemate. Instead of firm, decisive action driven by a clear, unified vision, actions from the board became muddled, ambiguous, slow, and ultimately weak.
... We're all also holding up the good parts of the culture by sheer force of will, and it's starting to be too much, this method isn't scaling, there have to be better ways, things we are missing. We gotta level up if we want to fix this. We can't just do more of this same thing, it's not working. I don't know what to do yet, but we have to figure it out and soon.” -email from Dom, (board member at the time), to the Board -- Jul 2018 |
A shadow was being cast over the organization from a combination of growing pains, disconnected leaders, and cultural problems resulting from a rising feeling of distrust in the leadership due to lack of clear vision and communication. All the stress from this shadow now fell squarely on the shoulders of Nick Marinelli, who had been promoted to Executive Director after Dom had stepped away from the role for his own personal reasons. Nick was an operational powerhouse, and did wonders for improving MAGFest culture from that aspect of things, improving operational communication, getting volunteers the resources and procedures they needed to make their jobs easier, he helped MAGFest grow and evolve in many ways. Unfortunately, he was still a victim of the lack of clarity in leadership, and wasn’t equipped to personally be the one to sort that out. Under stress, and very much under attack from all angles in the organization, he decided the situation was not in his best interests and resigned.
Having no clear leader, every cultural conflict in the organization bubbled up to the board, and the board handled it in the way it had been. Many conversations, no strong decisions. All this time, the workload on the board increased beyond what was sustainable in the current situation, and the problem compounded, each issue taking longer than the last, more things ending up unresolved, more and more distrust from the Community. Furthermore, we were now faced with the monumental task of hiring a new Executive Director. With no clear solutions, Eli requested to add two more people to the board to help with the workload, Jack and Joel. Dom, Paul, and Tresch approved their additions under some protest. We did not see a larger board as the solution, but were exhausted at having the argument, and we gave it a shot.
While Dom, Paul, and Tresch had a specific person in mind that we believed exemplified the specific skills needed to be the Executive Director for MAGFest, it was a hard sell for us to just place someone. We knew that MAGFest was not a normal organization, and taking a normal organizational approach could be actively harmful. MAGFest was a human organization, about vibe, communication, and togetherness above all else, and thus, the leader needed to be someone that had both the skills to attack those problems collaboratively as well as the emotional constitution to weather the weight that comes with dealing with emotional problems.
Unfortunately, being worn down by the existing situation like everyone else, and having long lost the cultural and moral authority to make high risk decisions like that, we relented and went through the long and highly democratic process to hire a new ED, taking nearly 6 months of board time as well as a huge amount of time from the office staff. It was an impressively thorough undertaking, although with everyone having a personal stake in it, we risked finding a candidate that was acceptable in many different categories, without excelling in the one area we needed most.
Ultimately, while Jack and Joel brought two more perspectives to the board, and certainly a lot of new energy and willingness to put in work, they were unfortunately added in support of the existing fragmented leadership system and as such they did not add more clarity of vision and leadership. Without an extremely effective ED for everyone to rally behind, employees, volunteers, and board alike, the philosophical rift within the board widened, and with that came more exhaustion, more confusion, and even more feelings of distrust from the community.
every one of you needs to be aware that this IS the job. i think there are still delusions going around that somehow the ED can be 'set up for success', and if things were just set up ok and there werent any disasters happening, things would be fine and the ED job would be less stressful. thats what nick was looking for, and i think thats what deb did. its wrong. things will always be screwed up. if the board isnt facing that head on, the ED has to. the board hasnt really been facing shit for a while, and i dont see that changing without radical re-structuring.” -email from Paul Good to Board, Feb, 2020 |
MAGFest entered 2020 exhausted but with cautious optimism. With Paul Birtel (PB) chosen as the new Executive Director, there was some potential hope for a stabilizing force. Someone that could bridge the gap between the board and the office, and take much of the load off the board in handling cultural problems in MAGFest with skill and grace. It wasn’t going to be a quick fix; the goal was for PB to shadow the organization for much of the first year, making personal connections throughout the organization, and ultimately not completely “taking over” until he had been through a full MAGFest cycle.
This little thing called Covid-19 had other plans. Immediately before PB officially joined the office, the country went into lockdown, the office was closed, all collaboration was shifted to online video conferencing, and focus turned from training to survival. PB’s year of gradual onboarding disappeared almost overnight.
We were facing a situation where MAGFest 2021 might not be able to happen, and suddenly MAGFest was facing a huge threat. Without being able to run Super MAGFest in January of 2021 to raise funds in 2020, MAGFest would not be able to remain solvent while still keeping the office staff employed. The concept of not having an event in 2021 was almost unthinkable, but holding an event despite the pandemic would be unconscionable. In classic MAGFest fashion, everyone in the organization dropped their differences for the time being and got to work solving the problem.
Unfortunately, the differences still hung around, and they weren’t going away on their own. The three of us were still exhausted with the whole situation and had one foot out the door. There were still unresolved trust issues in regards to the board that were possibly being projected onto PB. Jack, Eli, and Joel were taking on a huge amount of work to keep the engines running, PB was doing his best to steer the ship, but cracks were forming in the hull, and the ship was sinking.
Tensions began building between the existing office staff and the new ED. These tensions and communication breakdowns naturally led to multiple “echo chambers” being formed, the BOD and ED on one side, and the rest of the Office Staff with a small group of volunteers on the other side. This initially peaked in August when the staff met with the BOD and reported their concerns with PB’s leadership, communication, and conflict management skills, and said that the working environment had become extremely uncomfortable as a result.
There were attempts made to break through those communication barriers and get people working together again. Mediation sessions, one-on-one conversations, attempts to adjust and compromise. Unfortunately, despite hard work and good intentions, these types of negotiations are delicate and require a particular set of skills, and those skills need to be backed up by leaders that are open, humble, and empathetic. At very least, leaders must have the ability to clearly communicate their values and vision and make decisions that conform to those, so the community can manage their own expectations about the structure they are working within.
Unfortunately, these attempts to break through the barriers of those Echo Chambers failed. From within the board, the situation seemed to be improving, but on the other side of the equation, the improvements seemed to only be skin-deep. With the fundamental problems still persisting, surface-level fixes only deepened the level of distrust in the office and volunteers. At a certain point, when someone changes their language, but not their message, it just comes across as placation, or worse, manipulation. Again, the rifts widened.
Throughout all of this, there was an election, driven by the volunteers, to place more members on the board. Again, the nature of the election was based out of a long-standing distrust for the leadership on the board. Again, the board was fundamentally split in regards to elections. The three of us, Dom, Tresch, and Paul, were largely in agreement that adding more people to the board would only further spiral MAGFest into uncertainty and mediocrity, and that even within that context, elections within the MAGFest community were not the best way to pick people with the right skills needed to handle the problems we had in the way they needed to be handled. Previous elections and additions to the board had not helped solve these problems and we were increasingly sure that MAGFest needed a different structure.
It made no sense to us to add new members to support a broken system, and if the new members were being added to change the system, then that was an explicit choice to go in a new direction, to accept a new structure, but that was not a direction the board was in agreement on. Without having that conversation and agreeing on a direction, further cultural fallout was guaranteed.
This combination of personal conflicts, mistrust on all sides, vague and misleading communication about expectations in regards to the election, and vastly contrasting fundamental views about the nature of leadership in MAGFest, lead to a perfect storm. The board was afraid of the volunteers' retaliation if we were not satisfied with the electees, and the volunteers were scared of BOD retaliation if we didn’t like the results. The process was delayed, excuses were given, there were grudges and personality conflicts. When the decision was being made to prevent one of the electees from being placed on on the board, the situation surrounding it from an outside perspective looked like a clear case of retaliation against criticism, and as a result, the decision was made that the system was broken, and that working within the system no longer would create change.
After the initial letter dropped with the launch of the friendsofmag.com website, the general feeling from the board was mostly that of exasperated sighs and rolled eyes. We had been through so many “slacksplosions” (community protests, mostly occurring within Slack, our primary online collaboration tool) at this point that, from within the echo chamber in the board, it seemed very much like retaliation from a group of volunteers that insists on trying to create change and gaining influence by tearing other people down; something that is significantly against the MAGFest values. Initially, the board was fairly unified in the belief that those in the organization who chose destructive forms of bringing change, instead of constructive, collaborative ones, are toxic, and need to be removed from positions of control, and coached on how to better create positive change in the organization.
However, there was also a certain sentiment, initially raised by Paul Good, that the Friends Of Magfest group was right, and that we had been arguing similar points from within the board for a long time; the leadership structure of MAGFest is broken, unsustainable, and requires drastic change. In a sense, the three of us were in agreement with the statement made by the Friends of MAG; the Board, in its current form, is an existential threat to MAGFest.
The initial meeting with the Friends of Mag(FoM) was emotional, difficult, but also enlightening. From within the BoD “bubble,” with the mediations that had happened between the ED and the office staff, it seemed to us that the situation in the office had actually improved since the initial complaints were raised in August. In that meeting, it became very clear that this was not the case. It was at this point that it became extremely clear that these echo chambers existed, and the work that was being done to try to communicate through them by other members of the board had not been effective. The context of large meetings was not productive, a more personal approach was needed.
At this point, the three of us began reaching out to members of the Friends of Mag, and getting their stories directly from them. We split from the more recent MAGFest BoD tradition of presenting a unified voice, and simply opened up with people as individuals about the fact that we didn’t believe the system was being effective. The BOD is ultimately responsible for maintaining a culture of safety for the employees and volunteers, and had obviously failed in that regard.
Simply by being honest about this, taking personal responsibility for the situation, and letting people explain their side of the story, the walls of the echo chamber were shattered almost overnight.
As the conversations continued, it became clear that the situation was not as clear-cut as it had seemed from within the board meetings. It was a mess, with poor actions on both sides. Volunteers and employees made some questionable decisions. Rules were broken. The reputation of the company was put into question. Arguments could be made that much of the problem was due to volunteers inability to engage in constructive problem solving themselves, and their refusal to engage in conversation with leadership is an indication of their toxicity, rather than the board’s leadership ability. However, the truth is that these skills and values start with the leadership, and if the leadership struggles, and creates a situation where people don’t feel safe communicating in that way, then the responsibility for creating that situation falls onto the leadership to fix that situation first.
So then when looking inward, at the actions, and inactions, of the Board of Directors, individually and as a whole, and the Executive Director, with this new information from the other side, patterns became clear: Consistent mixed messaging, ineffective listening and communication skills, lack of follow-through, and the general confusion that results from ambiguous values and vision at the top level. It painted a picture of a fundamental failure of leadership to create, communicate, and uphold a clear set of values and vision for people to understand, and as a result, allowed fear, mistrust, and toxicity to brew in the organization, leading to the eventual actions by the FoM.
Our vision starts with this idea: That the board and ED have not achieved an outcome of creating a safe and functional culture for our community. That without it, we do not command the respect and moral authority necessary to pursue the accountability the community needs. Trying to use a lens of punishment to correct for damage done to the organization would produce worse and escalating results.
Instead, we believed that we could lead a new collaborative process that establishes a vision so compelling it could strongly unite the board, office, and volunteers. And part of this process would involve a collaborative approach to accountability where all the parties could reach a resolution, work together again, and leave the past behind. We researched one promising framework for this called “Restorative justice”.
This approach actively involves the offender, the victim, and the community in a joint effort to find actions that apply justice in a meaningful way, subjective to the situation, the environment the offender was operating in, and any other factors involved. The goal is to bring justice and accountability, while also allowing for growth, forgiveness, and a healthy path forward for everyone involved.
-Defining Restorative, Ted Wachtel |
Once we have moved past all the events from this year, we are going to need to make some big changes in order to prevent this type of thing from happening again. There is always going to be conflict. Humans are dynamic and complicated creatures, and MAGFest is, or at least should be, something that inspires passion. With passion comes strong emotions, and with strong emotions comes the guarantee of strong conflict. MAGFest, ultimately, is about showing the world a better way to be and grow, together. We should be setting new precedents in how to handle these conflicts, we should be building our culture so it can handle pressure smoothly.
We cannot simply be critical of the way people carry themselves when there’s a conflict, without providing people a clear vision of how to handle conflicts in a positive way. We need to define a sort of Gold Standard for personal conflict management in all levels of the organization. This will be an iterative process; a living and changing set of best practices and resources for helping with collaborative and constructive conflict resolution. We cannot simply expect everyone in the organization to be an expert in perfectly managing their communication, especially if they are stressed.
Another place of conflict is the notion of these large community protests (i.e. in Slack/etc), and the hypothesis that they don’t help, and only drive us apart. The problem with this idea is that it ignores the reality that they do actually bring attention to serious issues that would not have gotten attention otherwise. Again, we cannot expect everyone in the organization to have professional level mediation and resolution skills; that’s the job of leadership. When things are falling apart, people need a way to pull the alarm and bring attention to a serious issue. This is ultimately the driving principle behind Unions. By embracing protest, by enabling it instead of making it taboo, we can give people the tools they need to bring problems to attention while still maintaining constructive communication, and minimizing collateral damage.
There are a number of other ideas and factors that could go into these changes, too many to list in this document, but for any of them to work and be implemented with any sort of clarity and expediency, we still need to address the long standing elephant in the room; the fundamental leadership structure of MAGFest. The Board, its members, and how it operates. MAGFest is not a standard non-profit organization, and was never intended to be. MAGFest was designed to be a high risk, visionary organization. We believe that in order to achieve this, MAGFest needs strong, unified, experienced leadership with a clear set of values, a strong vision, and the skills needed to bring that vision to reality.
It’s for this reason that the three of us, Dom, Paul, and Tresch, decided that we could no longer sit on the sidelines and allow things to continue as they have been. We had been watching MAGFest INC continue in this direction for quite some time, against our better judgement, and in the process, have grown exhausted from continuously compromising on our values for the sake of being told what the “right” way is (i.e. “best business practices”, “professionalism”, etc) . The split within the board prevents us from leading MAGFest with decisiveness and clarity, to take risks needed to find better ways of moving forward, and to unite the MAGFest community behind a single shared vision.
The three of us are no longer personally willing to work within the current board structure. The constant conflict has been worse than ineffective, and actively damaging to the organization. We either needed to remove ourselves from the equation, and allow other leaders to move forward with their own vision, and for that to succeed or fail on its own merit, or we needed to be able to do what we feel is best for our vision of MAGFest.
A few days after the Friends Of Magfest letters went public, instead of simply resigning, we made an offer to the remaining Board of Directors; we (Dom, Tresch, and Paul), would return to taking on the task of leadership of MAGFest, under the condition that the remainder of the Board of Directors resigns. We would guide this process of reconciliation, we would mediate and negotiate a peaceful resolution to the conflicts between the office staff and the Executive Director, and we would work to put the systems in place we feel are vital to the continuation of the mission of MAGFest. We would get MAGFest back on course, or, we will get out of the way and allow others to try their approach.
Naturally, the offer was not received well. There was no expectation that it would be. However, we thought it was more important for us to be totally clear about our desires and intentions. This is one of the values we hold strongly as leaders. Get the truth out first, then from that point on, the conversation can be much more productive, without each party trying to guess what the other is getting at. Unfortunately, that conversation wasn’t going to be completed in one night, and there was a more pressing issue at hand.
The ED, with support from the rest of the board, was planning on taking a series of disciplinary actions against various members of the MAGFest community, due to recent actions, and we felt that doing so could result in catastrophic fallout from the MAGFest community. In consideration of this, we offered to put conversations about the structure of the board on hold, while we work as mediators, helping communicate with and connect the Friends of MAG and the Board of Directors, with the goal of bringing about a mutually agreeable solution, hopefully preventing an immediate catastrophe.
The feeling from the other half of the board and PB was very strongly that by not taking immediate action, they would be rewarding toxic actions in the community, and that they would be putting the culture of the community as well as the upcoming event at significant risk by doing so. We did not share that feeling, as conversation with the FoM had been going very well, and we were certain that we could navigate the situation in a way that would make MAGFest stronger in the end, without creating a rift.
Ultimately, it was PB that decided at the last minute, under protest from the rest of the board, to give us two weeks to find an agreeable solution, under the condition that if we did not, we would resign from the board. At this point, we saw no other options for us to steer MAGFest off this course, so we accepted the offer. An announcement was written and sent to the MAGFest community to Slack, and we began our work.
It was a nearly impossible task; trying to solve years worth of cultural problems with MAGFest in two weeks. Our goal was never quite that; we knew that was impossible. What we were trying to do is merely show that the default course of action, of discipline first, was not the only possibility, and that there were other ways to achieve accountability. If we could get people on both sides to believe that, then we could put down the swords for the time being, work together to put on an amazing online event in January, and continue the conversations of accountability and restructuring as we go.
It was risky, but it also bought us time to talk more with people, brainstorm more ideas, and gather more information about the past and current situation that would help us decide what to do next. We concluded that any and all of the potential outcomes would be improved by us having this additional time with people while things were still fairly calm, and that it was our last chance to significantly alter the default future. So we went into those two weeks with an open mind, simply focusing on moving things as much as possible in a positive direction, while gathering the clearest picture we could put together of the whole situation.
When talking with the Friends of MAG, we focused initially on seeing what sort of space they would need in order to continue work toward the event in January, as this was a significant concern on both sides. We also tried to clarify as many things as possible from our standpoint as board members, and alleviate concerns of bad intentions on various actions. By putting in the work to gain their trust, it was much easier for them to trust us in describing the motives behind certain actions from leadership, without having to reveal confidential information.
Beyond that, conversations were mostly about how to move forward. Many ideas were exchanged about future board structures, future conflict resolution paths, and even in the shorter term, how people could get along and work together, despite significant differences and personal incompatibilities, while other changes played out.
Throughout this time, talks with Friends of MAG were insightful, fluid, dynamic, empathetic, and often exciting. There is obviously a lot of frustration there; if there wasn’t, obviously they wouldn’t have taken the drastic action they did. However, everyone in the group was always willing to temper their frustrations with an open mind, and despite their doubts, continuously be open to new ideas and arrangements to make things work. Generally speaking, these were people that, for better or for worse, had made a commitment to take a risk for something they cared deeply about, in order to make it better.
There was never a time when members of the Friends of MAG were unwilling to take responsibility for their actions, either the direct action of the FoM “public” statement, or other recent actions leading up to it. All that they asked was that they were looked at in context of the situation, and that leadership take accountability for them being put in that position. From their perspective, the leadership was failing, creating a hostile situation, and retaliating against the community for demanding change. If leadership could provide a satisfying solution to that, there was a strong sentiment that people would be willing to step out of the way to provide a clear runway for the next steps.
Our primary focus when talking with the rest of the Board was to try and help coach people on more holistic conflict resolution and conversational dialogue skills. With only two weeks, we weren’t going to have enough time to have a significant effect on everyone’s outlook, so for the sake of efficiency, most of our effort in this regard was directed to the ED, as ultimately the decision for the next moves would be his, and the rest of the board by and large were willing to support whatever decision he felt was right.
In these conversations, we attempted to focus on helping others see new perspectives from the standpoint of stressed volunteers and employees, and how situations that seemed fine from above, could seem extremely frustrating or even toxic to the people below. We provided examples of alternatives and, in our opinion, more positive outcomes, and we worked on helping develop skills for more effective listening and understanding.
In regards to the above topics, on the surface, most of these conversations went well. Everyone involved was happy to listen and acknowledge these new ideas and perspectives, and were thankful to receive our viewpoint. However, in contrast to the conversations with the Friends of MAG, ultimately, there was a common theme in these talks, where new perspectives were accepted graciously as valid and useful, but then ultimately dismissed in favor of preconceived outlooks.
Many times the exchanges were met with defensiveness or deflection. Often conversations would get derailed with doubts about our intentions, and our ability to effectively mediate, implications that the FoM were only listening to us because we were helping them, and regular mischaracterizations of statements we had made in the past in order to discredit our arguments. This is not to say that we didn’t have some great and productive conversations, they were just not as productive as we had hoped, and ultimately were revealing to us about their skills in regards to leadership at this level.
Before we continue, it should be mentioned that the board members are people we consider friends, and have worked with in various capacities for upwards of 15 years. We have extremely high regard for the individual character of everyone these criticisms are directed at. Everyone on the board has put in a huge amount of work, at great personal cost of time, effort, and sometimes emotional stability. These criticisms are directed only at their skills as they apply to our vision of what the top level of leadership in MAGFest requires to fulfill our vision. This does not come easy to us, and by no means do we hold any personal ill will toward anyone on the Board, or the Executive Director. In many ways, these are some of MAGFests greatest heroes.
That being said, here are some observations we made throughout this process:
As a result of the lack of progress being made, and the increasing uneasiness in regards to the leadership skills of ED and the rest of the board, the three of us never got to a point where we were comfortable bringing the two parties together to mediate resolutions before the two weeks were over. Whether this was a failure in our skills in providing an inspiring vision, an unwillingness to be open to change from others, or simply an impossible scenario, given the timing and our role in the whole picture, isn’t really for us to say.
We three, Paul, Dom, and Tresch, are ultimately writing this to declare our dissent and strong condemnation of the planned course of action to be taken by the ED with support of the remaining three voting members of the Board of Directors.
We believe that, through action and inaction, the board has slowly lost the moral authority to take these actions without first addressing the complaints brought forth from the community. In taking the disciplinary actions they have taken, without a clear plan or show of competence in managing these or future systemic cultural issues, we conclude that the ED and the other three voting members of the board are, in our opinion, negligent in their roles as leaders in upholding the values and mission of MAGFest.
As we have been unable to sway the Executive Director or the other three voting board members in order to force a change, and we don’t have a majority vote, we are now in a position where we have done everything we can from our current positions on the board. Having this conflict of leadership on the board is confusing and destructive in its own right; indecision from leadership creates confusion and distrust, and we see that as a significant factor in the slow escalation to current events. Furthermore, lack of clear direction from leadership robs the community of its ability to effectively create change, as there is no clear direction to push for or against.
Ultimately, the leaders of an organization are accountable to the people who do the work to achieve their vision. Everyone involved with MAGFest declares their support of the vision put forward by the leadership with their participation, and with us out of the way, people will be able to more clearly make that choice for themselves.
There are a few more thoughts we thought worth adding that didn’t necessarily fit into the chronological nature of the above document.
The Friends of MAG situation is solvable. There is no reason for this to be the worst crisis MAGFest has faced. In a matter of days, we were able to connect on a personal level with most of this group and clear up a lot of long standing conflicts. Yes, there was potential damage done to the reputation of the organization, but it’s possible to take a situation like this, which has extremely negative optics, and turn it around into something so positive that the entire world takes notice.
The entire concept of what leadership looks like in MAGFest is not a normal problem in and of itself. MAGFest was designed to be a high risk, high reward, human focused organization. MAGFest was not designed for “standard best corporate practices”, and is in many ways incompatible with them. The reason people talk about how MAGFest is special, and has a different vibe than anything else is by design and specifically resulting from this fact. There are plenty of leadership styles that might be perfectly valid, effective, and healthy in other organizations, that are completely antithetical to MAGFest’s nature. We believe, and have always believed, that MAGFest needs leaders that can set and enforce, with little to no ambiguity, a clear set of values and a vision for propagating them without watering them down.
In addition to just the general fact that there will always be conflict in social groups of humans, MAGFest is always going to excel in generating conflict. MAGFest is, or at least should be, something that inspires hope and passion among those involved. The more passionate people become about something, the more common, and more intense, conflict will become as it relates to that thing. This is an inevitability. The inverse is also true: eliminating conflict also comes at the cost of eliminating passion. From this viewpoint, conflict and passion are intertwined, and the only way to maintain the passion is to have a healthy relationship with conflict, to embrace it and improve your skills and strategies for dealing with it when it happens.
MAGFest is a movement that has the potential to change the world through video games, and this is already happening. MAGFest inspires others around the world through our example.
MAGFest Inc. is just a corporation, it’s a tool we created to help achieve that mission.
The other three voting members of the board, and the ED, are perfectly capable of managing a corporation, we are not questioning their abilities in that matter. We simply believe they are not currently equipped with the leadership skills needed to inspire a movement. This is the reason we are coming out so strongly in this letter.
If MAGFest Inc. doesn’t develop the tools needed to support the movement, it will ultimately be reduced to a more formulaic version of what it has been in the past; an imitation of itself. This will result in a slow trickle of talented people leaving the organization, likely punctuated by riotous disruptive behavior from groups within MAGFest seeking change. When the movement dies, it won’t be as a result of MAGFest Inc. going bankrupt or otherwise ceasing to exist, but instead will come as a collective shrug, and a feeling that things just aren’t what they used to be, but no one can quite figure out why.
Just as the corporation can continue beyond the death of the movement, the movement can continue beyond the death of the organization. If MAGFest Inc. doesn’t survive, due to Covid, or problems with leadership, or any other factor, or even if you decide that you no longer want to be involved with MAGFest Inc. for your own personal reasons, it’s OK. The movement and ideals of MAGFest exist independently. There will always be opportunities to change the world.