Unless you’ve been living on a moonbase (the kind without internet access) the last few months, you know that the IPMS USA continues to step on it’s own feet in a Looney Toon sorta way. Every time a new issue involving IPMS flairs up, I can’t help but think about Bugs Bunny bending Elmer Fudd’s shotgun barrel back on him… so when Fudd goes to shoot the Wabbit, he instead blows his own head to smithereens.

We continue to hear well intentioned members of IPMS leadership ask “what would you want to see change?” and we continue to see folks offer a laundry list of potential changes. As a follow-up, there is a near total lack of feedback and/or action about those suggestions. It’s become a regular cycle:

  • Issue happens
  • Discussion flairs up
  • IPMS leadership has to be shoved into participating in the discussion, if they participate at all
  • Ideas are shared
  • We hear very little back, if anything at all
  • Things quiet down
  • Rinse, repeat

One of the common refrains we hear is “if you want change to happen, run for IPMS office! There’s not enough people stepping up and everyone’s running unopposed or leadership positions are being left vacant!”

Well, duh.

I’ve been a member of IPMS for years. I’ve been a member of the modeling community since I was in high school. I’ve attended countless IPMS events, judged/volunteered at many of them. I’ve spent hours sharing my input as openly and as clearly as I can regarding how I believe things could change for the better, based on both personal experience and a successful career building communities and supporting organizations in this kind of work.

And after all of that, I honestly believe that the IPMS organization, the very culture itself just don’t give a fuck. Not about improvements, not about change, not about listening to the membership, not about acting quickly. The only thing it seems like the IPMS culture gives a fuck about is protecting “the ways things have always been”.

So when I hear that IPMS needs volunteers to run for office, to participate in leadership, my main question is: Why should I give a fuck?

Organizations like IPMS USA are driven by volunteers. Without its volunteers it ceases to exist. Like so many non-profits.. This isn’t an excuse for bad behavior, it’s a reality check on how the organizations like IPMS function. But the problem with these realities is that leadership tends to go in one of two directions:

  • Option 1: An insular, “nobody really understands”, batten down the hatches and protect the way we “have” to get things done mindset sets in. Leadership creates a culture of protectionism. As a volunteer organization with volunteer leadership, this becomes an easier way to manage the work. At least in theory. But this also breds a certain resentment towards the membership and it creates a resistance to change because it just feels like a lot of work. It also locks an increasingly smaller number of people into participating because if you’re not “one of us” then you don’t belong.
  • Option 2: A mindset of “everybody goes home happy“, where both organization and community are sharing each of their needs openly, creating positive feedback loops, being honest about what the realities of their experiences are. This isn’t to say everything becomes a direct democracy. Far from it. Those don’t typically work well. Leadership still takes a leadership role, but like any good leader, there are clearly stated positions and open discussion of options. Tyrants and generals both give orders, but generals seek wise counsel from those around them, share reasoning when appropriate, and get their subordinates to understand the “why” of the decisions to help expand the knowledge of those around them. Tyrants issue orders and then demand action with no further conversation.

I don’t know that I even have the time in life to run for an IPMS office with a pending marriage, blending of family, a special needs step-kid, a self-employed consulting practice making a major focus pivot, and my oldest kid going off to college in no time at all. But the better question is would I even want to if I had the time?

Honestly? Probably not. It feels like I’d be fighting embedded positions at every turn. It feels like I’d be looking for changes that would be nearly impossible to make. It feels like I’d be struggling between a desire to professionalize the organization and the resistance of current leaders wanting to maintain the “old ways”. So why would I want to give up my time with the family, at work, or at the bench to fight a losing battle?

The IPMS leadership culture seems to consist mainly of resentment towards their members at this point. I have been a member for years and barely have any understanding of how things work, whether ideas presented actually get discussed, who is in charge of what, or how change happens. After the IPMS Journal magazine editor published a horrendously inappropriate editorial he wrote himself, we came to find out that the magazine has an approval workflow of one person: the editor. WTF? And I have no idea whether IPMS leadership believes that’s a problem, since the IPMS e-board rarely communicates much of anything publicly.

Various community members keep saying things like “if you want change, run for office… the officers are running unopposed”. Sure… but we need to have a real conversation about why people are able to run unopposed. The culture of resentment towards the membership would have us believe it’s because members are lazy, unwilling to step up, and (accordingly to the IPMS Journal editorial) just wanting to complain because that’s more fun.

Bullshit.

In the corporate world “change management” is a major practice and field of study. Google define change management as:

Change management is a systematic approach to dealing with the transition or transformation of an organization’s goals, processes or technologies. The purpose of change management is to implement strategies for effecting change, controlling change and helping people to adapt to change.

 

Adapting to change, helping a group adapt to change is as hard (if not harder) as figuring out what to change in the first place. And I can tell you from deep experience, the best way to help a group adapt to change is to make them part of the process. It requires enthusiastic support from leadership, and hell, clear leadership itself. You can’t get a company to move from paper to email for the first time if the CEO won’t even do it, or if he complains about “this new fangled technology”.

At this point, I see very little from the IPMS leadership that tells me that they actually want to change. I see a lot of silence, a lack of vocal leadership, very few communications publicly about what they’re debating and why. I don’t feel as a member like I have any way to truly influence the direction of the organization. I don’t feel like I have influence over the board as my elected representatives.

Maybe that’s not true. Maybe the E-Board is actively listening and debating the issues being raised by the membership and the community. But if it’s so well hidden and rarely results in a publicly shared update, does it matter? If a tree falls in the woods and no one is there to hear it…

I fear that the only way to see change of any significance with IPMS is that something breaks so bad it requires a fundamental start over. I believe in IPMS and I want it to succeed. But I honestly don’t even know what “success” looks like right now. I’m not sure that the IPMS leadership has a clear, inspiring understand of that…and if they do, they’re certainly not communicating it in a way that rallies the troops to jump in and help.

Running unopposed is a great signal to all of us that there’s a major problem here. And not because we’re all lazy, but because the IPMS organization itself (not any particular individual(s)) simply isn’t inspiring enough to create desire to volunteer.