State of Play

"The SCA in New Zealand is dead."

In order to talk about much of what we planned and did, it helps to know why we did it. Thus, a short history lesson. All groups go through cycles, so bits of this could really be about any group if you catch it at a particular moment.

Southron Gaard had a very tough two years in 2002 and 2003. That period isn't often mentioned now but, when it is, it's frequently termed "The Time of Troubles". It fitted many of the classic patterns of a civil war -- a breakdown in civil society, families and friendships split, normal governance greatly undermined and the smallest disagreements blowing up out of all proportion. Hard-working, well-intentioned people got hurt all over the place.

The main causes of contention were completely comprehensible. SG and the other Crescent Isles groups had grown up under a benevolent Kingdom -- we liked them and they us -- and were now being offered the opportunity to join to a brand-new, closer, younger one. No matter how pragmatically sensible that move might seem to some, or how strongly the ties to Caid were felt by others, there's no way the decision would be either easy or unanimous, whichever way it went.

Because of that, the debate and decision process had to be preternaturally smooth to avoid some kind of blow-up. Alas, it was far from that.

To make things worse locally, interleaved through the same period there arose some governance issues concerning our then-College, which had been running strongly for nearly a dozen years. I could write a book on how the ensuing fracas appeared to an outsider but, in the interests of brevity I'll summarise it somewhat fairly as "personalities".

The College wasn't broken at the start, far from it. But it ended up deader than a dodo, and took a fair hole out of the Barony in the process.

Naturally attendance, energy levels and enthusiasm declined steadily during these two years. At first, people stopped wanting to bring new friends to events. Eventually, many stopped coming themselves.

One memory which katherine and I have from that period is of two long-standing members who sat on our sofa at different times and declared that "the SCA in New Zealand is dead". They believed it.

We felt otherwise. All groups go through up and down cycles and we knew that SG itself had been through at least two major ones in the previous two decades. We had a lot of respect for those who had husbanded the group through those times because -- no matter what side of the historical arguments they took -- the group today would not be here without them.

So we kept playing, in much the same explicitly non-political way we'd always played, and did our best to stay on good terms with everyone.

[Why is it these days that so little weight is given to the fine art of rubbing along well with others? Are we each so wedded to our prime place in the world and the modern rules of assertiveness that good grace must needs always give way to discord? Is there never any time or room to consider the views, or motivations of others, and to give them due regard? Does the loudest and least accommodating always get to win? Am I getting old and daft?]

We thought then and still think that, if we'd been politically active during the Time of Troubles -- or had deliberately become so in order to try and help out -- we would have ended up in the middle of the strife, rather than being able to help resolve anything. Some things are just too hard.

Imagine how it felt for our predecessors in the middle of all this. Unlike everybody else in the group, B&Bs basically have to attend all events, and Council as well. They feel obliged to do a whole lot of other things too, which get harder and harder when there are steadily fewer people willing to help, to respond, or even to be involved.

So, as Southron Gaard hollowed out around them, the symbols of the Barony were increasingly powerless to do anything about it -- except wait, make the transition to a new Kingdom, and reach for whatever touchstones showed there was still life and hope.

The key touchstone was Canterbury Faire. No matter what else happens in Southron Gaard, we, collectively, have always been GOOD at hosting CF, and burying our differences for the duration.

Perhaps this is because of a sense of host responsibility, or perhaps the influx of visitors - who themselves help run a lot of the event - gives us a fresher, wider perspective. Whatever the reason, there's little doubt that CF has always been a generally enjoyable event, even in the worst times. As "the best we can do" goes, CF in any given year is a damned fine high point to have.

And so time passed. Each month was a little easier than the last, but the Barony was still at a low ebb, and felt very divided. Lots of people had stopped playing -- many of them "for good" as they saw it. Every single activity the Barony had - fighting, craft, heraldry, seamsters, stewarding - was reduced to a few stalwarts who were comfortable with each other, and felt willing to make the effort to keep that area going.

Council was hard yakker, because Council was where opposing factions from the earlier disputes were forced together. The good news, though, is that it wasn't monolithic.

Three times during 2004, we were quietly asked if we'd be interested in taking on the B&B role when our predecessors decided to step down. These questions came from right across the Barony.

And in response to that, we decided there were really only three questions that mattered:

1. Could the Barony stand us?
2. Could we stand the Barony?
3. Could we achieve anything useful?

The first should be obvious to anybody who knows us a bit. We're not half-hearted people. If you're going to get sick of us, you're going to get VERY sick of us. We were eventually persuaded that we'd get by.

The second question was actually the hardest, and is perhaps the most contentious bit of this long essay. I've alluded to our long-standing lack of engagement in the Barony's politics. We'd been to maybe two or three Councils in 15 years and, for a very long time, never ran an event as the primary event steward. There was a reason for that.

Please turn on your bias filter now.

Katherine and I each have extensive experience of small groups and societies. And to us, the Southron Gaard way of getting things done -- even when it was a Shire -- was always really demotivating. There was a Council, and Officers, and Corpora, and local rules and guidelines. And if you wanted to do something interesting, you just had to jump through the hoops.

Except the hoops were hard to find at the best of times, and turned out to be largely fictituous once you found them -- when something needed to get done, they could be conveniently ignored. Actually, I've seen this elsewhere in the SCA, so shouldn't suggest it is purely a Southron Gaard invention; SG just happened to be particularly good at it.

And sometimes the disparity between the amount of hoop-jumping and the value of the result could be enormous (do. not. mention. staplers.).

Of course, those are common small-group problems. What intensified them for Southron Gaard was an atmosphere that (we felt) so pervaded Council that those who attended it regularly during those 15 years probably didn't even notice it. Essentially, it was "we're in charge, who are you?" But it also included "you are raising a different point of view, and disagreement is Wrong. And dangerous".

For a very long time -- possibly since it was first formed, the group seemed to have great difficulty with gracefully handling opposing viewpoints. Perhaps that grew out of a few major schisms in its early years. Or perhaps it explains those schisms. Whatever the cycle of cause and effect, from where we were sitting, the culture that SG's Council seemed to promote was remarkably de-motivating. Quite the opposite of "cheerful engagement".

Bearing in mind the way that misconceptions can be easily formed and maintained, you can imagine that we probably had a couple of fairly early experiences of that sort of thing, and then just gave up and assumed it was continuing. There's some truth in that, but we had plenty of confirming evidence as the years went by -- and the intensity of the strife during the Time of Troubles is a pretty obvious marker. This group's management style was not user-friendly.

(I've heard comments now and then that ascribe this general problem to specific individuals or sub-groups. That hasn't been our experience. Some of the most puzzling criticisms I've heard over the years have been directed at people from various parts of the Barony who, for the most part, I place in the "cheerfully engaged" category. The Council culture pre-dated most of them, and seemed to have a life of its own).

So, in considering whether we could be B&B, we were really thinking about whether we wanted to interact with the group at a political level. Which meant considering whether we could either survive that kind of atmosphere for any length of time (nope), or could perhaps succeed in completely changing it.

On the plus side was one simple but crucial fact - even more crucial when you get to it after reading all the above, so please read it slowly:

When this group gets its act together, it's magic. It has stellar people in terms of skills, accomplishments, vision, reliability, inspirational qualities, experience, determination -- all the good things that can make an SCA group really shine. The only trick is to give those virtues an outing as often as possible, and leave the baggage at home - or bury it for good.

That huge plus made us feel well motivated. The real question came down to whether we could achieve anything useful - score some successes and, particularly, help improve the management culture without losing any more of the support and energy the Barony had left.

Obviously we decided it was worth a go. Two factors tipped the balance for us:

The first was that -- all appearances to the contrary -- we'd been thinking about this issue for a helluva long time, and felt that we properly understood the group's problems and had a rough idea of how to solve them.

We also felt, strongly, that the solutions could only be applied as B&B, rather than in any other role. Quite frankly, it was bound up in the sense of the power and influence (for the good of course :-) that we felt the role would let us deploy, and equally the sense of powerLESSness we would have felt trying to do it any other way.

The second factor, just as important, was the strong sense we got that the Barony was ready to turn a corner: that a number of people who had played before did want to play again, or more actively, and just needed the right excuse. That even those who had kept things going through the hardest times, and hence were now pretty tired - still wanted to see the group recover, and thrive.

There was immense goodwill waiting to be tapped. It seemed to need change as a trigger, so our predecessors didn't have the option of using it the way a new B&B could. And I guess it wasn't available to just anyone. But I can imagine candidates other than us who could have recognised this goodwill and been boosted by it the way we were.

So we agreed to stand, knowing that there was an excellent chance we would get the nod. Our objectives if we succeeded were:

a) To improve the management and social culture of the group to be far more welcoming, relaxed, transparent and user-friendly -- and far more tolerant of differences, therefore more resilient when they arise

b) To maximise successes and minimise problems for a very long period ("good news and no stuff-ups") -- without being too overbearing about it -- until the group was robust enough to wear normal problems with ease

c) To grow the group with both old hands, returnees and new blood -- LOTS of new blood. Which in turn meant encouraging an atmosphere where people wanted to bring newcomers along, and newcomers felt right at home once they turned up.

In other words, to make it all more FUN, dammit!

As I recall, we were pretty clear with people about what we wanted to achieve if appointed, though not necessarily the details of how we'd go about it.

And that was good, because a lot of the ideas that drove our actions didn't properly form until we really started listening to people, and that couldn't really begin until after our succession was decided and announced.