Relieving our Tensions

Dear Colleagues,

I hope all of you have had a pleasant and restful holiday.

I was reflecting a bit more on the outcome of the Denver meeting when Paul Mosher’s posting about the Barbershop Harmony Society caught my eye. I too saw it as a cautionary tale. I had just come across some words of Einstein’s that seemed relevant to our own organizational dilemmas.

“The world we have made as a result of the level of thinking we have done thus far creates problems we cannot solve at the same level of thinking at which we crated them.”

My Denver reflections centered on two related issues that seem to me, if not the crux, at least a major source of our current problems. First is the sense expressed by some BOPS Fellows that even the possibility of an overruling of a BOPS decision related to standards by the Board of Directors (the Executive Council) of our membership organization is unacceptable. Second is the current inextricable intertwining of TA status with the certification process. I believe that if we could at least loosen this tie and open the door for alternate paths to TA status that we could diminish at least some of the concerns of BOPS about being overruled by the Council. (To the best of my knowledge this has never happened in over sixty years with our current governance structures.)

To me these are difficult but definitely solvable problems provided we don’t approach them, per Einstein, with the same attitudes with which we originally framed our governance structures. All of the current contingencies among which are our changing membership patterns, shifting candidate characteristics, declining level of interest in certification, as well as many others, must be included in a major way.

Warren R. Procci