[Ansteorra] Advice to a new Baron and Baroness

[willowdewisp at juno.com]

Herr Detlef
I loved what you had to say. they say it takes a village to raise a child and it takes a Barony to make a good Barony and a good Kingdom
One of period jobs of nobles was to train people for their Lords household. Young people would go to a Baron's house hold and learn how to serve a table or be a Herald or polish their courtly graces and when their Lords or their Lords Lords came to the Barony they would recruit for their household and people would advance that way.
When the Kingdom was plotted out we talked about how were our Crowns were going to get skilled people to do all the things that a good Crown needs done. We thought of the Medieval model. Just as one of the duties of peers is to train up more peers the duties of Baron and Baroness were to train in their court people who could function and run the Kingdom Court. By "Court" I mean all the people and activities around a ruling noble. It was the job to listen to bad bards until they improved and could perform for the people and the Crown. It was their job to encourage bad artist and Heralds and help officers learn the ropes and help people to get better at what they do and provide places for them to interact and to show their skill to their best advantage. 
We thought we had laid this out so people could understand this concept but with changes in wording and changes in how the real world defined concepts this model was got lost.. 
As a simple mover and shaker I found that the social model of we are just friend doing things together had two major failings:
One, no matter how friendly the people were that would start to fight. It seems that there are a limited number of positive interaction that a group can do and an unlimited number of negative interactions. By our nature we are an inbred group and closed groups start fighting. 
I discovered if I could keep people working on interesting projects that bought them together and since most of us joined the SCA because of something concerning history it was logical to use history as the base. We used to say that the product of our SCA Communities were our events and a healthily group was one that could combine the skill of everyone in the group and  create an event that showed our research and opened windows of understanding to the Middle ages and the Renaissance.
I thought it was great because when done right it made everyone think well of each other. The fighter was loved by the artisan and the officer was appreciated by everyone and the performer were praise, because they all had made something neat.  It was a great way to bring everyone together. Similar to the War now.
The second failing of a social group is that it seeks status que. This is one of the iron rules of sociology. The problem is we are not a "natural" community like a "farm" community and we lose people for real life problems all the time. Status Que is most often maintained by closing ranks. Everyone finds their niche and stay there. This may lead to end of the group and does end up with no or few new people.
In the large Churches they face the same problem and they solve it by starting small groups and getting them started with leadership provided by older members. Our solution  to the problem was to have small, local events and activities at the big events that we could get our new people involved in. Running a gaming tent or doing a quest involved a lot of skills that you would need to do a big event. Also it would put them in contact with the autocrats and if the autocrats had problems they might be able to offer solutions. 
It is the B&B's job to oversee this and encourage this and redirect that. Smooth hurt feelings and make sure no one hogs the ball. It takes a lot of finesse and it takes a strong leadership of people who are willing to step in help everyone play nice together. All of this should be done without being authoritative because being too managing kills creativity. 
If you look at successful groups you will discover that all groups need to solve these problem. In my days everyone learned what it takes to keep a community going and I think we all learned the roles necessary to make things work. the life experience was everywhere and we didn't think about it. 
All over American groups and business are failing because many people have never been expose to free form groups that worked. While the bureaucratic model is keeping thing together on the business and government level ; group like ours gets in trouble with bureaucratic system because the system has been shown to limit creativity and self managing. Even business are having troubles because if people only do what is listed in their job description then a business will fail because there is no way to write all of what is needed down. 
So now our B&Bs, nobles and peers are going to somehow make people understand that in a free form group like ours we can not wait for someone to tell us what to do we need to start things ourselves. they also need to show people ways to do things that don't cause conflict. 
willow
willow 
 
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