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So I’ve been saving this one for a bit, so I could do it some justice. Now I probably won’t be responding to everything in this right now because some of it is very dependant upon later policy releases, but to be fair to Thomas I’m going to answer specifically what I can right now and go from there.

1 - “Politician Speak”

I have to kind of take issue with something and hope to clarify it.

We refuse to do politician speak, and by that I mean answering in a way that sounds pretty but doesn’t give you any real information.

So, you and I have spoken about this before, and I agree that lots of talk with no substance can be frustrating and misleading. However, a lot of people don’t understand what “politician speak” is. There is a difference between politician speak and the idea of “politically correct” - something I’ve heard you express contempt for in the past. The problem with this is that people tend to say that they won’t worry about being “politically correct” and then to demonstrate, they tend to be completely without tact and sometimes rude. They can be aggressive, degrading, and insulting to people. One can be honest without being rude, and one can be direct without being dictatorial. I know this all too well, as for a long time my reputation in STF was, unfortunately, one of being too direct, and that doesn’t serve anyone well. There is a point where not using “political speak” is counterproductive. The reality is, the job you are campaigning for requires its use, and skill in its execution. You must be able to harness this skill and use those powers for good. This is not a first draft job. I think it is a common political tactic here in the club and beyond to seek points for saying this, but in my case, I view it as a con instead of a pro.

With that in mind, can you further clarify what your leadership style will be? Should I be expecting brash-to-prove-non-political, or can we expect some of the finesse that is required for this job? I would prefer detail and honesty here, I’m looking for you to be insightful and reflective. There is not a “right” answer, but the answer should provide your reasoning.

So to answer the question, there is a difference between speaking with authority or the exercise of authority, speaking like a politican and speaking politically correct. As someone who has been trained in leadership by my countries armed forces I differentiate speaking from authority. This is a tone and mode of communication I rarely utilise in STF and it’s not brash, impulsive or rude at all. It is something that I utilise to give directives, it’s firm, no nonsense and just the right amount of direct and it’s only used for exactly as long as needed and I strive to make the switch in tone obvious.

My references to not speaking like a politician doesn’t mean I intend to cultivate a propensity for brashness, rudeness, flippancy or over bearing directness. In fact for me it means the opposite. I find politicans refuse to concede obvious points when asked directly and will evade a straight question and respond with a weasel answer.

This is further differentiated from political correctness which I would define as the prevailing social idealogy of non confrontationalism. A desire to shape a world free from emotional hurt. Now just because I do not agree with this ideology doesn’t mean I am unable to be considerate and empathise with others.

With regards to my leadership style I would describe it as a lead from consensus style. I take the lessons the army spent alot of time hammering into me that being that no one person has all the answers to all the problems all the time, no matter how high or low their intelligence. I intend to essentially set the goal and the expectation. For example you can see this in the discussion about cutting government positions.

The expectation was a more efficient administrative process in line with current club infrastructure. I posited that this would be executed by cutting some positions, after some discussion you yourself suggested a idea that was superior to my implimentation. The method doesn’t really matter to me. That’s not what I’m invested in, what I’m invested in is the outcome meeting the stated expectation and utilising the resources at hand to get there.

I will always be willing to listen and act on logical reasoned arguments about why X will or won’t work. At some point I’ll make a decision after weighing all the arguments and proceed from there. In fact I intend to add a second step to the proposal process in command. It’s more a codification of what happens some of the time and IMO should happen all the time.

Basically after an idea is accepted as going ahead a second stage commenting on the Edict/Bill/Bylaw implimenting it for whether the language and intent meets the stated aim and goals of the proposal.

2 - Needed Changes

We have, over the last decade seen the slow and steady trend of leadership that is/was/has been unwilling or unable to see to the necessary changes the club needs

I feel like we should clarify this a little bit. I feel like it is a little dismissive to bundle every administration of the past 10 years into this. Having been here for 8 of those, and been President during one of them, I can say that it isn’t 100% true. Most administrations (not all) have some sort of project they want to do. Some of them are less “global” in scope than others. For instance, during my term, we went through a very tough process of cutting ships and doing so in a way that was well thought out, planned for, and thoroughly structured. That should have been the first step in a series of steps to help improve the GM shortage that we were facing at that time. My successor did not follow up on that.

The reality is that 8 months is not a long time, and it is hard to do certain things and do them thoroughly enough to be done well here. There should be carry over from one term to the next, and there rarely is. Often terms are very hard starts and stops hinged on the President’s personal ideology. Given that you were a part of the most significant club change in modern STF history, I feel like you should have some sense of what these changes should be.

What do you view these as, and how important are they for you to accomplish? How do you prioritize? If you are unable to accomplish them, what foundation will you provide for your successor to carry on?

Ok so part of this I hope to address with the STF google drive, allowing presidents to set multi-term projects and have the documentation and record of effort to date readily accessible to each successive president. This will help sustain effort between lulls in effort to achieve the desired outcomes. Now obviously I can’t guarantee a president will continue on with a project but by having the material generated always accessible means we can more easily learn from failure. Failure can often be the greatest instructor but only if you can analysis the results. Starting again from square one every time will just lead to hitting different failure points without learning why and overcoming them.

I think the biggest change is linked to the Exodus changeover that being the accommodation of mobile devices. Mobile devices have caused a massive paradigm shift towards always on, on demand instant gratification mentality and I think that the greatest challenge STF faces is in finding a way to adapt yet not loose our identity, culture and traditions. This is going to mean some uncomfortable compromises and changes to legislative and procedural norms. The challenge for the President is to do it in such a way and pace that the club is able to sustainably absorb it.

5 is literally the oldest political tent pole in this club - “training, training, training.” We drill it into everything, we all know it is important, and yet we really have no idea how to implement it. What is your idea, and how is it different/better from every other time this is presented?

Ok,

So the problem here is there is no training and currently no point to doing it if there was. There is no developmental pathways, guided or self driven. STF has a few info bleeps in form of the academy courses and you can read them if you want but there is no benefit to doing so. Ok you get your name on a list for passing but so what? From a standard member’s perspective who is trying to climb the ranks and yes that is what they want, to climb the ranks and get their own command. It’s a militaristic drive, getting training if it really existed doesn’t help in that endeavour so why do it.

The key here is not only do we need to create a vast dirth of training content, but we need to incentivise its use. Used to be you did a Academy exam you got to start any character in that field at Lt jg instead of Ensign. Graduated from the academy and getting a post in your discipline, congratulations skip to Lt jg.

Academy ships struggle to get good DH’s, well a possible way to solve that is to tie promotion to Lt Cmdr tied to each character doing stints in the academy. Make extension courses or other developmental pathways. I’m just spitballing a few basic ideas here without indepth implimentation details because this will be talked about in greater detail but I just wanted to answer one of these instead of saying wait for the policy piece.

4 - Stress Management

Years ago, when I was President and before, I didn’t have the best stress management. In years since I have practiced it as a religion and am often in a state of near-zen because the stakes here are not comparable to the work that I do outside of this. But I know that the Presidency carries a certain pressure with it, even if it is just an online writing club. I also know that you can sometimes be reactive (again, not unlike myself). What is your plan for managing this?

My main concern is that if you go “all in” without a solid strategy of managing your own reactions in combination with the “no political correctness” that you could implode. I advocate for all to have systems in place to manage stress. Joe, for instance, is a fan of “sleep on it” - I am too, but I also do pros/cons, work through motivation and perspective taking, etc. How do you feel the intersection of “no politics” and stress could inform the way you operate as President?

So in regards to this the last 8 months I’ve been learning about setting appropriate boundaries and sticking to them. And you’ve helped me with that Thomas. Yes I do know I have a tendency that if I see something when I’m fairing poorly I can be a bit of a bear and that’s why I have chosen D as my running mate. Some VP’s take other positions because VP is mostly seen a redundancy or in case position. From my perspective D will be part of my setting boundaries and buffering strategy. We’ve had long discussions about how we want to approach the duties and task of the executive and that’s what we’ll be the exec not a prez and a vp.

Thank you for your questions and I look forward to any follow ups you have Thomas.

– Matt