The Single Point of Failure: Biggest Monster Your Guild Will Face

The single point of failure: the biggest monster your guild will ever face.

Guilds are by their nature volunteer organizations. The vast majority of officers and leaders don't get any kind of compensation for their efforts, aside from perhaps guaranteed raiding slots. Some roles within the game lend themselves toward being executed by one person at a time (tanking chief among them). So it is almost ludicrously easy for guilds to unwittingly riddle themselves with weaknesses like a bloc of swiss cheese. These weaknesses can be thought of as single points of failure, and your guild lives or dies based on what it does about them.

A single point of failure (SPOF) is anything which, if it breaks, the whole system comes crashing down. Some systems are designed with a single point of failure on purpose. Some include single points of failure as a necessity. Whether SPOF is completely unavoidable in a volunteer organization is debatable. However, I believe it is more important for a guild to recognize its SPOF, eliminate them wherever possible, and manage those it cannot eliminate as best as possible.

What are some examples of a SPOF?

• a guild with a very strong leader, whose officers feel incapable or unauthorized to make decisions in the GL's absence.
  
• a guild with an officer who has taken on so many key roles that the rest of the officers would feel lost without him/her.
  
• a guild with one raid leader, and the rest of the leadership is either incapable or completely unwilling to raid lead.  
  
• a guild with one person designated as "main tank" either formally or de facto.
  
• a guild with one person designated as a class leader, either formally or de facto, without whom the rest of the people in that class cannot figure out their raid role or gear.
  

Think about your guild right now. Think about the people in it. Is there anyone in that guild you would feel lost without? Do you shudder to think what would happen if any particular person quit the game, moved to a different guild or server, or couldn't log on even for some of the guild's raids? Is your guild leadership so top-heavy that nothing happens without a leader's direction? Those people are single points of failure.  

This touches on issues such as knowledge management, system design, and good old-fashioned human resources management. However, I'll try to cover those kinds of topics later.  

Once you've identified a SPOF, what do you do about it? How do you handle that guild leader who feels the need to micromanage every aspect of the guild to the point where everyone is dependent on him/her? What do you do about that go-getter officer who does everything because no one else is willing to put in as much effort? What do you do about those people who have assumed certain roles like raid/class leading and tanking, and either by design or by happenstance are the only people anyone thinks can do their jobs?  

A volunteer organization lives and dies by redundancy. Any good leader will build in as much redundancy in that organization as possible. This alleviates burnout, which is probably the number one killer of good guild leadership. It also means that your guild is stronger because it is more adaptive, more responsive, quicker to adjust to a changing raid situation. No guild should be so dependent on one person that the rest of the guild cannot make decisions without him/her. No guild should be so used to any one voice calling out direction during a raid that they don't know what to do if that voice is replaced by another. No guild should be so used to any one tank that they cannot kill bosses if another tank is tanking them.

This means that a guild has to be willing to consciously train some redundancy into the guild.  People have to be willing to take on each others' roles, and the guild leadership has to be okay with giving up some control to each other and even to the membership.

If a guild takes a serious look at its SPOF and determines that some cannot be helped, then the guild has to come to grips with the fact that it is not a stable guild. Every effort should be made to minimize the effect of burnout, and train others to take the place of any one SPOF. But if the leadership is unwilling or unable to do this, the members of the guild should be aware of the fact that the guild is not a stable one and could fail at any time. Of course, this is not a healthy way of doing things, but reality dictates that even if people are perfectly aware of their SPOF, doesn't mean that they are always willing and able to do anything about them.

That leads me to a discussion of SPOF and tanking, specifically. Most guilds unfortunately make the severe and frankly, boneheaded mistake of elevating one tank above the others. They ignore that that tank has been made into a single point of failure in favor of the view that it behooves the guild to put its best gear in one place, that that person will give the guild the best chance for success against a new, bleeding-edge boss. All that the guild is doing in this case is trading short-term gain for long-term stability. That tank will eventually leave the guild, or game, either temporarily or permanently. How much you depend on that person's tanking will determine what happens to your guild when (not if) they leave.  

Of course, there are other ways in which it hurts a guild to elevate one person as the main tank above all the others. I will discuss those later, but for now, I will close in saying that every guild needs to take a hard look at itself and determine, through discussions among the leadership as well as the rank-and-file members, what the single points of failure are in the guild, and what the guild should do to alleviate them.