We have a regular volunteer with a number of diagnosed mental health issues. When helping people he is knowledgeable, enthusiastic, and friendly but gets carried away quite often and sometimes has strange ideas or ways of doing things.
A while back I overheard him tell someone not to adjust their axle nuts during the month of August because the metal is too malleable then. I'm sure the person who was told this knew not to take it as reliable advice.
The real problem is that he generally takes 1-2 hours to help someone patch a flat because he is so detailed and has so many rituals (cleaning the tire and rim bead with a soapy tooth brush). Other repairs are similar and often spiral out of control (while removing a tire he notices a slightly bent derailleur, and soon the derailleur and chain are removed to be straightened and rigorously cleaned even though the patron had no problems with shifting) Often this ends with frustration or on occasion results in a meltdown.
I've had multiple direct discussions with him about 'how not to help people' (Don't take over their project, don't impose your ideas, there may be more than one right way to patch a flat) but this had had a limited effect.
Does anyone have constructive advice to offer or experience from similar situations.
It has been my experience over the years that bike collectives can be welcoming places that allow neurodiversity to flourish, but we're generally better at knowing how to identify a solution to a problem with a bicycle than the sort of problem you have described here.
There are two primary sets of skills that go into walking people through a repair. One of those skills involves knowing the mechanics of repairing a bicycle. The other skill involves knowing the processes of walking people through that repair. To use the technical terms: content knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge.
It sounds like your volunteer has the content knowledge. The pedagogy isn't coming to him so easily. Your patrons surely see this as a problem - and I think that's a key point. This is a matter of respecting your patrons. This affects what may well be their primary vehicle. It sounds like this can also be a safety issue. At this time, I would not consider him fit to walk people through repairs unassisted.
This is also a matter of respecting your volunteer and the other volunteers. I can't imagine that spending two hours guiding people through an otherwise straightforward flat fix is inspiring much goodwill from them to him. Does he see this as a problem? If he does, then the solution is pretty straight-forward. He can work on all the other mechanical things that can happen more on his own time frame such as triaging, sorting, building bikes. If he doesn't, it is still an identified problem, but you can work with him and the other members of your organization and maybe even an external organization. Do the other members of your organization see this as a problem? What is the decision-making structure at your organization? Sometimes with collectives it can take a long time to get everyone on the same page.
Lastly, if teaching is still on the menu for this volunteer, you or someone else can research how to teach people how to teach. You can even research how to teach people with this volunteer's traits. You can also offer workshops that would be beneficial to both this volunteer and the collective as a whole, such as communications workshops. One small bit of advice for you is that I only see you explaining to him what not to do. Tell him what you need him to do: leave the tools in their hands, stay focused on the repair they requested guidance on, ask patrons if they want the 2-hour flat fix or the Graham's Bike Collective Flat Fix Special (aka the way everyone else does it).
This might also be a good opportunity to spend time thinking about and working on your shop's safer space agreement as a collective. There are a bunch of resources online to get you started.
Angel York
On Mon, Jun 8, 2015 at 12:10 PM, Graham Stewart grhmstwrt@gmail.com wrote:
We have a regular volunteer with a number of diagnosed mental health issues. When helping people he is knowledgeable, enthusiastic, and friendly but gets carried away quite often and sometimes has strange ideas or ways of doing things.
A while back I overheard him tell someone not to adjust their axle nuts during the month of August because the metal is too malleable then. I'm sure the person who was told this knew not to take it as reliable advice.
The real problem is that he generally takes 1-2 hours to help someone patch a flat because he is so detailed and has so many rituals (cleaning the tire and rim bead with a soapy tooth brush). Other repairs are similar and often spiral out of control (while removing a tire he notices a slightly bent derailleur, and soon the derailleur and chain are removed to be straightened and rigorously cleaned even though the patron had no problems with shifting) Often this ends with frustration or on occasion results in a meltdown.
I've had multiple direct discussions with him about 'how not to help people' (Don't take over their project, don't impose your ideas, there may be more than one right way to patch a flat) but this had had a limited effect.
Does anyone have constructive advice to offer or experience from similar situations.
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participants (2)
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Angel York -
Graham Stewart