Rethinking thinking
Posted on March 16, 2009
Filed Under Managing Change, Managing Environments
Does your public library have a thinking pattern that is so tried and true, so formulaic, that it has moved beyond a successful method for solving problems into being a problem itself? Does every perceived problem get its own drawn out royal commission?
Occasionally when I muse on the future of libraries, I’m not enthusiastic: I’m actually a little pessimistic. Not because I don’t think we have a future, but because I’m not sure we know how to think our way into it.
I find it odd (just slightly, not overwhelmingly) that if you flip through any of our professional literature, conference offerings or liblogs it seems that we are eager to seize opportunities of innovation, transformation, and adaptability while amazingly enough using our traditional paradigms of thinking.
For example, take the economic situation that I frequently read is good news for libraries (woman gets card for first time since childhood). There’s sort of this collective “yeehaw, now they’ll pay attention to us, cuz we’re free!” Our affordability will bring the masses to our doors seeking materials that they bought last week but have decided to budget on this week. But folks we are not free.
There are public libraries facing declining circulation, rising material costs, dead formats, and facilities that no longer meet the needs of their communities. And these communities fund their public libraries.
And to be accountable to that funding we had best be clear as to what business we are in. Are we a stop gap in a financial downturn, an affordable purveyor of DVDs?
We have a tendency to chop up and isolate our perceived problems. The dying format of the DVD is discussed separately from funding children’s programs and the need for new washrooms is seperate from the ILS. Unfortunately our users don’t divide up their experience. They walk in, and walk out, having experienced the collection, programs, space, and an overall feeling of having been somewhere special, or dismal, as one single experience.
To get to where they want their library experience to be, we need to think about the library as an integrated system and I don’t think we can do this with chopped up linear thinking. It’s time to throw out the inhibitions, the fear of making a mistake in a meeting with colleagues, being wed to an idea, and its time to adopt a new way of thinking. Not only do we need to look at the perceived problems differently but we need to understand that the best solutions are already there and are discovered through kicking around ideas, putting forth notions that will be adapted, amalgamated, and grown to the point where any individual can’t figure out where their contribution ended and someone elses took off.
We need to be liberated from our usual way of thinking.
Final word to the folks at Fischbowl.
“We are going to have to seize on the current crisis to make transformative change and conjure up new institutions – or least new learning paradigms. One of our core values must be to seize these “new ways of sharing ideas or organizing human life,” to be compulsive sharers and utilize these tools and our learning networks to transform our schools, our communities and our world.
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