Where the extraordinary and fun happens
Posted on April 6, 2009
Filed Under Managing Environments, Managing Ourselves
The Canadian version of Richard Florida’s Who’s Your City is now in print . Florida is known for exploring the relationship between people and place, and in this book the particular relationship between creative people and a small group of Canadian cities. Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers asks us to consider that leaders or successful individuals are not lone cowboys, but beneficiaries of networks, environments, and opportunities that come together to create a time and place in which the extraordinary will develop.
While it may not have been their intention, I think it is possible to see these works as road guides for encouraging successful and creative library environments. Too often in smaller cities, and organizations, that have not yet fully realized their recruiting power, it looks as if creativity and excellence happen as a fortuitous and natural by-product of living and working in Montreal or Vancouver. Nothing worthwhile in our libraries is fortuitous or natural - it all happens with vision, goals, and strategies.
So what can we do to manage our environments regardless of where we are geographically?
A quick gleaning of Florida and Gladwell’s work provides the following sign posts of heading in the right direction.
Bring people together:
- Internal staff brain storming sessions
- Think tanks with community leaders and innovators in city planning, arts, business and academia
- Create meetings that are events, not just running through business agendas (I have asked before that if its information that does not require discussion to change its outcome then email it to me - such as the washrooms are closed or we are out of paper clips)
- Design meetings with a purpose to get to an outcomes
- Work on meaningful projects with increasingly raised bars for excellence
- Deliberate team development
Set the ground rules:
- Solution oriented
- Positive can-do attitude
- Question assumptions
- High expectations
- Ideas are kicked around and transformed
And just when I thought I was on a brilliant roll, I checked in with a favourite Australian blog, and look what Kathryn Greenhill, John Blyberg, and Cindi Trainor came up with: The Darien Statements on the Library and Librarians
It’s all worth kicking around with friends and colleagues, but my favourite section is
“The Preservation of the Library” which opens with:
Our methods need to rapidly change to address the profound impact of information technology on the nature of human connection and the transmission and consumption of knowledge.
If the Library is to fulfill its purpose in the future, librarians must commit to a culture of continuous operational change, accept risk and uncertainty as key properties of the profession, and uphold service to the user as our most valuable directive.
They provide a list of what we must do as librarians to meet that statement. Here are the ones that I consider to be the most exciting and provocative:
- Endorse procedures only if they guide librarians or users to excellence.
- Be willing and have the expertise to make frequent radical changes.
- Hire the best people and let them do their job; remove staff who cannot or will not.
- Trust each other and trust the users.
Is it just me, or did librarianship just move up a notch on the fun-o-metre?
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