June 9, 2006
“You Can’t Build a Fire in the Rain:” Sparking Change in
Libraries
The word “change”, often partners with, in opposition to.
At every workshop I give someone asks, ”What can I do about staff who
resist change?” Similarly, when I ask “What’s your biggest bug about
teamwork?” the most frequent response is “Colleagues who won’t
change.”
The cable news coverage from Paris of the youth employment law protest
gave me several images - some humorous and some irrational - of
responses to the threat of reform. Like the one of the fractious
young man, pants below his knees, mooning the gendarmes, the media, the
world. Middle fingers extended, his waving hands were like quotation
marks for his clichéd intransigence.
As unlikely as this may sound, the young man’s antics evoked a memory of
a Palmer House ALA mid winter meeting with directors of public services.
My enthusing about some new program elicited a wearied response from a
peer: “Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.”
Indeed, “The more things change, the more they stay the same,”
is near the top of the “Fifty Reasons Not to Change” chart.
We’ve all been there – the old way of doing something no longer works as
well as it once did. Something different is needed, and, being an
intelligent workforce, we probably have a good notion about what needs
doing. But, as we start exploring the new ideas, like trying to light
that fire in the rain, our well intentioned efforts are swamped by a
deluge of rationalizations for no change. However Promethean our fire,
the nay-sayers, the uncertain, the fearful, drench the sparks of change,
until we’re left with an ever expanding puddle of doubt – and no
fire.
Why does reform require a Herculean effort?
James O’Toole offers an explanation, and a template for explaining
opposition. A dominant ideology exists within each of us and
effects our ability to change. (1) Our cataloging code probably would
qualify as a competing dominant ideology – consider how we cling to it
while our users (and many librarians) almost exclusively use key word
searching to find books. The fight over “open access publishing” is
another example close to library interests. While O’Toole is talking
about fundamental change across wide populations, his theory still
provides insights into why we resist change of whatever magnitude.
He splits the population into the Haves and the Have nots.
Haves, those benefiting from the way things are, are unlikely to support
change, especially reform that may reduce their perks. The Haves include
Have lesses who aspire for better but, like many of the Parisian
protesters - students with welfare benefits, social networks, and family
support - are unwilling to accept the risk and sacrifice that come with
reform. In the case of the labor law uproar, these Have lesses
reject the risk of being fired in the first two years of employment, a
concession employers say they need to cover their risk and
investment to remedy the chronic 20% unemployment among the under 25
years of age Have lesses.
Progressives, another category of Haves, support reform,
but they too subscribe, if with reservations, to the dominant ideology.
They are an interesting group, because, to use a library example, some
Progressives, will vote for library expansion bonds, or other
public goods, even if they rarely use the library since they have other
channels for their information needs, including personal budgets to
buy most any book they want.
Have nots include the many uninvolved who, sheep-like,
accept the dominant ideology – the way it is. The Have
nots also feature a working class conservative group (called
“Tories” by O’Toole) who have the most to gain with reform, yet, defend
the dominant ideology. Tories vote against library expansion
bonds, even though their families would most benefit from greater
information access and opportunity. Only the Revolutionaries in
the Have nots reject the dominant ideology. But,
Revolutionaries rarely achieve a critical mass for change because
the dominant ideology’s centrifugal force spins them out to the fringe.
Their rejection of the dominant ideology is made moot by the Haves’
and Have nots’ aversion to the Revolutionary alternative.
Each semester, on the first day of my academic libraries class, I read a
geology quote:
“Do not trust rocks. A rock resting on the rim of the Grand Canyon may
give an impression of strength and permanence but as soon as a man turns
his back the rock will resume disintegrating and sneaking off to
California.” (2)
The students readily grasp the metaphor beyond the crumbling rocks –
they understand their campus is changing, and the academic
library is hardly isolated. While not exactly sneaking off to
California, the campus library’s role is disintegrating - call it
disintermediation. My students cope well with what is a historically
profound change for libraries – after all, this is a class – and
our discussion of trends informs subsequent class assignments to
envision the academic library ten years out. Invariably they design a
merger of “bricks and clicks.”
In my other class, Management, I talk about the Sigmoid curve, the
S-shaped curve. It applies to life, as Shakespeare’s Seven Ages of
Man illustrates entropically, a span from “puking infant” to school
boy to life’s work, to “second childishness and mere oblivion.” (3)
Organizations, and libraries, are on a S-shaped curve. I ask the
students, “Where is your current employer on the curve?” A few draw
organizations on the upswing, well out of infancy and approaching
maturity. Some depict their organizations in a nose dive to “mere
oblivion.” Perhaps obviously, the best organizations anticipate the
shifts in their business, and make necessary adjustments to catch a new
upward curve. Be it a new service, a new product, a new challenge, all
serve to re-invigorate the evanescent organization. Businesses that lose
money close quickly – their S-shaped curve is greased. Not-for profit
agencies, like libraries, have less of a bottom line to worry about;
they are less susceptible to cash flows. Funding agencies which renew
our budgets regardless of our “productivity” tend to give us a longer
ride on the downward slope, but it is still downward, however
imperceptible. Instead of a few years we may get a decade or two before
we bottom out.
Any librarian working in the early to mid 90s had to be aware of what
was not going on all about them: numbers of reference questions
were plummeting, fewer books were being checked out, fewer photocopies
were being made while public printers connected to electronic resources
were smoking. And then along came the World Wide Web. Disintermediation
was upon us, as it was for most every other service and business.
Back then, we were looking down the slope of the S-shaped curve,
a dark precipice. How did we respond? Understandably, there was denial.
We still hear cautionary tales about the shortcoming of search engines
like Yahoo and Google, and that most users are chronically duped by
Internet charlatans. Some librarians regard our students like so many
Pinocchios easily beguiled by any Fox and Cat web master. Trouble is,
the users are not listening anymore now than they were a decade ago;
instead most are using the Internet in effective and efficient ways,
probably better than they used the legacy collections in our libraries.
Have we in mid decade of the new millennium, caught a new curve, got our
mojo back, like Apple with its iPod? Have E-mail reference, the
information commons, Ref-chat, information literacy programs, and our
retailed-up Barnes & Noble look put us on a new upward curve, a new
beginning? Have we re-invented ourselves? Or are our new services
augmentations that do not address the fundamental shift in the way
people find and use information? Some claim we have turned the corner,
caught a new curve: more students in the library along with increasing
numbers of books borrowed. Certainly, this seems to be the case in some
public libraries and I am told it is so in some academic libraries,
especially those that have established learning partnerships on
previously inaccessible faculty turf. Yet, some academic librarians are
less sanguine, they see empty rooms, deserted stacks and unused
expensive e-resources. Even for those libraries who have budgets to pay
for retail ambiance, it is unsettling to note what happens when a magnet
service like an information commons moves out of the library: students
follow.
How do we spark change in libraries? For much of my career, I believed
change was simply what you did – it was intuitive. Like communication,
change was too obvious to talk about. The important thing was to act.
With some sad experience and mature reflection, I realize one can
achieve far more with followers alongside. It was naïve for me to think
change would happen because it must happen for me. So, how
do you bring others along?
Much has been said about strategies for implementing change. Some are
superficial, like swapping out an old name, Circulation, for a new one,
Access. Another of my least favorites is the call to re-organize – one
embittered soul made up a quote, ascribing it anachronistically to a
corporate sounding, first century, Petronius Arbiter: “… we tend to
meet any new situation by reorganizing; and a wonderful method it can be
for creating the illusion of progress while producing confusion,
inefficiency, and demoralization.” I don’t share the knee jerk
cynicism – nor do I consider all reorganizations wasteful - yet I
understand what the unhappy author was talking about. Many
re-organizations tend to be in name only without tangible goals,
glossing over fundamental causes.
Then there is strategic planning, the reigning model for introducing
change in libraries. Strategic planning, honestly and courageously done,
has great potential. From reading dozens of library plans, I have to
conclude reluctantly that potential is rarely achieved. What I see is a
clever strategy to retain the status quo. A friend at a university
library told me they were at the conclusion of their strategic plan and
that action steps were being written, exclusively, by the senior
library staff – the Haves. One can only hope there are a few
Progressives in the group. Perhaps no librarian knowingly does this,
but, if you want to slow down change – change desperately in need
of doing – there’s probably nothing quite like well orchestrated
strategic planning to achieve “an illusion of progress.”
For O’Toole, true reform comes through values based leadership, led by a
leader who overcomes resistance to change by virtue of their moral
leadership. Such a leader is persuasive and principled and one who
engages followers to arrive at mutually beneficial actions. O’Toole
terms this leader, Rushmorean, akin to the Presidents captured in
the mountain’s granite.
There is a change tool available to the values based leader: the Future
Search. I’ve been involved in planning and participating in a full scale
future search (FS) and in leading a FS at another large library. Both
enjoyed a modest success, not seismic, but a shift in perspective that
helped galvanize the staff around purpose, goals, and engage them in the
decision making to achieve those goals.
The underlying theory behind the FS is that if you get enough good
people together, they can decide what needs doing for their organization
and then go about doing it. (4) Envisioning the future is the first step
to getting there. The FS includes a large number of stakeholders:
selected staff Haves and Have nots along with invited
guests, like customers. For the academic library this group would
include students, faculty, and board members. (My FSs numbered over 60
participants each.) This mix is the difference maker, because for an
intense two days, we sidelined the pecking order, with good and bad
ideas coming from all over. Good ideas are supported on their merit and
not by the status of the suggestion maker. Invariably, there are enough
positive people in the mix to assuage the uncertainty and trepidation
some participants - often proponents for the status quo - might be
feeling. Cannot becomes can do.
Most of the first day in a FS is a reflection on the way we were when
and how far we have come. This includes addressing (and burying) the
mistakes, our “sorries,” and celebrating the “prouds,” our many
achievements.
The required rigor shoots up on the second day when the group makes
specific choices about resources and tradeoffs – things you will do
without - to get to the future. They do this after sub sets of
participants have described the future in scenarios of their design.
The long list of what is wanted can become like grid locked strategic
planning lists by which we accommodate compromise upon compromise in
order to retain the old way of doing things. In both FSs, the lists
became a sticking point, where we ran out of time before we reached
conclusive steps. However, we did take away a much clearer idea of where
we wanted the organization to be. We had not agreed on how to get
there, or what we would do without, but we had agreed on the end result.
The positive conclusion in one FS was that connectivity was all
important. And it was pretty well agreed upon, organization wide, that
connectivity was replacing the just-in-case model of book accumulation.
Everyone now knew – however much it pained some - there was a new model
of information provision, one that was not going away. The unspeakable
had been uttered.
At the follow up meeting of many of the original FS participants, we
agreed to use existing budgetary resources to make a sizeable down
payment on technology. Without knowing it, we had shaken the dominant
ideology and change was underway.
Yes, you can build a fire in the rain. It is technically possible
to do it without any help. Maybe not on the first try, but eventually a
spark will cling to the tinder, smoke and burst into a flame. Of course,
you may be the only one to enjoy it. The best kind of metaphoric fire
for an organization is that made combustible with help from your engaged
followers. They’ve gathered the tinder, worked with you in delivering a
spark, and shelter you and the budding flame from the downpour.
Notes:
2. Editor at Time Life Books. Quoted in Readings from the Hurricane
Island Outward Bound School, , Edited by Alison Murray Kuller, June
1986. Rockland Maine, HIOBS. p. 59. Spiral bound.
3. William Shakespeare, As You Like It, 2. 7. 139-167
4. Robert Rehm, et al. Futures that Work. P.O. Box 189, Gabriola
Island, B.C., Canada: New Society Publishers. 2002. 196 pp. Includes
several cases of the future search with not for profits, along with much
practical information about the process.
Author’s note:
On Managing
LA&M
Fall, 2006 volume 20, issue number 4
Why change? Do we have a choice about change?
1. James O’Toole, Leading Change: The Argument for Value-Based
Leadership. New York: Ballantine Books 1996 p. 245
John Lubans, Jr. is a Visiting Professor at North Caroline Central
University School of Library and Information Sciences. Reach him at
Lubans1@nc.rr.com.