My last post about Procter & Gamble and their Design Thinking Initiative was largely about change. If the people involved in the Initiative were resistant to change it would never happen. And that’s what sometimes, maybe frequently, happens in libraries. Resistance to change is a surefire innovation killer. Likewise, organizations can thwart innovation and change with questionable tactics. An article from the July 2008 issue of University Business titled “Stifling Initiative” provides 10 simple rules for crushing innovation and maintain a culture of inertia. Here are those 10 rules in summary format:

1. Request a formal written proposal - make the innovator meet as many administrative requirements as possible

2. Send the proposal to a committee - this ought to make it take as long as possible to get a show of support for an idea

3. Schedule meetings to discuss the concept - it’s important to make sure all the key players are involved in the decision

4. Lose the proposal - another stalling tactic to avoid making a decision on the proposal

5. No money for that project - “This is a great idea…but…there’s no money for it”

6. Have you talked to…about this - put the innovator on the bureaucracy merry-go-round

7. We don’t, haven’t, won’t, can’t… - just be completely inflexible

8. Sounds exciting but give more detail - a good tactic for wearing down the innovator

9. Yes, but - there’s always a catch and it’s usually not a good one

10. Go Nancy Reagan and just say no - the ultimate power play to stop innovation

There are abundant ways to destroy the spirit of innovation in an individual or an organization. This article provides a reminder that it’s not that difficult to find ways to make it happen.

It can be a challenge to communicate what the design thinking process is and the benefits to be gained from implementing or using it in an organization. So imagine an initiative to shift the entire culture of a large industrial corporation to a design thinking mentality. It sounds nearly impossible, right? Well that is exactly what Procter & Gamble accomplished over the last few years. An article in Business Week profiles how P&G “changed it’s game”. If you are comtemplating how design thinking could be used to transform the work and innovation processes in your library, read up on P&G’s Design Thinking Initiative.

Now it’s true that P&G applied some considerable resources to this Initiative. For example, they’ve conducted over 40 design thinking workshops using over 100 internal facilitators. They also brought in design thinking gurus like Roger Martin from the Rotman School of Management and David Kelley of IDEO and the founder of Stanford’s D.School to help them develop and prototype their workshops. But there are some things that P&G has learned and developed that could be of help to other less well-resourced organizations - like your library.

One goal of any transition to a design thinking organization is to teach leaders to use it to reframe their problems. Here is how the change in approach at P&G is described:

“The analytical process we typically use to do our work—understand the problem and alternatives; develop several ideas; and do a final external check with the customer—gets flipped. Instead, design thinking methods instruct: There’s an opportunity somewhere in this neighborhood; use a broader consumer context to inform the opportunity; brainstorm a large quantity of fresh ideas; and co-create and iterate using low-resolution prototypes with that consumer.”

As an example of this reframing, for one of their personal care product lines the emphasis changed from telling the consumer why the product was right for them to creating a web-based interactive consultation that engages the consumer through a series of questions that allows consumers to identify, on their own, which P&G product is the right one for their specific needs. It is based on an empathic design process. Through the use of design thinking P&G employees are encouraged to work in groups to brainstorm new ideas and they are using much more rapid prototyping of products to learn what works and what doesn’t. Another key to the transformation process is that it must involve the entire organization which is why P&G is approached this as an immersion process. It seems like an enormous effort, and I don’t doubt it is. But this quote provides some insight into the benefits the company is gaining from its Design Thinking Initiative:

“Design thinking activates both sides of the brain—it makes participants more creative, more empathetic toward the human condition P&G consumers face. Our managers don’t leave their analytical minds at home; instead they are able to operate with their whole brain, not just the left hemisphere.”

What library couldn’t benefit from a more creative workforce? Though the article doesn’t come right out and say it I see a company that is going through a transformation that allows it, through the design thinking of its workers, to ultimately give their customers a better user experience with their products. To me that sounds like the effort required to shift to a design thinking culture is well worth the effort.

Librarians engage in endless dicussion about what we can do to make our organizations successful, and by success we mean achieving a high level of relevance to our user community. Do they care about us and the services we offer? Do we add meaning to their work and lives? Although we largely lack the tools to measure success on these terms, beyond the basic satisfaction survey, our motivation for change is to move in the right direction on the road to success. Marginalization. Obsolescence. We do know the signposts of failure.

In our search for that elusive formula for library success, I found some ideas worth contemplating in a blog post over at Branding Strategy Insider. Jack Trout, in writing about the relationship between strategy, positioning and success, writes that we all know it’s important to have the right people, the right tools, the right attitude and the right role models. We hear this all the time. But Trout points out that it’s the right strategy that makes the difference. But even the right strategy can fail without good positioning.

Positioning, he writes, “is how you differentiate yourself in the mind of your prospect”. That really fits in with past discussions here of user experience. It is about being different in the mind of the user. In a world with increasing information options and competition, libraries must differentiate themselves. There are five elements to the positioning process, and they all require us to really understand the minds of our regular and potential library users:

1. Minds are limited and will only allow information that is new and different to compute - but even then only if it relates to old information (sounds familiar to stage three of Gagne’s nine points of instruction).

2. Minds hate confusion so keep it simple. We are already familiar with the simplicity-complexity conundrum with which librarians must cope.

3. Minds are emotional not rational so taking advantage of the “bandwagon” effect and word of mouth can be critical to gaining new users. More good reasons to study the findings of Dan Ariely.

4. Minds are more comfortable with what they already know than with what’s new. That sounds like our greatest challenge. How do we get a generation of minds raised on Google and now, Wikipedia, to get out of that comfort zone and into a whole lot of new library resources? We must learn to differentiate them and make clear what value we add to the proposition of learning something new.

5. Minds have trouble dealing with choice and variation. Another huge challenge for us because we offer dozens of variations of information products and overwhelming numbers of features. How do we turn this from a weakness to a strength?

As you form your library’s strategy and decide how best to position what you do and offer, it seems wise to keep in mind these five important points about the workings of the mind. Trout provides a final reminder that should give all librarians something to think about - the importance of focus and specialization. I suspect that many of us are trying to do too many things, provide too many services and to trying to excel at all of them. Perhaps an important part of any position we take must be to identify what we do well - and to get better at it - and to figure out what we need to stop doing. Not an amazingly original thought, but one well worth remembering.

One of my favorite moments in The Deep Dive, the 1999 Nightline segment on IDEO and their design thinking process, is when they discuss the myth of the lone creative genius. Though we often imagine that great ideas and innovations come from a sole, highly creative person who gets his or her ideas in flashes of brillance, that is rarely how innovation happens.  That’s why this article, ”Eureka! It Really Takes Years of Hard Work“, captured my attention. It echoes this theme of innovation, not as a magic moment, but rather the end product of a team of creative workers putting in many hours to finally reach the point where a form of innovation occurs. The author, Janet Rae-Depree writes:

As humans, we want to believe that creativity and innovation come in flashes of pure brilliance, with great thunderclaps and echoing ahas. Innovators and other creative types, we believe, stand apart from the crowd, wielding secrets and magical talents beyond the rest of us. Balderdash. Epiphany has little to do with either creativity or innovation. Instead, innovation is a slow process of accretion, building small insight upon interesting fact upon tried-and-true process. Just as an oyster wraps layer upon layer of nacre atop an offending piece of sand, ultimately yielding a pearl, innovation percolates within hard work over time.

What librarians trying to design better libraries need to take away from this article is that there are no quick fixes or overnight solutions to perplexing problems. It’s possible, but highly unlikely that a librarian will suddently devise a great solution that offers a new innovation. Instead we need to put into place a process that will accumulate the needed information and ideas so that library workers work towards change, be it innovative or otherwise. To support this process library administrators should consider allowing library workers a segment of weekly time to get “Kept-Up” by reading magazines, listening to podcasts watching great lectures on YouTube. Some time away from e-mail, IM and tweets can allow us to collect our thoughts and reflect on understanding the depth of our problems. Those may be the best moments for organizational innovation. In fact, this article discusses the negative impact that e-mail overload, and other electronic distractions, can have on creativity.

It is possible to achieve good results by taking time to be thoughtful. Steve Erhmann, of the TLT Group, recently wrote about “ the idea of “Watching the Donut, Not the Hole”” in which he speaks to the merits of avoiding the fast technology solution, opting instead for the slower but better designed implementation process. He writes:

Our approaches to faculty support and course improvement, to cost modeling and time-saving, and to formative evaluation all focus on helping educators and institutions improve teaching/learning activities over time: small steps and, ultimately, larger changes.

I find that one of the key character traits of a good librarian is patience. Whether answering a reference question, connecting with students in an instruction session or working one’s way through a complex cataloging assignment, our work requires us to thoughtfully work through problems and situations in order to find the right solution. We need to realize there are no quick fixes in our profession, and that those “Aha” moments are often the result of many hours of thought and reflection. That’s where our patience may prove a powerful asset. That said I know that some newer to the profession librarians would like to make their mark and be discovered quickly. I’ve advocated the slow but steady approach before. Seems like Rae-Dupree’s article provides some support to my way of thinking.

Editor’s Note: Cross-Posted from ACRLog.

It’s rare that I’ll write about one of my personal projects - maybe a casual link here and there - but today I want to share with you the link to a recent project that I’m particulary proud to bring to your attention. This past spring semester I engaged in a unique experience. For the first time in my career I served as the guest editor of a journal issue. A good friend and colleague, Lisa Finder, a librarian at Hunter College and current co-editor of Urban Library Journal invited me to serve as the guest editor of the spring 2008 issue. When she said I could choose any theme I liked that sealed the deal. After some careful thought I decided to assemble a collection of articles that would showcase the creative abilities of librarians. We call this issue “The Creative Library“. Lauren Yannotta, also a librarian at Hunter College, is ULI’s other co-editor.

If you are new to Urban Library Journal you should know:

Urban Library Journal is an open access, refereed journal of research and discussion dealing with all aspects of urban libraries and librarianship, welcomes articles dealing with academic, research, public, school, and special libraries in an urban setting.

The editors and I were amazed at the number of quality manuscripts we received in response to our call for papers. Choosing those to include was quite difficult. I think you will find the articles in this issue offer great examples of creative librarians at their best. For an overview of what’s included take a look at my introduction to the issue. Here’s a snippet from that overview:

That’s why this special issue about creativity in libraries is just right for the times. First, it’s important to celebrate the many creative minds working in this profession. Libraries have traditionally orked with restrained resource pools. To have come so far with so many successes is owing to the high levels of creative thinking in our libraries. Second, as we find ourselves in times of rapid change our most valuable asset is our ability to master the art of adaptation. If one program fails, if users seem to be going elsewhere for their information, if user expectations shift unexpectedly, then library workers must use their creativity to quickly adapt. By understanding our user communities, we can create new programs that leverage our skill sets to deliver new services and new ideas that will continue to make the library a community destination, both physical and virtual. We have compiled here a set of dynamic articles that demonstrate that there is no lack of creativity in the world of librarianship. But you probably already knew that. Anyone who has worked in this field for any length of time knows there are many creative people attracted to the field of librarianship. Yet we rarely use our journal literature to promote the many acts of creativity happening at our libraries. This special issue of Urban Library Journal changes that.

Did I say that this is a free, open access journal. So it’s free. What are you waiting for?