Librarian by Day » Best Practices

Stop Wasting Your Failures! Plan for Intelligent Failure

Bobbi Newman — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 13:57:40 +0000

It’s all fine and good to say learn from your failures, but how? First you need to acknowledge that they will happen. Especially right now in the current economy. Rita McGrath notes:

Despite widespread recognition that challenging times place unpredictable demands on people and businesses, I still run across many managers who would prefer to avoid the logical conclusion that stems from this: failure is a lot more common in highly uncertain environments than it is in better-understood situations.

Then you plan for failure. Sim Sitkin talks about intelligent failure in his article “Learning through failure: The strategy of small losses.” Intelligent failure? Yep. Essentially planning your projects to be certain that you will learn something from them succeed or fail. What do intelligent failures look like?

They are carefully planned, so that when things go wrong you know why
They are genuinely uncertain, so the outcome cannot be known ahead of time
They are modest in scale, so that a catastrophe does not result
They are managed quickly, so that not too much time elapses between outcome and interpretation
Something about what is learned is familiar enough to inform other parts of the business.

McGrath adds two more in her article Are You Squandering Your Intelligent Failures?

Underlying assumptions are explicitly declared
These can be tested at specific checkpoints, identified in advance, since planned results may not be equivalent to outcomes.

Why bother?

Failures show you where your assumptions are wrong. Failures demonstrate where future investment would be wasted. And failures can help you identify those among your team with the mettle to persevere and creatively change direction as opposed to pig-headedly charging blindly ahead. Further, failures are about the only way in which an organization can re-set its expectations for the future in any meaningful way.

Despite your best efforts and preventative measures you will still fail occasionally, best to set yourself and your project up for intelligent failure to ensure you learning something from it.

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Is Good Enough good enough?

Bobbi Newman — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 18:59:51 +0000

I don’t know, but it’s what I’m thinking about thanks to Jason Griffey

Think about the services in your library, and the amount of effort and resources poured into making your services as good as they can possibly be. What if good enough is really enough, and instead we should be expanding our range of services instead of seeking perfection in any single one? How does that change the way libraries operate?

He cites a Wired magazine article – The Good Enough Revolution: When Cheap and Simple Is Just Fine which he quotes

…it happens to be a recurring theme in Good Enough products. You can think of it this way: 20 percent of the effort, features, or investment often delivers 80 percent of the value to consumers. That means you can drastically simplify a product or service in order to make it more accessible and still keep 80 percent of what users want—making it Good Enough…

Aaron Schmidt responded in the comments

This is great, mostly because just yesterday I was thinking about just the opposite! My thoughts aren’t fully formed but my basic line of thinking is that good enough services are probably wholly unremarkable and don’t leave any sort of impression on our users. Doing Things Right (even if we have to do fewer things) with pride and quality, on the other hand, could make libraries stand out and make our users admire us.

I admire and respect both Jason and Aaron, so as a proper little librarian, I hurried off to do some reading to decide if I agreed with either, both or neither of them.Turns out I’m still not certain.

Sometimes good enough is good enough. Insisting on great product can mean you miss the boat, time wise. It can mean you’re so invested in the finished product that you’re resistant to changing it. It could mean you produce a Porsche when a Saturn could produce the same result, getting you from point A to point B.

Let’s say you can spend a lot of time and money developing a new system or product. Since were talking about libraries and it’s timely lets say it’s a new service that helps patrons find a new job. You could insist that you’ve covered all your bases, considered every possible problem, question and need before you make it available. But while you’re doing that there are people who need your help who aren’t getting it. Or you could make it available when it’s good enough. People will have access to a service they need and you’ll learn as you go what needs improvement. Remember holding on to it until it’s perfect doesn’t guarantee you’ll wont run into problems later. In this case, as long as you’re willing to make modifications as you go along, and you should be, it is good enough.

I can also see problems with doing things that are good enough. Patrons who encounter problems and obstacles to their goals may become frustrated and never come back. They wont be around to know when you’ve improved the system or service.

So I’m not sure where the line is. What do you think?

How social media can hurt your library

Bobbi Newman — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 16:38:49 +0000

photo by DCvision2006 on Flicrk

We’ve all seen warnings and stories about people getting fired from their jobs because of status updates or photos on social medial sites like Twitter, Facebook and blogs.

CNN is has a new one with some social networking don’ts

1. Don’t announce interviews, raises or new jobs

2. Don’t badmouth your current or previous employer

3. Don’t mention your job search if you’re still employed

First I think number 2 should include – “or coworkers”, really nothing good can come of that either. But the point I want to add for librarians (library workers) everywhere is

4. Don’t badmouth your customers.

We all get frustrated, we all have bad days, I understand that, but venting on social media sites isn’t the solution and it could cause real problems for your library. Your customers may read what you wrote, they are more tech savvy than you give them credit for. In addition to some old fashioned hurt feelings this can lead to some real problems for your library. They could complain to someone at the library, which means staff will need to spend time dealing with this issue. They could email it all their friends or maybe the newspaper, this is bad PR no library needs. Or they could just never come back, which is contradictory to the mission of libraries, and loosing patrons is never good for libraries. Libraries don’t need bad PR, especially not now when so many are facing funding cuts.

If you don’t care about how it will affect your library keep in mind your boss may read what you wrote, there are endless ways this could happen. I can’t imagine a library manager anywhere being happy that an employee is publicly badmouthing patrons. There are a wide range of outcomes depending on what was said, how the library handles custom service issues, but being fired is a possibility.

Think being anonymous will protect you? think again. Think having a private account will protect you? It might, unless there is a glitch & its made public, even briefly, or until you *friend* the wrong person.

Your best plan is not to put anything online you aren’t prepared for the whole world to see. Just don’t do it. Think twice before you post that next Facebook or Twitter update or write that next blog post.

Additional Reading

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Freedom, Responsibility and Culture

Bobbi Newman — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 14:51:36 +0000

This is a great slideshow from Netflix* for salaried employees which discusses nine values which should be embraced:

Judgement
Communication
Impact
Curiosity
Passion
Innovation
Courage
Honesty
Selflessness

It’s long and parts may be controversia,l but it makes some great points about what it takes to create the culture you want in your organization and it’s worth the time to go through it all.

Culture

View more presentations from reed2001.

seen on The MLxepreince

*I haven’t been able to verify that this come from

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