I spend most of my professional life facilitating decision-making in all kinds of libraries & organizations. I’m fascinated with how people make choices, how they decide, what influences these decisions - and what doesn’t.

I haven’t finished the book yet, so there will be more postings on this, but The Art of Choosing by Sheena Iyengar is a fascinating study of how people - and publics - make choices.  Why do I care about this? And why should all those in the library & information world care about this? Because every day, every minute, decisions are being made about your services, your libraries & their place in the community, the university, the organization. Look at the choices being made right now for the Charlotte Mecklenburg Libraries or New Jersey Public Libraries or the Community Access Program in Canada?

Some initial highlights:

- in North America, the more choices people have the less likely they are to choose one; many very successful companies (like P&G) have scaled back the # of products they offer — and the result is higher sales, higher revenues, higher profits.  Iyengar’s work in this area started with her famous study of the “Jam selection” — when people were offered samples of 24 jams, few ppl choice to purchase 1.  But when they were offered samples of 6 jams, they were 6 TIMES more likely to purchase 1.  I identify with this; I hate huge malls with lots of stores. I’m MUCH more likely to purchase items in small towns from a few stores — just ask VISA. I’m overwhelmed at the Eaton’s Centre or other big malls. Yuck. Too much.  The “apex” of choice is 7…….so how many services does your library offer? Or how are these services bundled for people to choose from?

- in North America, which tends to have a culture of individualism, we regard ‘choice’ as our right; but those from other cultures, like China or India, this is not the case….. hm……what are the implications for libraries whose constituencies are new to North America?

Why did I choose to read this book? Because I love to understand how people perceive options & choose among them…..but….that’s just my choice.

The Economist’s Feb 25, 2010 issue has a special report on managing information targetting business but to be leveraged by all those in the information industry. Information management, which is all about understanding & applying information, is growing in businesses — so why are libraries being cut? We need to ask ourselves this. 

Excerpts from the article: “Alex Szalay, an astrophysicist at Johns Hopkins University, notes that the proliferation of data is making them increasingly inaccessible. “How to make sense of all these data? People should be worried about how we train the next generation, not just of scientists, but people in government and industry,” he says.

Chief information officers (CIOs) have become somewhat more prominent in the executive suite, and a new kind of professional has emerged, the data scientist, who combines the skills of software programmer, statistician and storyteller/artist to extract the nuggets of gold hidden under mountains of data. Hal Varian, Google’s chief economist, predicts that the job of statistician will become the “sexiest” around. Data, he explains, are widely available; what is scarce is the ability to extract wisdom from them.”

I hope I get this quote correct “If not now, when? If not us, who?”

I just finished one of SirsiDynix’ free webinars — what a great experience! Focus Groups: Perceptions for Planning is really about when to consider using focus groups - when not to - and how. I liken focus groups to organizational leadership.  To be an effective leader, you need to journey within yourself. The same is true for organizations. To be a leader, organizations have to know who they are, what they stand for, and where their leadership comes from — or doesn’t come at all. Leadership, for individuals and for organizations, involves discipline, integrity, focus and hard work.

Focus groups are a fabulous - and fun way - for an organization to better understand itself or one or more of its services and how it is perceived within its market or constituency.

To gather that “gold” afforded by groups, focus groups need to be approached as guided discovery into the perceptions & opinions of representatives of your community or your university or your corporation. The facilitator is really the guide leading the group as they explore a specific topic or section of their environment.  It’s not a beef session or a forum for complaints or suggestions — it is a group’s opportunity to focus on a concept.

What’s most often forgotten by those putting focus groups together is that the there needs to be something in this for participants. The WIIFM (what’s in it for me) syndrome goes beyond the $5.00 gift certificate you may give them to get a coffee, or the USB, or whatever gift you are offering them. What’s sometimes more important for them is that they get something out of the focus group — that they learn something they didn’t know, or they engage in a dialogue that’s interesting for them, or they just have a good time!

Critical success factors for effective focus groups?

1. Having no more than 3 clear objectives; what don’t you know now that you want to know at the end of the focus groups? These objectives drive the form of the group, the types of participants/thinking required, & the questions or “discussion starters.”

2. Participants (no more than 15, no less than 5 in a “room setting”; maximum 8 online or 6 on phone (at least for me that’s the max!)); a good “mix” of participants relevant to your objectives.

3. A competent facilitator who is an expert “listener” — who can take in all that is being said & not said plus the group dynamics & emotions — & then synthesize & analyze this into what it all means.  If you want to use someone on staff, they absolutely can’t have any ownership of the plan, service or concept being discussed by the group.  A facilitator isn’t a talker — a facilitator is a senser & a delicate prober who can quickly establish credibility & rapport with a group, and keep them on track without upsetting anyone.

4. Preparation, preparation, and…..preparation. A solid discussion guide; a comfortable room; inviting participants, following-up with participants, and following up again; tent cards for each participant, recorder, you name it — be prepared.

5. Pre-think & follow-up for participants. Send participants an outline prior to the session — it engages them & let’s them know their input is expected. Then follow-up with a draft of the focus group results; it reinforces the value of their input & says “thanks” much more than any form letter.

And thanks to SirsiDynix for these webinars!! Richard Hulser’s “Getting the Most out of Vendor Partnerships” and Helene Blowers’ “From Libraries to Lifebraries” are just 2 of the latest FREE (did I say FREE? yep, FREE) webinars on topics critical for libraries by some of the best, experienced practitioners out there.

I often turn to Henry Mintzberg’s writings for his sage advice on management and leadership, yet tonight I found his advice on teaching.  Here’s his “Ten Rules for Professors Who Want to Educate Real Managers”; they apply to anyone who is leading any kind of workshop, class, course, podcast or any other learning event:

1, 2, 3. Don’t pack it. Don’t pack it. Don’t pack it.

4. Schedule an extra hour for each session, but don’t tell the instructors until they arrive so they will have more time to turn the discussion over to the managers.

5. Profess less. Participants have at least as much to learn from each other as from the professors. (This is about what they learn, not about what we teach.)

6. Let participants run with the material on their agendas.

7. Be flexible. Let good discussion go on. If necessary, cut

what has to be “covered.”

8, 9, 10. Listen. Listen. Listen.

If you get nothing else out of that list, go back to #5; learning isn’t about what we trainers have to teach — it’s ALL about what the learners have to learn.  

Third Generation Management Development

Jordan Frank of Traction Software has posted the presentation he & Christine Connors (TriviumRLG LLC) gave at the 2009 Taxonomy Boot Camp, “Ontologies & Tagsonomies: Linked Data, Web 3.0, Tag Mush”.  Christine addressed “What do ontologies provide that taxonomies and thesauri lack? What is the big deal about the semantic web? What’s the difference between the semantic web, linked data, and Web 3.0 and what are the technologies that will power this next evolution of the web?” while Jordan explored how driven social tagging can work for or against you and then suggests tagging and search driven entity extraction strategies that can put tagging to productive work.

For those interested in other presentations, the userid and password is tbc2009 at http://www.taxonomybootcamp.com/2009/presentations.shtml

The HBR Management Tip of the Day today is from Marshall Goldsmith (author of What Got you Here Won’t Get You There — must reading) about succession planning - a hot topic in the information profession.  I’ve always referred to the need for succession “management”, but Goldsmith refers to succession “development”, & he’s right.  Managing an organization’s succession does have to be a whole process which must be managed, & the emphasis really is on people’s development to enable them to “succeed” in every sense of the word.

Here’s an inter-mingling of Goldsmith’s & our tips for succession development & management; much of our experience has been guided by Rothwell’s Effective Succession Planning.

1. Determine Future Requirements: Recognize that strategic planning, staff planning, & succession management are all inter-related & highly dependent; you can’t move forward (strategic plan) without the right capabilities, competencies (staff planning) & management (succession management). PLUS - how can you determine staffing & leadership needs Call it what it is: succession management or succession development - it doesn’t matter which, just don’t call it succession planning, since the focus shouldn’t be on the plan, it should be on how the organization is ensuring ongoing leadership, management, capabilities & success.

2. Commit: Senior management or the board must buy in to the overall process be supportive of it as on-going, not a one-time “here’s the slide deck” event.

3. Assess Current Requirements & Skills: As with anything, start with where you are - know what you have - a plan is all about moving from where you are to where you want to, or need to!, be.

4. Appraise Performance: Make sure people have agreed-to performance expectations & that they receive regular feedback about how they are doing to keep progressing.

5. Identify Potential: Now……here’s the kicker. Many organizations haven’t really defined what potential “is” — nor have they discussed career plans & perceived potential with employees.  If we want people to move into various positions, especially leadership positions (which, like it or not, is usually what succession management focuses on), then the organization has to be clear regarding how potential is assessed & that employees know this, and know what their current potential is assessed. Eww….. I’ve seen this be the trip-factor for senior management. But don’t let it be.  It’s a very valuable exercise for management.

6. Create & Implement the Development Program: Not just the training program - but a multi-faceted, realistic way in which people are going to be able to grow new skills, mindsets, approaches through experience — secondments? projects? “acting” positions?

7. Recruit, Hire, Place: Use the succession management and staff planning to go after the right kind of current & future talent that’s needed.

8. Evaluate: And know how you’re going to evaluate it when you start out — agree, at the start, on “what success will look like” for the succession management process, and then assess it to see what’s working & what, in the light of the strategic alignment needs to be tweaked.

9. Keep it simple & stay realistic: This is from Goldsmith - & he’s absolutely right.  Although the 8 steps outlined may seem daunting, they are pretty logical and basically simple.  And how else are you going to manage the management progression, keep & encourage talent, and ensure you have the right capabilities?

One last thing about succession management is, as I said above, it usually focuses on management positions.  Remember, though, that there are other non-management yet critical expert positions that need to be included; a gap in these positions is as crippling to your organization as any leadership role.

If you are doing anything in the learning arena (either formal or informal learning - just helping people “get it” in terms of doing something or knowing something), be sure to follow Jane Hart’s E-learning Pick of the Day, and link to her other sites and blogs as well, including her homebase, Centre for Learning & Performance Technologies, and  Social Media in Learning.   Her August update of “Top Tools for Learning 2009″ lists the top 10: Twitter, Delicious, Google Reader, Google Docs, Slideshare, Wordpress, YouTube, Skype, Google Search and Audacity.  Fast up & coming, Hart says, is prezi - which we hope to try out in the next few weeks. We’ll let you know how it goes. Have any of you tried prezi yet? I’ve been experimenting a bit with it….embarrassing as it is, I get a bit whoozi with the screen moving around so much - but the possibilities are fantastic - and I’m sure this old powerpoint dog can learn some new tricks!

Earlier this week Karen Huffman, (an incredible thinker, and even more importantly “doer” with National Geographic), mused on her Facebook status whether it was ok to “re-write dreams based on life changes.”  Oh yeah. It’s not only ok, it’s necessary.  I empathize with Karen’s wonderings, as do many of us.  Our dream for our life at 40 sure isn’t the dream we had at 21 - nor should it be. As we move closer to anything — either physically or metaphorically — the details become clearer to us — we can see more pieces of the dream and perhaps the environment or terrain surrounding the dream  have changed.  That environment or terrain is life’s realities.  As those realities change, we may adjust our dream. I say “may” because sometimes the dream is broad enough, that it is the details that change rather than the essence of the dream.  Sometimes you just develop a whole new dream.  Either of those scenarios is ok - and is quite understandable.

It’s the same with organizations.  It’s ok for an organization to “re-focus” or adjust the lens on their vision of where they were headed.  Maybe the environment has shifted and that destination ain’t what they thought it was going to be. C’est la vie.  What’s important is that they keep looking forward, they keep scanning the horizon and sending scouts out to explore what’s ahead.  In otherwords, when the realities for organizations are shifting, they tend to hunker down and focus on operations & on “keeping on keeping on”, not wanting to look at their strategies, or - gawd forbid - do strategic planning!! “Do strategic planning in tough times like this? No, we don’t have time — we have to keep the doors open.”  Ahem…….keep the doors open right now, but running on the spot takes you no where.

It’s times like this that organizations should review their visions, their strategies & do a bit of planning.  Just like we, at mid-life, need to look at our dreams & do some adjusting, organizations need to look at where they are going & make sure there’s still a market there.  The only thing I remember from highschool Latin (argh) is that “vision” is “to see”.  If we don’t look where we are going, we’ll trip (believe me).  And, if our vision - or our dream - isn’t compelling, we won’t hurry to get there.

As individuals, we have to have dreams. Dreams - imagination - play - fun - contributions to ideals & to others - laughter.  Mix in some work, & that’s life. Organizations have to have visions.  Visions - imagination - innovation - fun - contributions to values & to others - laughter.  Mix in some work & that’s value.

A few years ago Jane, Stephen & I went to a “Pathways to Performance” session by Jim Clemmer (his business writings are incredibly motivating & insightful), in which Jim talked about the importance of keeping a “dream list” — a mix of personal & professional wishes, dreams, hopes (cuz our personal & professional lives ARE just one life, right?  We need to remember that). That “dream list” is our source of passion & energy.  It’s Friday — start your dream list over your Saturday coffee.  What have you got to lose? Nothing but your dreams - and don’t lose your vision or your dreams.

Nancy Dixon just blogged about A-Space, a Facebook-like space for the US intelligence community.  She mentioned this to me a few months ago when we were finalizing her participation in KMWorld 2009 and I’m really pleased to see the executive summary in this post and the full 30 page study here. It talks about how A-Space is shaping the analysts’ work bringing in cogintive diversity.  It emphasizes:

A-Space is an environment in which analysts collaboratively create new meaning out of the diverse ideas and perspectives they collectively bring to an issue. Through this collaboration, analysts have the potential to break through long held assumptions to provide new ways of thinking about complex problems.

Networked relationships on A-Space provide a stream of cognitively diverse information without the costly time investment that maintaining strong ties requires.

A-Space is reinforcing the value of asking questions of colleagues, providing analysts the means to uncover flaws in their own data and reasoning.

A-Space is providing analysts a set of new practices to: 1) build cross agency networks, 2) gain situational awareness, and 3) hold discussions of interpretation, that operate in parallel with the normal production process. These new practices constitute an emerging model that provides a level of cognitive diversity not previously available.

The non-hierarchal nature of A-Space, results in analysts feeling that it is okay to offer their thinking even if it is not completely formed or thought through, increasing the speed of product development by eliminating faulty hypotheses early on and quickly settling on those that are viable.

Check out the links to research and more details on Dixon’s blog and hear her talk more about this at KMWorld 2009.

Thanks to Steve Barth for pointing out this definitely, as he says on Twitter/FB, “way cool” Periodic Table of Visualization methods.  I love the way you can hover over one element and get a look at each method more closely!