Doing The Same Thing But Expecting New Results
By Scott R. Cooper, Crook County Judge
First published in the Central Oregonian, Prineville, Oregon, June 2008
Somebody called me the other day to complain that the new library director doesn’t believe in alphabetizing. I listened politely, if somewhat incredulously, and made a mental note to ask the library director the next time I saw him what he was up to. I honestly didn’t think much about the matter until the new director happened to show up in my office on another matter. After we concluded our business, I asked him, “David: do you believe in alphabetizing?”
Even as I asked the question, I felt stupid. Of course he alphabetizes. He’s a library director. It’s what they do.
So it was that I listened with some astonishment as the county’s new library director explained to me that the current theory of library and information science is that as long as books are in alphabetical order by author and in numerical order by Dewey Decimal number, title order doesn’t matter. Most readers are capable of finding what they need in a few seconds if the book is in the right general area. He went on to explain that shelving in this fashion saves an incredible amount of staff time, and also allows library staff the freedom and flexibility to shelve series of books together in the order they are intended to be read.
That wasn’t the answer I was expecting, but I had to admit that his observations had some logic to them. After all, I’m sure I’m smart enough to look at five or ten books on a shelf and find the one that I want, regardless of the order they are in. Certainly, my bookshelves at home are in no particular order, and I can find any volume I need with only minimal searching. Still, I couldn’t quite get my mind around this new-fangled theory. After all, books in libraries are SUPPOSED to be alphabetized. Putting books in order is what librarians do, isn’t it?
Finally, I said, “David, you might well be right. There might be a different way to do business, and perhaps we need to consider that at some point in the future. But you’re new around here, and you have a lot of important projects pending. Do you really want to launch a big fight with a public that’s just getting used to you about the order of the books on the shelves? Will you please, as a favor to me and yourself, reconsider your position, which I think is a little too radical for Prineville and Crook County, and put the books back in alphabetical order?”
The library director laughed and agreed that innovation has a time and a place and maybe we’re not ready for big city thinking yet. He agreed to put the books back in order and save “progress” for another day.
I’m not telling that story to rat out the library director as some sort of progressive. He is in fact a great director who has brought the county fresh ideas about how to take our library in exciting new directions involving expanded access to information, better use of technology, more extensive programming and solid theories of collection management. He’s doing well, and he’s going to do even better in the future —as long as he keeps alphabetizing the books.
The point of the story is to point out just how hard it is for us in government and communities to get outside our comfort zone and think in new ways about old problems.
The library director was responding rationally to a long-standing problem in the library: how to put more people to work on important tasks like ordering material, processing material and helping patrons. Shelving, while necessary, prevents these jobs from getting done, and the faster it can be completed, the quicker the library staff gets back to more urgent work. Unfortunately, the library director’s excitement got a little ahead of his constituency’s tolerance for the new and different.
He isn’t the only one in that predicament at the moment.
The May 20 election results suggested that a lot of people are having problems coming to grips with the need to change the reality of how we have been thinking.
No point better illustrates that than the fate of some of my peer commissioners around the state. Of the thirteen incumbent county commissioners in Oregon who running for re-election with opponents, eight lost their seats in a primary battle. Given the supposed overwhelming advantage that incumbency confers in electoral contests, there is definitely a message here.
I know many of the people whom the voters sacrificed. They are hard-working, creative and dedicated to their constituencies. The fact that they lost their seats probably has more to do with voter frustration with rapidly occurring change than any particular thing they did.
My sense of the electorate right now is that having plunged from the glory days of economic supremacy in 2005 and 2006 to a rapidly cooling economy in 2007 and 2008, voters are being driven by fear and discontentment. Most say they say they want “change”. In truth, they don’t change as much as they want things to return to where they were: a time when a house purchase was a guaranteed retirement income, when easy credit allowed us to live well beyond our means, when a labor force shortage guaranteed that if you lost your job you could find one in a few days, when gas was cheap and so was food and so were goods.
The problem with the “good old days” of a few years ago is that they came at a price: housing prices rose far beyond affordability for first-time homebuyers, mounting debt eventually ate into our savings, employers started taking jobs overseas to find labor, our dependence on foreign oil forced us into uncomfortable reliance on unstable political regimes, we began to erode the competitiveness of our own farmers and we fueled the rise of developing nations like China and India who are now competing with us for the very things that have defined our comfortable lifestyle.
We may think we want the “good old days” back, but we aren’t likely to get them and keep them without making some fundamental changes in the way we have been approaching the world.
But therein lies the politician’s quandary: how does he or she convince voters that a little change, adjustment and acceptance of new ways of doing things may be necessary if we all don’t want to destroy the very way of life we prize?
Then again, how does a library director expand his services but still run economically, if we don’t give him the flexibility to try something new once in a while?
First published in the Central Oregonian, Prineville, Oregon, June 2008
Somebody called me the other day to complain that the new library director doesn’t believe in alphabetizing. I listened politely, if somewhat incredulously, and made a mental note to ask the library director the next time I saw him what he was up to. I honestly didn’t think much about the matter until the new director happened to show up in my office on another matter. After we concluded our business, I asked him, “David: do you believe in alphabetizing?”
Even as I asked the question, I felt stupid. Of course he alphabetizes. He’s a library director. It’s what they do.
So it was that I listened with some astonishment as the county’s new library director explained to me that the current theory of library and information science is that as long as books are in alphabetical order by author and in numerical order by Dewey Decimal number, title order doesn’t matter. Most readers are capable of finding what they need in a few seconds if the book is in the right general area. He went on to explain that shelving in this fashion saves an incredible amount of staff time, and also allows library staff the freedom and flexibility to shelve series of books together in the order they are intended to be read.
That wasn’t the answer I was expecting, but I had to admit that his observations had some logic to them. After all, I’m sure I’m smart enough to look at five or ten books on a shelf and find the one that I want, regardless of the order they are in. Certainly, my bookshelves at home are in no particular order, and I can find any volume I need with only minimal searching. Still, I couldn’t quite get my mind around this new-fangled theory. After all, books in libraries are SUPPOSED to be alphabetized. Putting books in order is what librarians do, isn’t it?
Finally, I said, “David, you might well be right. There might be a different way to do business, and perhaps we need to consider that at some point in the future. But you’re new around here, and you have a lot of important projects pending. Do you really want to launch a big fight with a public that’s just getting used to you about the order of the books on the shelves? Will you please, as a favor to me and yourself, reconsider your position, which I think is a little too radical for Prineville and Crook County, and put the books back in alphabetical order?”
The library director laughed and agreed that innovation has a time and a place and maybe we’re not ready for big city thinking yet. He agreed to put the books back in order and save “progress” for another day.
I’m not telling that story to rat out the library director as some sort of progressive. He is in fact a great director who has brought the county fresh ideas about how to take our library in exciting new directions involving expanded access to information, better use of technology, more extensive programming and solid theories of collection management. He’s doing well, and he’s going to do even better in the future —as long as he keeps alphabetizing the books.
The point of the story is to point out just how hard it is for us in government and communities to get outside our comfort zone and think in new ways about old problems.
The library director was responding rationally to a long-standing problem in the library: how to put more people to work on important tasks like ordering material, processing material and helping patrons. Shelving, while necessary, prevents these jobs from getting done, and the faster it can be completed, the quicker the library staff gets back to more urgent work. Unfortunately, the library director’s excitement got a little ahead of his constituency’s tolerance for the new and different.
He isn’t the only one in that predicament at the moment.
The May 20 election results suggested that a lot of people are having problems coming to grips with the need to change the reality of how we have been thinking.
No point better illustrates that than the fate of some of my peer commissioners around the state. Of the thirteen incumbent county commissioners in Oregon who running for re-election with opponents, eight lost their seats in a primary battle. Given the supposed overwhelming advantage that incumbency confers in electoral contests, there is definitely a message here.
I know many of the people whom the voters sacrificed. They are hard-working, creative and dedicated to their constituencies. The fact that they lost their seats probably has more to do with voter frustration with rapidly occurring change than any particular thing they did.
My sense of the electorate right now is that having plunged from the glory days of economic supremacy in 2005 and 2006 to a rapidly cooling economy in 2007 and 2008, voters are being driven by fear and discontentment. Most say they say they want “change”. In truth, they don’t change as much as they want things to return to where they were: a time when a house purchase was a guaranteed retirement income, when easy credit allowed us to live well beyond our means, when a labor force shortage guaranteed that if you lost your job you could find one in a few days, when gas was cheap and so was food and so were goods.
The problem with the “good old days” of a few years ago is that they came at a price: housing prices rose far beyond affordability for first-time homebuyers, mounting debt eventually ate into our savings, employers started taking jobs overseas to find labor, our dependence on foreign oil forced us into uncomfortable reliance on unstable political regimes, we began to erode the competitiveness of our own farmers and we fueled the rise of developing nations like China and India who are now competing with us for the very things that have defined our comfortable lifestyle.
We may think we want the “good old days” back, but we aren’t likely to get them and keep them without making some fundamental changes in the way we have been approaching the world.
But therein lies the politician’s quandary: how does he or she convince voters that a little change, adjustment and acceptance of new ways of doing things may be necessary if we all don’t want to destroy the very way of life we prize?
Then again, how does a library director expand his services but still run economically, if we don’t give him the flexibility to try something new once in a while?
posted by Scott Cooper | 1:49 AM
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