Sources of Inspiration

I’ve always been fascinated with the concept of fuzzy logic, primarily because I sometimes confuse myself by trying to see things from many different perspectives. I’ve never been a black-n-white thinker, which is most likely the source of my life-long, intense hatred of the study of probability and statistics. I firmly believe that you can make numbers prove any hypothesis. It just depends on how you use them.

So, I was intrigued when I came across this slideshow on the shirt-tail relative of the Long Tail…the Fuzzy Tail…

http://www.slideshare.net/darmano/the-fuzzy-tail

It’s all about blending and blurring of roles and ideas, which is something some of us are working towards in MCLS. There are still some people who think only librarians at a certain level in their career have the smarts and the dedication and the know-how to lead and contribute to teams that are going to change the way we do things. Those people are wrong. I’m rather tired of seeing all the usual suspects appointed to teams and committees, while other very capable, intelligent people are left to watch the store. There’s been a lot of lip service given to succession planning in MCLS, but I haven’t seen a whole lot of willingness to relinquish control and let the heirs apparent begin to affect the organization.

Tomorrow, the RPL/MCLS senior management team is meeting for a half-day retreat to discuss succession planning. I hope to make people see the importance of filling our teams with people who are going to be around in 10 or 20 years, whether they are librarians, clerks or whatever, and giving them the freedom to make change happen. Eliciting participation in meaningful ways from all levels of the organization is the fuzziest way of moving forward. It’s been working nicely with the Emerging Tech, Marketing and Web teams, but I still think we have a long way to go.

So here’s my challenge to you. Do one thing this week that you consider “fuzzy” and share the experience and results here. Let’s see how fuzzy you are….

Patty

It’s 3:00 on a Thursday afternoon and I’ve been writing reports all day, in between listening to and advising on the various staff challenges that always present themselves. As I hit Save on my last report, I decided to go see what’s happening in Blogland today, and found this jewel on the Think Customers: The 1to1 Blog…

Tap Into Your Inner Intelligence

Every company has its own central intelligence “agency.” That group: employees. Tapping into that inner intelligence can lead to valuable process and product improvements.

An organization’s front line sees problems and opportunities their managers don’t, according to Alan Robinson, Ph.D., coauthor of Ideas Are Free and Corporate Creativity. To be truly excellent at customer service, Robinson said during his keynote at the recent Call Center Week conference, you have to be able to capture and implement large numbers of employees’ ideas.

Robinson, a professor at the University of Massachusetts’ Isenberg School of Management, gave several examples of companies that have formal idea-gathering processes—not the dreaded suggestion box, but meetings where staff share ideas and management takes the best of them, prioritizes them, and acts on them. Wainright Industries, for examples, gets about 65 ideas per person per year, and implements about 90 percent of them. Richer Sounds gets about 20 ideas per person per year; those ideas have been the source of improvements that led the firm to have the most sales per square foot of any retailer globally, according to Robinson.

One firm, Boardroom, ties ideas to bonuses and gets about 104 ideas per person per year. Employees are required to bring ideas to quarterly meetings. Those who come without any for one quarter don’t qualify to get a bonus for that period; two quarters and they’re fired. No one has ever suffered either consequence. In fact, the “stick” approach has created what Robinson called a black market of ideas. Employees from across the company share ideas regularly in preparation for the meetings. Robinson noted the incredible value Boardroom has gained from getting people across the organization communicating in this way.

Robinson offered four steps for getting started in creating your own idea-gathering process:

This is what should be happening all over MCLS. I’m not sure about the bonus part, but I bet we could come up with some kind of rewards system. And Lord knows, we’d never fire anyone. How can we turn MCLS into an Idea Factory? An Idea Wiki? Would people use it? Twitter? Any thoughts?

Patty