Some days are just brutal

It is amazing how brutal some days are. Work can be emotionally, and psychological draining sometimes. The worse feeling for me is to have put time and effort into something get emotionally behind it and then start questioning myself. Today was one of those days. I’ve been working as part of a group to develop Strategic Directions for the Libraries. Its been a thrilling and exhausting process. Now that we’ve got to the point where we want are pretty much committed to our directions I’m having second thoughts.

This actually started a while back when I was reading “Wisdom of Crowds” and found myself focusing on a section of the book that talked about how crowds can make mistakes and miss things. I began to wonder if perhaps that had happened with our Strategic Directions group. Had we missed something crucial and if so what and how? I convinced myself that if we had missed something that our interactions with the Libraries at large would reveal it, that someone would speak up and say “hey what about this”.

However, a conversation with a colleague today revealed that perhaps that was not the case. She was caught completely off guard by the relatively final directions we had come up with. Leading me to ask myself three questions:

• How could this happen when this person had been actively involved with the process?
• If the strategic direction don’t immediately sing for this person (who is one of the more active and engaged members of the Libraries) will they sing for anyone?
• Has the committee strayed into the land of group-think, and as a result, have missed something huge?

Strategic Directions endeavors create a plethora of data. All of it interesting and valuable in its own way. However, essentially the people on the committee have to boil that down into a very limited number of directions to conciously choose to follow. It is difficult at best, somewhat maddening at worst. Decisive reccomendations need to be made and potentially not everyone will agree with the choices. My recent interactions have only emphasized to me the importance of building a compelling picture for each of the directions, that involves and engages and many different groups in the Libraries as possible. Without this the directions are doomed to a slow and quiet death, which would be a shame considering how much energy the Libraries has put into the process.