Getting change to stick
Jun 11th, 2007 by Karen
It is funny how years of experience alter one’s perspective on the pace of change. When I started at Cortland in March of 2001, I was perpetually frustrated at the rate of change within the organization. I wanted action to get taken and to see tangible changes. It seemed to me like no progress was ever made. We kept rehashing the same problems, over and over.
When I left in July of 2005 and looked back on what had been accomplished during my time at Cortland, my perspective had changed a great deal. In the time I was at Cortland we implemented a new ILS, ILLiad, redesigned the website (twice), got an OpenURL resolver, started down the road to a Learning Commons, and brought up chat reference service. (And these are only the projects I remember/was involved with). Change it seems was present after all.
So why this disconnect? I think it is because that when you are in the middle of a situation it is extremely difficult to get perspective on it. Even though many people are pleased with my work here, I’m always striving to do more, to make things better. What I’ve done or what I’m doing isn’t enough, because there is some much more I want to do to make the users experience in the Libraries better. As a result, a part of me feels a little bit like nothing has changed when another part of me knows that things are different.
In the past, I would have left my impatience get the better of me and disregarded small victories and indicators of change. Experience has taught me to temper my impatience though and to trust my nose when it comes to change. The arrival of change in an organization is a little bit like the arrival of spring in Maine; it take forever. In Maine the arrival of full spring can take until the month of June, but from March to June there are subtle signs that spring is coming. One sign is that things smell different.
Organizational change has its own subtle signs. It has taken me a long time to recognize some of these signs and to learn to trust my instincts and intuition telling me that change is afoot. That means being a little more patient watching things play out that I often have no control over. Yet that is the nature of making organizational change happen, some of it is acting, some of it is strictly a waiting game.
Some of my colleagues have yet to figure this out. They don’t want to play the waiting game, which is a shame because I fear that they leave before what they have set in motion comes to fruition. I also fear that if they do leave, what they started will be left undone, because there isn’t a person around with the passion to pursue it. It seems trite to say to these folks “be patient” but it is true patience, persistence, commitment are required to make organization change stick.
The key is to know when you are actually contributing to positive change and when you are beating your head on the wall. I believe Roy Tennant wrote about this recently, though I can’t remember where. I too felt at FPOW Minus One (Librarians’ Internet Index) that change happened at a glacially slow pace, largely due to chronic funding issues. Yet in looking back, it was a good five years where we moved into important new directions, and I left the place better than when I arrived.
This reminds me of all the discussions about ALA, etc. I know it seems ageist to point this out, but world experience is helpful in understanding what can be changed, what’s WORTH changing, and how long change really takes.
Your unconference is great because it changes ALA without abandoning ALA.
Great advice! More librarians and library administration need to read this. I remember talking with Sandra Nelson during the update for the planning for results. She said all the libraries that had participated had made so many great changes, even though they didn’t see it. We just see the boulder we push up the hill, but not how far we have pushed it.
[...] post, Getting change to stick, at Karen Coomb’s blog, has me thinking about change and growth, but not in an institutional [...]