Podcast, Training

Episode 307: Planning

Old English Garden, Battersea Park - geograph.org.uk - 286969

Introduction

Welcome back to Season Three of Linking Our Libraries! We are Central Minnesota Libraries Exchange, and we are here to share information with all types of libraries, archives, and other nonprofits working to build their skills.  This season, we are working on building a toolbox of leadership skills and ideas. By the end of this season, you will have fifteen specific skills that will make you a stronger leader and manager in your organization.

This week we are looking at strategies for planning.

The Basics

How do you know what is going to happen in the future? Do you have a set of magic glasses that let you know what is coming up? Probably not. At least, we don’t have any cool tools like that; and will be jealous of you if you have them. This is the essence of planning: think about what you want to happen then figure out how to make it happen.

Today we will walk through some different strategies for looking into the future and figuring out how to get there. Let’s set some goals, and then talk about different kinds of planning for different situations.

Overview of the Planning Process

When you are thinking about plans and looking toward the future, what do you do first? How do you start? Let’s walk through a process that will be helpful as you do your own planning.

  • Step One: Get Your Bearings
    Look around and figure out where you are and what you have now. This is the time to collect your budget documents, any past plans, any other information on prior plans you might have hanging around your file cabinet. And you may have other resources of data which contribute to your understanding of your current position.
  • Step Two: Big Ideas
    This is the time to dream. Think about all the things you would like to see in your library. Capturing ideas in words that people can read makes them real to everyone. Don’t worry too much at this stage about making the goals realistic, or fitting them into a specific plan – just get them down and you can figure out later what to do with them or how to adapt them to the needs and realities of your library.
  • Step Three: Refine and Define
    Now you have a whole big bunch of potential ideas – things you have always wanted to try in the library. This is the point where the realistic parts need to come into play. In this step, take the best parts of the dreams and aspirations for the future, and figure out what can actually be accomplished. Ideally these goals should be phrased in a positive way, even when they are aimed at solving difficult problems.
  • Step Four: Implement
    Now that you have all this great info and these optimistic goals ahead of you – DO THEM! Don’t get paralyzed by the fear that it might not go well; some goals will be wrong, some will not get achieved – but it does not matter. Enough of them will turn out well, and by working toward those goals, you will help your library succeed where other organizations may fall behind in service and in funding.
  • Step Five: Assess and Revise
    Once you are underway with your work, you can start measuring how close you are coming to the goals you have set. It does not happen too often that you achieve exactly what you set out to do; goals change with the changing realities. Figure out where you are in relation to the goal, with the definitions you developed, and work on some mid-course corrections as necessary.

Types of Plans

So now that we have a plan for planning, we are going to work through some of the different types of plans you might use in your organization. Remember the most important thing about planning: not doing it is worst decision. Letting things just happen without trying to figure out where you want to go is not the best way to operate. Don’t be afraid of making mistakes – you will, after all; just dive in and start figuring out where you want to go and how to get there.

Strategic Planning

  • Let’s start by looking at the strategic plan. This one is the long-range plan, the one that lets you look years, not weeks or months, into the future. In the past, strategic plans extended five or maybe even ten years ahead; as the pace of society changes it has become more common to consider it as a more of a two to five year look into the future.
  • In a strategic plan you are looking at the big picture of what your organization wants to accomplish. Not every single detail needs to be ironed out here, but you want to develop some large or long-term plans that your library would choose to accomplish. From that you can make smaller plans (see below for more information on that!); but you need to have that overall view of where you want to go.
  • Whether you decide to go it alone, or to get assistance, this is going to be a large project. Ideally, you want to talk to as many people as possible to get all kinds of feedback and planning ideas from your stakeholders.
  • You want to put together all of these ideas, and start weeding them down in a realistic way. Some things will be impossible: you do not have the budget, the time, or the ability to bend the laws of physics in the necessary ways. Some things you are just not going to be interested in trying.
  • The important part of strategic planning is to keep your eyes focused firmly on the far flung future. You want to have a big-picture sense of what is going on and where you want to be in a few years. Think big!

Tactical Planning

  • Next, let’s talk about Tactical plans. If you were a Star Trek: The Next Generation fan, you may remember Captain Picard snapping out orders and requests for suggestions from Worf in Tactical. His answers were always quick and to the point, and did not get hung up in the big picture.
    • You don’t have to always want to shoot bad space guys, it is just a way of thinking about this planning style!
  • Think short range, next three months; what urgently needs to happen? What would be good to happen? What can’t wait? In these plans, the focus is on a smaller plan. These are the pieces of the plan that you use to make the larger plans in your strategic plan happen.

Project Planning

  • Related to Tactical planning is the Project plan. In most libraries, this will be the type of planning carried out by most people and discussed most frequently. Think about your summer reading program: making it happen is a Project plan.
  • This is a plan focused on one specific plan or thing to be accomplished. The idea is to figure out what is going on to meet a specific project from start to finish. So a project plan will include ideas about the formation of a project and its definition, then how it will be implemented, who will participate, and how it will be evaluated after it has reached its target completion.
  • Generally this is quick – a few days or weeks, maybe months; and you are done. As a manager you want to keep an eye on things; but you should be able to feel confident enough in your staff to let them handle project plans after some consultation with you.

Disaster Planning

  • Disasters are not an “if” situation – they are a “when.” You will have disasters. Disasters are scary, they cost money, they cost a lot of time you could be spending on programming and materials selection, they give you bad publicity – they are just all-around problems. Disaster planning will let you get ready so you can minimize the problems disasters cause.
  • Just start off easily: what disasters are possible or likely in your organization? This would be a great time to convene a team to think about your plan, or to involve the community by asking them to contribute disaster ideas. So what disasters are possible for you?
    • The standard disasters are fires and floods – they can easily happen in any LIS organization and can cause varying amounts of damage.
    • Denial of service attacks, hackers taking over your website – these are not just problems for our for-profit organizations, they can and do happen to any of us.
    • Earthquakes are a problem not only on the West Coast, but along the New Madrid fault line, and potentially near fracking sites.
    • Hurricanes hit the Southeast, and can run all the way up the Eastern Coast.
    • Bomb threats can happen anywhere.
    • A friend worked for an organization whose off-site storage facility was destroyed by a tornado.
    • I talked to a librarian who said they included “how to handle a rattlesnake” in a library in New Mexico; and another librarian in Maine who said dealing with roaming bears was part of their plan.
    • Some disasters will be common to all of us, while others will be regionally or site-specific. They can also be time-sensitive. A couple of weeks after 9/11, my library evacuated as assorted health officials came to identify the mysterious substance on our floor – which turned out to be the cattail plant shredded into little piles.
  • Now, do you have a long and frightening looking list? Perfect! That’s exactly where you should be at this point. Don’t panic, the rest of this part will help you to get past that.

Conclusion

Remember that a plan is a living document. Things will change, it will develop over time. Sometimes those changes will be great and you will be thrilled that wonderful bonus things happened for your organization. Sometimes, those changes will feel like they involve taking pieces of your heart out and stomping on them. Celebrate the first, learn to shake off the second – you just keep developing the plan until you are done.

Thanks to everyone for joining us this week! And check back in with us next week to discuss our next topic: Budgeting.

Do you need more books in your life? Sure you do! Subscribe to our Books and Beverages book group podcast. Each week we look at a different genre, chat with our guests about their book suggestions, and sip our beverages. It is always good to find a new book!