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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 the 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 achieve – 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.

 

Setting Goals

It’s a handy management trick to create acronyms to make things easy to remember, and this is one of the most common: you want your goals to be SMART.

• Specific: makes it all easier to understand, so do not try to get fancy and wordy with your goals. Clear and concise will be fine.
• Measurable: Put numbers in there, or establish some other way to be sure you are achieving your goals.
• Achievable. You want to set goals that you can actually carry out.
• Realistic: This means you want to identify things that are not only possible, but have a real chance of occurring. If you think it’s a great idea, but your staff is completely united against you – it’s not realistic. If everyone in the library wants to change a policy, but the patrons refuse to go along with it – it’s not realistic. Another facet of this is the perpetual effort in too many libraries to “do more with less.” No. Do less with less. When resources are diminished, it is not realistic to keep producing the same amount of effort or results.
• Timely. Factoring in time will make things better for achieving a goal. This is not to rule out pushing people to work quickly, or make important deadlines; but you go into that knowing that you need to put in extra effort to achieve the goal.

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 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.
  • In any disaster, the first step should be to see if anyone is injured and get them to some medical assistance. With every disaster that can involve injury or worse – emphasize that any disaster mitigation happens only IF there is time, or the situation is judged to be safe enough to remain. You will have notice before a hurricane arrives, there may not be much time to evacuate in a fire or a bomb threat.
  • Think about the basics first. Where should people evacuate to? In a tornado, a basement or interior room would be good – so let’s practice getting down there safely.
    • Practice is always important, and not always for the obvious reasons. Yes, we all know where the basement is; but in a tornado disaster drill I did in one library, we all discovered one staffer could not walk down the stairs due to a health condition.
    • If you are meeting outside, such as in a fire emergency, set a place that will be easy to get to, large enough to accommodate everyone, and is accessible to people with all sorts of physical abilities.
    • Again in advance, assign someone to count people as they emerge. Tell everyone to look around, so anyone who may still be inside can be identified. No one should leave until they have checked in outside – you really do not want to endanger fire fighter’s lives hunting for someone who wandered away from the disaster without any notice.
    • Tell people that If There Is Time(!) to grab keys, wallets, purses or other small items that they will need later. If the building is closed down for a chemical spill, or burns to the ground, but a staffer needs to pick up the kids at school – those car keys and house keys are going to be a huge loss.
  • What are your most important materials? Think beyond just the items in your collection – do you have valuable art on the walls? Community donations that are irreplaceable, or that have to be returned? Items that are important to the staff or the community even though their dollar value is not much? Make a list of things that need to be saved first. If you have enough items, you can categorize them into Priority A, B, and C lists.
    • And if you really want to get organized, you can put colored stickers on the back or bottom or inside cover of items corresponding to their priorities. This would help people grab items quickly.
    • If There Is Time(!) organize staff to grab items and move them to a designated safe place.
      • You want to freeze wet paper before it has a chance to mold.
      • You want to take wet art somewhere an expert can safely handle it.
      • You want to have a good insurance policy for wet computer replacements.
      • Should some things in your library go home with staffers until the flood is over? Maybe – it’s something to discuss in advance.
• Gather supplies in advance. Having plastic sheeting and duct tape to cover things from water pouring down overhead can be helpful. Rags, mops, and buckets to work on standing water will also be great to have.
• Always have a first aid kit around, because all sorts of weird things will happen – and injuries will happen in disasters. Be ready to roll an ace bandage around a sprained ankle or wrist, pour some hydrogen peroxide over a cut and then bandage it up, or other minor first aid issues to either get the person safely to actual medical care or to patch them up with little problems.
• The ongoing cleanup is the worst part. The adrenaline of dealing with an immediate disaster, and the natural pulling together people will do then, will get you through the first part. The days and weeks of cleanup later will be tougher. Work out some strategies to keep people’s spirits up, especially if the flood caused trouble at their home as well as at work. Try to make this a team bonding experience, to encourage people to grow closer rather than sniping and complaining to each other.
• After you put together your disaster plan, be sure to carry out some training using it so everyone knows what to do and where to look for information. Have multiple paper copies, copies on your website, copies in the homes of all your managers. When disaster strikes you do not want to be trying to find cell service or Wi-Fi or yelling at your website that has crashed.
• And remember that you are not in a disaster, or a disaster plan, alone! There are a lot of resources available from different government agencies to help in planning, and post-disasters. Talk to other organizations around you. What kinds of resources and plans is your parent organization making? Get in on those! When there is planning to be done, and resources to be saved, you want to be in on the conversation so library resources and personnel are considered. There are many useful disaster plans found on the Web that you can model. Look around to see what ideas other people are bringing to their disaster planning, to make yours stronger.
• These plans are the ones you hope you will not have to use – but you will. I’ve been in bomb threats, shooting threats, suspected chemical spills, gas leaks, suspected anthrax, tornadoes, fires, and other disasters at work. Fortunately, most of them were more threat than disaster; but in all of them I learned new ways to handle workplace disasters. And in all of them, I realized how important it was to have a good plan. So I encourage you to make your plans, practice and prepare, and be hopeful that you never need them!

Books Read

Everyone share a book you are reading, or one that you like

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.

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