As a library leader, you have to do a lot of planning: putting together a strategy for accomplishing a future task like renovating a space, hiring a librarian, adapting to an expected change in budget, etc. You also have to entertain a lot of proposals that reflect planning by others: you’ll have staff who want to institute a new program or policy, extramural organizations who would like to move into the library, people who want to reorganize a library department, etc.

It’s trivially obvious that every new initiative, every program change, every reordering of space, every new collection acquisition – in short, every decision you make as a leader – has consequences. Less obvious are what all the consequences will be – and yet anticipating and preparing for those consequences is an important job of leadership.

One thing that complicates the task of anticipating and providing for consequences is the fact that some consequences are more likely than others; another is that some consequences are intended, and others are unintended. Unlikely consequences are difficult to plan for because there are so many and most of them will never emerge; unintended consequences can be difficult to plan for because the people advocating for an initiative or a change don’t want to talk about them. Let’s look at each of those problems briefly in turn.

Planning for Unlikely Consequences

Obviously, you can’t plan for every conceivable unlikely outcome of a change or initiative. So how do you decide which unlikely consequences should absorb some of your bandwidth and which should not?

One good rule of thumb arises from the distinction between high-impact/low-likelihood scenarios and low-impact/low-likelihood scenarios. In the library, an active-shooter situation is very unlikely, but it’s a scenario that would have a high impact, so most libraries invest resources in some kind of planning for that situation. Low-likelihood scenarios that would also be low-impact require less planning and attention.

When considering a new program or course of action in the library, the same principles apply. Redesigning a multi-floor atrium should include planning for the unlikely (but high-impact) scenario in which someone tries to jump from a high floor; on the other hand, withdrawing a low-use book from the collection entails the risk that someone will want it later, but the impact of that low-likelihood scenario would be low enough that calling a meeting to discuss preparations for it probably wouldn’t represent a wise use of resources.

So planning for unlikely consequences is important, but it’s also essential not to let yourself get paralyzed by trying to provide for every possible outcome or scenario. Invest your time and energy focusing on the unlikely scenarios that would have the greatest impact: natural disasters, violent patrons, fires, etc.

Planning for Unintended Consequences

When someone comes to you in your role as a leader in the spirit of advocacy – presenting a proposal that they believe it is important to adopt or implement – it’s important understand that advocacy and analysis are very different things. The analyst’s job is to give you all the best and most relevant information so that you can make a well-informed decision; the advocate’s job is to push for a specific decision, and to focus on the information that will tend to move you towards that decision. For this reason, those operating from a position of advocacy will generally want very much to talk about the intended consequences of their proposals, and will not want to talk about potential unintended consequences.

This unwillingness can manifest itself in a variety of ways, one of the most annoying of which is a close relative of the It’s Not About Gambit (which I discussed in a recent post titled “Watch Out for the Subject-Changers.”) A typical exchange looks like this:

Leader: “I’m concerned about implementing the policy change you’re advocating for, because I’m afraid it will lead to [Unintended Consequence X].”

Advocate: “[Unintended Consequence X] is not our goal with this policy change. Our goal is to achieve [Intended Consequence Y].”

“That’s not our goal” is, of course, an irrelevant response to the concern expressed, because the concern is about a likely or possible consequence that is unrelated to the goal but that is nevertheless of enough concern to need consideration.

One good response to this gambit might be to say “I understand that [Unintended Consequence X] isn’t your goal with this policy change, but when we make changes like this, not every outcome is going to be one that we intended. Let’s spend some time working through possible outcomes of your proposed change and make sure we’re both prepared for and comfortable with them.”

Of course, not all unintended consequences of an initiative are negative – sometimes we experience positive unintended consequences too. But what’s most important is that we do what we reasonably can to anticipate those outcomes that are likely to be problematic and have a plan for responding to them.

Takeaways and Action Items

• Everything we do has consequences; not all of those consequences are what we expect or what we intend. Our planning needs to account for this reality.
• Be prepared for staff to resist discussion of unintended consequences when they’re functioning in an advocacy role.
• Has your organization experienced stress due to unanticipated or low-likelihood events for which you should have planned better? Looking ahead, what are some potentially troublesome low-likelihood but high-impact scenarios for which you should be planning now?