The third entry in my “Eight Things Every Library Leader Needs to Do” series is not so much a thing we need to do as a reality we need to accept.

Let me explain where I’m coming from on this.

It’s a common and completely natural human tendency for library leaders to assume that when we’re making decisions – especially high-stakes ones that have serious implications for our organizations and services – our goal is to make decisions that lead to good outcomes and avoid decisions that will lead to bad outcomes. And of course that really is our goal. Problems arise, though, when we have unreasonable expectations about the degree to which problems and unforeseen outcomes are avoidable no matter how careful and well-informed our decision-making.

What separates a good decision from a bad one is not that good decisions prevent undesired and unintended outcomes; it’s that good decisions get us closer to our desired outcomes and result in fewer (and less severe) undesired consequences than bad decisions do. And they position us better to address the undesired outcomes that do arise.

Here’s what I mean. Imagine that you and your leadership team are looking for a way to better recognize outstanding service on the part of library staff. One of your team members raises a hand and says: “At the last library I worked at, we had an award system in place whereby a staff member could nominate another staff member who had done something outstanding. If leadership agreed, the nominee would get a small plaque and a cash award.”

As the library’s leader, you will likely have two immediate responses to a suggestion like that:

1. “I like the idea of instituting some kind of formal recognition for outstanding staff performance.”
2. “If we decide to institute this program, we’ll need to make sure we do it in a way that ensures the award criteria are appropriate and are applied fairly and consistently.”

Following both of those lines of thought, you may then start on a course of due diligence, maybe pulling together a small task force of people to draft a policy-and-procedure structure to help ensure that this award program will accomplish the desired goals (motivating staff, encouraging them to see the best in each other’s work, offering concrete rewards for outstanding performance, etc.) while avoiding creating bad outcomes (discouraging some employees who feel the system is stacked against them, engendering cynicism among employees who sense favoritism baked into the process, etc.).

Here’s the thing, though: not only will your efforts fall short of preventing all the predictable negative outcomes, they will also fail to anticipate all possible negative outcomes. To the former point: you can make less likely, but you cannot prevent, people misinterpreting the purpose of your program or finding ways to manipulate it. To the latter point: no matter how perfectly you design the program, it will produce at least some outcomes that are not desired. Someone will see an award given to a colleague whom she blames (perhaps correctly) for serious problems in their department; someone else will feel unrecognized for work that is at least as good as that of someone who got the award; and so forth.

Careful, well-informed decision-making might make these and any other, similar bad outcomes less likely – but it will not prevent them, nor will you be able to anticipate and control for all possible bad outcomes. In other words, a good decision is not one that forestalls all possible bad outcomes, and bad outcomes do not necessarily show that a decision was the wrong one.

My purpose in pointing this out is not to make you, the reader, feel discouraged about the value of careful decision-making. It’s to reassure you, when negative outcomes emerge despite your best efforts, that the problem is probably not you. The problem is the complexity of human organizations and the vagaries of the human heart. Your due diligence does make a difference – if you weren’t engaging in it, your outcomes would be much worse. My message here (believe it or not) is intended to be encouraging: negative outcomes do not necessarily reflect a failure of strategy or preparation on your part.

One of the many difficult balancing acts that library leaders must perform is that of, on the one hand, being careful to do one’s due diligence before making decisions, and also, on the other hand, not getting too discouraged or freaked out when due diligence doesn’t fully prevent bad outcomes.