Vision & Balance: Leading and Managing in the Academic Library

Over at the Scholarly Kitchen, where I’ve been a regular contributor for many years now, I’ve been involved in what looks, on the surface, like a discussion about an emerging open access (OA) business model – but is really a discussion about mission alignment between libraries and their sponsoring institutions.

The business model under examination is called subscribe-to-open (S2O), which basically works this way: the journal publisher commits to making its journal or journals OA as long as a sufficient number of library customers continues to pay the former subscription fee. This arrangement is attractive to many librarians, because it allows us to support OA (which we love) without changing anything about the way we do business – we just keep doing what we’ve been doing (i.e. paying annual invoices) and we not only continue getting access to the subscribed content, but we support the publisher in making that content free to everyone in the world. And as an added bonus, we’re helping make it possible for our authors (and others) to publish in those journals without having to worry about paying article processing charges. In return, the publisher gets a steady and reliable base of funding to keep the journal going.

It seems like a win for everyone, doesn’t it?

Here’s the problem, though: by adopting S2O, the publisher is radically changing the underlying logic of the subscription arrangement. Whereas the library-publisher relationship used to be one of paying customer to content provider, it has now become one of benefactor to beneficiary. And while this may sound perfectly fine to the library (we love OA, remember), the fundamental problem with this new arrangement is that it does not reflect the purposes for which the library’s host institution allocates a collections budget to the library. The university gives the library a collections budget for the purpose of securing access to content, not for the purpose of underwriting the production of free content. If the library decides unilaterally to take money intended for the former purpose and redirect it to the latter, it runs the risk of getting seriously out of alignment with the university, which never ends well for the library. In the piece, I strongly recommend that libraries considering making such a move counsel first with the administrators who allocate their collections budget, and make sure that move is in alignment with university priorities.

For either current or aspiring library leaders who would like to see a very interesting debate over the importance of mission alignment unfolding in real time, I would recommend the comments section of my post. It’s long and dense and getting more so even as I write, but the arguments being raised may be of great interest. Grab a sandwich and give them a scan:

Back in 2017, an anonymous writer published an opinion piece in Inside Higher Education on the topic of impostor syndrome. I have permission to reproduce it here, and I think it’s a good read for anyone in a position of leadership or management:

For a variety of reasons, academe can be a particularly difficult place for racial and ethnic minorities, for those from the LGBTQ community, for the economically disadvantaged, for women and for members of other groups that have been oppressed or have not typically enjoyed enhanced privilege in Western society.

Imagine being the only one in a faculty meeting with dark skin or apparently Asian features — or being the only woman or only non-cisgender person. In such a circumstance, it might be especially difficult not only to feel comfortable and accepted but even to anticipate ever feeling that way in the future.

In fact, you might very easily feel like you simply don’t belong there at all. You might feel like the dubious beneficiary of tokenism — like someone who has been selected for inclusion not because of their true abilities but to allow the institution to fill in a diversity check box and get the Office of Equal Opportunity off its back. And, consequently, you might feel a more or less constant anxiety about being found out and exposed as someone who isn’t actually fully qualified and doesn’t belong.

We call this feeling impostor syndrome, and in recent years it has emerged as a particular problem among those from underrepresented or oppressed groups. The fact that there is more understanding and discussion of this problem today than in the past is a good thing.

But after attending a recent meeting in which a job candidate from an underrepresented group invoked several times his own experience of impostor syndrome, I would like to offer an additional perspective. I have a small piece of advice that might be particularly helpful to those who find themselves struggling with these feelings.

The advice is: get used to it.

I’m speaking as a cisgender, straight, white male and (not incidentally) as a tenured full professor with 29 years of experience working in academe. In order to get to where I am today, I’ve had to publish books and peer-reviewed journal articles and to serve in positions of leadership in my department, college and professional associations. Notably, at every step of my career, I’ve been required to convince colleagues — most of whom I admire and consider much smarter and more impressive than I — to vote in favor of my advancement.

Two main facts about my story would seem to militate against my feeling like an impostor: first, that I’m part of a privileged majority in just about every demographic way, and second, that I can look at my CV and see all kinds of concrete and unfakeable evidence of genuine academic achievement.

And yet I don’t think a single day goes by that I don’t feel a slight frisson of fear that I’m going to be found out — that my colleagues will discover that I’m essentially lazy, have made few meaningful contributions to my academic discipline and really have no idea what the hell I’m doing, and they will expose me for the pretender I am. Whenever I go up for some form of faculty review, I genuinely half expect the chair of the committee to sit me down, close the door and ask, “How much longer do you think you’re going to be able to get away with this charade?”

In sharing this, I don’t mean to suggest that I’m somehow alone in this feeling. In fact, my point is exactly the opposite. What I hope readers will understand are two things.

1. Impostor syndrome is not something that will necessarily go away after a certain amount of time in academe or a certain amount of concrete and documented achievement. While I’m sure it’s not a universal affliction, for at least some of us in academe — and my guess would be that we are legion — it’s a more or less permanent condition.
2. Impostor syndrome is normal for many, if not most, of us. And just as it never goes away for some of us who are more socially, economically and professionally privileged, it also may never go away for members of historically marginalized or oppressed populations. Here I want to be careful not to give the impression that I don’t have sympathy for those who are less socially and economically privileged than I or that I’m asking for such sympathy from them. My point is only that, while a lack of privilege certainly may contribute to impostor syndrome and might make it harder to shake, the syndrome is not something that you can expect to see disappear even if society’s injustice and oppression are eradicated. I strongly suspect that the roots of impostor syndrome lie as much in general human psychology as in societal oppression.

This is not a message of hopelessness, however. You can manage and deal with impostor syndrome, no matter who you are and whatever your individual circumstances. If you find yourself struggling with it, consider these possible coping strategies.

• Bear in mind that, no matter how much you feel like a fraud, chances are good that someone else in your department feels like an even bigger fraud than you do — and that person may even be the one you most admire. Think about this from time to time, particularly when you’re feeling down.
• Give yourself permission to fake it. Don’t pretend to have credentials you don’t have, and don’t lie about knowing things you don’t. But don’t let your overall feelings of inadequacy stop you from taking on projects and challenges. Concrete achievement may not eradicate your impostor syndrome completely, but it will help over time.
• Find a trusted confidant or mentor. With that person, in private, share your feelings of “fraudulence.” Do not, however, share those feelings with anyone you do not trust implicitly. Even more important, never share such feelings in an open meeting. If, for some bizarre reason, you choose to publish an essay about your feelings, withhold your name (as I have).
• Compare yourself to others. I realize that this runs counter to most of the self-help advice we are given, but when it comes to impostor syndrome, comparing yourself to your peers can be useful. If you do so honestly and carefully, you will probably discover one of two things: either 1) you genuinely do fall below the standard they set (which is very useful to know, particularly in academe, where your peers hold significant power over your professional future), or 2) you meet or exceed those standards. While discovering the latter may not magically make your feelings of insufficiency and fraudulence go away, regular and self-administered doses of reality do help when one is suffering from problems of irrational thinking.

And when all is said and done, for most of us that’s exactly what impostor syndrome is: a problem of irrational and self-defeating thinking. If forced to reckon with reality in a strictly rational way, most of us would probably acknowledge that few genuine impostors succeed in academe. The fact that we are here may not prove conclusively that we are as good and accomplished as people seem (inexplicably) to think we are, but it does suggest that they’re more right than wrong.

For most of us, I suspect, the ultimate cure for impostor syndrome does not lie in social reform, institutional honors or the development of an impressive CV. It lies in the habits of mind we develop between our own ears

At one point around the middle of my career, my scope of stewardship was broadened to include oversight of an interlibrary loan department. And I had what I thought was a pretty good idea: I told the ILL folks that whenever a requested book came in for a faculty member, I want to be notified so that I could use that opportunity to deliver the book in person and ask that faculty member “What can the library be doing to make your work easier?”.

I thought it was a great idea. I’d be providing personal delivery service (everyone loves that, right?) and also getting to know the faculty better, and also demonstrating my desire to get feedback on the library’s services and how they might change or improve.

What could be wrong with that?

Readers with experience in public service are already smiling kindly at me and gently shaking their heads. Because to them, what’s wrong with the question “How can the library make your work easier?” is painfully obvious: the problem is that the great majority of faculty members have no idea how to answer it.

Sure, some of them will have a few specific ideas: “Let me check out books longer!,” they might say, or “Pay my APCs!” or “Give me a research room!.” And those are by no means useless responses – though they’re not likely to be terribly useful, given that they’re often going to be requests for systemic changes that will only be made if they turn out to be both a) feasible and b) desired by more than a single faculty member.

But the real problem with that question is that it is not the faculty member’s job to know how the library can make her life easier. Her job is to figure out the complexities of her own work – define and carry out her research agenda, build curricula for her assigned classes, help students who are struggling, etc. – not to understand the work of the library’s various service areas and provide guidance to us on how to improve them.

So if you shouldn’t ask “How can we make your life easier?,” what should you ask?

Here’s what I decided: instead of asking the faculty to tell me what I and my team should be doing, I instead just asked them what they were doing. I led with “Tell me what kinds of projects you’re working on at the moment.” And then I listened carefully, watching for opportunities to point them towards existing library collections (“Did you know that we recently acquired a whole database of primary sources on that topic?”) or services (“What a pain that you had to deal with that situation – you know, our staff in Circulation can help you if you run into it again”). And sometimes I came back to the library with ideas for new things we could do, based on what I had learned our faculty needed.

In other words, instead of asking the faculty to help me solve my problem (wanting to know how I could better help them) I set myself up to learn more about them and thus position myself to solve problems for them – sometimes problems they didn’t even know the library could solve.

I’ve kept that lesson in mind ever since.

One of the most common mistakes that leaders tend to make is rooted in some of our best human impulses. It is the mistake of stepping in and preventing the people we lead from experiencing the natural consequences of their mistakes.

Let me explain by way of an example – and not a hypothetical one. Indeed, this is one that many library administrators and managers have experienced directly.

A librarian – let’s call him Gary – is interested in presenting a paper at a conference in Berlin, Germany. He prepares and submits a proposal, which is accepted. He then informs his supervisor – we’ll call her Sarah – that he has had a paper accepted to the Berlin conference and that he will need travel support and someone to cover his regular workload during the week that he’ll be away.

For the sake of this example, let’s assume that the library where Gary works has clear policies and procedures in place for requesting travel support, and that these policies make clear that before submitting a presentation proposal to a conference, librarians must ensure that the necessary funding is available and that they can be spared from their regular duties during that time. (And yes, I realize that too many libraries don’t have clear policies in place for such cases; that’s a topic for another post. Or maybe a series of them.)

In this situation, Gary has made a significant mistake that has put him and the library in a difficult situation: he has made a commitment he was not authorized to make, and fulfilling that commitment will impact both the library’s budget and the colleagues who will have to do his work while he’s gone. However, failing to fulfill that commitment will be embarrassing both to him and to the library he represents.

This puts Sarah in a tough position, and she now has a difficult choice to make: will she allow Gary to experience the natural consequences of his mistake, or will she step in and prevent him from experiencing them? And what might be the knock-on effects of each of those approaches?

Let’s consider the second approach (interfering with the natural consequences) first. Sarah brings Gary into her office and says, angrily, “Gary, you never told me that you were going to submit a proposal for this conference. Now your paper has been accepted and we’re really stuck, because I don’t have enough money left in the travel budget to cover your travel costs. But I can’t afford to embarrass the library by making you withdraw, so I’m going to have to find the money someplace else. You’d better not do this again or next time you’ll be in really big trouble.”

Sarah is making several mistakes here, and I’m sure they’re pretty obvious:

• She’s using her anger as a punishment, hoping that the desire to avoid her anger in the future will stop Gary from doing the same thing again .
• She’s absorbing the consequences of his action herself (by taking on the responsibility for figuring out how to make his trip possible).
• She’s teaching him that the way to get around library policies is to ignore them, and that the cost of doing so is just a brief unpleasant conversation.

Now let’s consider the first approach (allowing Gary to experience the natural consequences of his actions). Sarah brings Gary into her office and says, calmly, “Wow, I didn’t realize you were submitting a proposal for this conference. We have a problem: there isn’t enough money left in our annual travel budget to support your travel and attendance. If you had followed our policy, I could have told you that before you submitted your proposal. As it stands, we’re now between a rock and a hard place: I can’t afford to send you to the conference, but if you withdraw after having your paper accepted it will make both you and the library look bad. What do you think might be a good solution to this problem?”

In this scenario, notice that Sarah is not assuming responsibility for solving the problem that Gary has caused; instead, she asks him to offer a solution. Nor is she threatening or yelling at him; there’s no need for her to impose artificial consequences (like a tongue-lashing) on him, because she’s going to simply let him feel the natural consequences of what he did.

What are Gary’s options in this scenario? I can think of a couple. The simplest would be for him to withdraw from the conference and apologize to the organizers. This would be painful both for him and for the library (and putting the library in a bad light in this way should come up in his subsequent annual review). Another option would be for him to honor his commitment, at his own expense. This would preserve both his reputation and the library’s, but would cost him quite a bit of money – and it may or may not be an expense he is actually in a position to bear. (If not, that leaves him the first option.)

Once Gary has proposed a reasonable solution and Sarah has accepted it, what will Gary have learned? Several things, including:

• He can count on his boss to be fair and consistent in following library policy (something that may not have worked in his favor in this case, but will likely work in his favor at some point in the future).
• Sarah will control her frustration when he makes mistakes, and deal with him professionally and fairly.
• When he creates a problem by disregarding library policy, he will be required to take responsibility for doing so and will be expected to come up with a solution to the problem he has created.

As a leader, ask yourself: which of these lessons would you like your employees to learn? In which of these ways would you like them to see you as a leader?

The problem, of course, is that in many ways it’s a lot easier to absorb consequences yourself than to insist that others deal with them. The “dang it, you’ve really messed up and now I have to clean up your mess” conversation is, paradoxically enough, usually a much easier conversation to have than “you made a mistake here; let me know how you intend to resolve it.”

But as leaders, our job is not to figure out how to avoid difficult conversations. Our job is to help our libraries be as effective as possible in serving our patrons and our institutions, and to help our employees grow and develop as professionals. The cost of doing so, sometimes, is difficult conversations.

Takeaways and Action Items

• Getting between your employees and the natural consequences of their actions may make life easier for you (and them) in the short run, but will cause everyone misery in the long run.
• Good leaders don’t leave their employees alone to figure out how to clean up their messes, but they do insist that their employees clean up the messes they make.
• When was the last time you yielded to the temptation to take away the consequences of an employee’s actions? What will you do differently the next time you’re faced with a similar situation?

One of the perennial complaints we hear in higher education is about what seems like a growing tendency among university administrators to think of students (and then to insist that we think of students) as “customers” – people who are entitled to basically whatever they want, and to whose every whim and preference we should cater.

Of course, what makes this issue complicated is that in some important ways, students really are customers: they’re paying tuition (in some cases a very large amount of tuition) and they’re often paying the university for housing and food as well, and there are certain things they should be able to expect in return.

For example: in return for their tuition payments, students should be able to expect that they’ll be taught competently the curricula for which they sign up. If a class is advertised as being about 19th-century English literature, that’s what should be taught in the class. And the class should be taught by an instructor who is well prepared, who shows up (and shows up on time), who can speak clearly in the university’s language of instruction, who grades consistently and fairly, etc. In the provision of these things, it makes sense that we think of students as “customers.”

However, the fact that students are paying tuition clearly does not entitle them to particular grades, or to coursework that is undemanding, or to a style of teaching that they find entirely congenial and in harmony with their personal preferences. If a university pushes faculty to treat students as “customers” in these senses, that would be inappropriate.

The academic library faces similar complexities. In some ways, it seems obvious that students (and other patrons) can appropriately be thought of as “customers” of the library’s products and services and should be treated as such: we should be thinking about which services and information resources they need in order to do their academic work, and we should cater intentionally to those needs. They should expect that they will be treated with respect and kindness by everyone who works in the library. They should be able to expect that the library’s service points, collections, and facilities are organized and provided with their needs in mind, rather than for the convenience of library employees. It makes sense for us to bear in mind that students are paying to use the library, whereas we are being paid to work in the library.

On the other hand, the fact that students are paying tuition and fees, and the fact that we are being paid to serve them, does not mean that students are entitled to everything that might be offered to them by a commercial establishment that relies on their ongoing business for its sustainability. The fact that we have an equal obligation to serve all students puts a natural limit on the amount of time we can spend with any individual student and on the degree to which we can customize our services to meet the needs of any subset of the student body; the fact that our facilities are used by an entire campus means that we can’t always give an individual student (or faculty member) the kind of access that he or she always wants. And the fact that we support an educational enterprise puts some limits on the ways in which we help students – a student may, for example, want a librarian to do work for him that the librarian feels is inappropriate, and appeals to the virtue of “customer service” will likely fall on deaf ears in such a case, as they should.

So how do we decide when and how we’ll regard students as “customers” and when we won’t? I suggest the following principles:

• Every student has the same status. Every student patron is (and is not) a customer in exactly the same way as all others. We may provide different services or different levels of service depending on need, but all students with a particular need are treated the same way, regardless of who they are.
• The library must know (and be able to explain coherently) what is included and what’s extra. In other words, the library needs to have a coherent set of policies that govern what students can expect to be provided and what is an “extra.” Do they get a certain number of free pages of printing per year, or does the library impose a fee for every copy or page? Are rooms reservable without charge? All of these policies must be clearly documented and administered consistently, and the policies must be easily accessible by patrons.
• The library’s collections, spaces, and services should be organized with the needs of patrons foremost in mind. This may sound obvious, but it’s not as obvious as it should be. We don’t select information resources based on which publishers we like and which ones we don’t, but rather based on the curricular and research needs of our patrons. We don’t organize library spaces in order to preserve our preferred workflows, but in order to make the library as useful as possible to patrons. We set service hours in accordance with the needs of our patrons, not necessarily to meet the convenience of employees, etc.
• Every patron must be treated with respect and kindness. This should go without saying, but sadly, it can’t: whether you like the idea of a “customer mindset” or not, there is no excuse for treating library patrons – especially students – with condescension, impatience, or rudeness. Now, to be clear: this does not mean that we give every student whatever they want, and it does not mean that we beat around the bush when policies needs to be explained or enforced. Nor does it mean that we cater to every student’s desires or demands. It does mean that we offer every student the full benefit of our professional skill and preparation, and do so with patience and kindness.

One of the great dangers of leadership is the fact that the more power you have (or are believed to have), the better people will treat you. This phenomenon may take multiple forms, including:

• Shutting up. One of the great frustrations of being in a leadership position is that it can make it hard to engage in frank and open discussion. Why? Because as soon as you express an opinion – or as soon as people feel like they can tell what your opinion is – discussion can shut down as people decide “Well, if that’s what our leader thinks, I guess there’s no point in continuing the conversation.” As I’ve mentioned in earlier posts, for this reason I try really hard to hold back on expressing my opinion on an issue until others have had a chance to express theirs. (I am far from perfect at doing this, however.)
• Insincere capitulation. A related problem is when people pretend to agree with you, even when they really don’t. Not only does this mean they pass up the opportunity to influence things in a direction they would prefer; it also means that you don’t get an accurate sense of what your people really think.

• Offering gifts or favors. Most people refrain from blatantly offering favors to their leaders, because they have an intuitive sense that doing so is both icky and inappropriate. But not everyone is blessed with that intuitive sense, and when you’re in a leadership position you will almost certainly, at some point, be faced with the necessity of kindly and graciously refusing an inappropriate gift or favor from a subordinate.
• Telling you what you want to hear. Poor leaders make it clear (either explicitly or implicitly) to those they lead that they do not want bad news. The classic line “Bring me solutions, not problems,” is one slightly less toxic expression of that tendency, but many of us have had experiences with leaders who punished anyone who brought them news they didn’t want to hear. Such punishment is usually more subtle than overt, but make no mistake: if you penalize the people you lead for giving you bad news, even in subtle ways, they will learn that lesson quickly and you will soon be hamstrung in your role as a leader.
• Flattery. This one is obvious. The more power you have (or are believed to have), the more likely it is that you’ll get compliments on your inimitable leadership style, your integrity, your charisma, your taste in clothes, etc. When deciding to what degree you’ll take such comments at face value, always ask yourself “How much power do I have over this person?,” and adjust accordingly.
• Funnier jokes. Related to flattery, but somewhat different, is the degree to which you’ll find that people laugh more at your jokes once you’ve ascended to a position of power. Trust me: you didn’t get funnier. What’s changed is that people have a greater incentive to make you think they appreciate your sense of humor.

So why is all of the above a problem? At one level, one could see all of these phenomena as legitimate perks of power: you worked hard to get where you are! You deserve gifts and flattery!

But obviously, to think that way would be disastrous – both morally and pragmatically. Morally, it will canker your soul; reveling in privilege turns one into a monster. And pragmatically, it will radically undermine your effectiveness as a leader. Leaders can’t function without the respect of those they lead, and the people you lead will lose all respect for you if they see you treating flattery as your due, or using your position to impose your will on them.

Takeaways and Action Items

• Not letting power go to your head is a constant struggle when you actually have power (or even when people just treat you as if you have power).
• The struggle is constant, but it’s essential to stay engaged. Don’t let down your guard.
• Think back to the last time someone you lead paid you a compliment. How did you respond? If you had been in the other person’s shoes, how would you have interpreted your response? Should it have been different, and if so, how – and why?

Last fall I wrote a post in which I argued for the importance of defaulting to openness and transparency, citing three reasons for such a stance:

1. People really do need to know more than you might think they do. Remember that you don’t fully understand the work of the other people in your organization, including those who report up to you. (You may think you fully understand their work, but you don’t.)
2. Whenever you show yourself to be an information sharer rather than an information hoarder, you gain trust. Then, when you have to keep information indoors later, people are more likely to give you the benefit of the doubt.
3. Your library will run better when its employees are better informed.

However, I also acknowledged that “defaulting to openness does not mean always telling everyone everything.” We all understand that in leadership roles, we’ll often be privy to sensitive personnel, financial, administrative, or other information that can’t be widely shared – or, at least, can’t be widely shared yet. Usually such information is easy to identify: you attend a meeting of academic deans in which a program still in development is discussed prior to its public rollout; you become aware that a library employee may have committed an offense that will lead to disciplinary action; you’re in discussions with a donor who is considering (but has not yet decided on) making a large gift to the library; etc.

But one of the challenges of leadership is that you often have to make judgment calls about what to share broadly within the library, and it’s not obvious what the right decision would be. An employee is out for an extended period because of a family tragedy that he does not wish to have widely discussed – obviously, his colleagues need to know that he’s going to be out, but how much should they be told about the reasons? Or an employee has been accused of financial malfeasance and is on leave while an investigation takes place – is it possible to tell her colleagues anything more than “she’s on leave and it’s not yet clear when she’ll return”?

While there is no decision-making template available to give you step-by-step instructions in every such situation, there are principles you can apply that will help. They include these three:

• Start with institutional policy. Depending on the situation you’re facing, there may well be a “policy fence” around your options – in other words, helpful constraints created for you by university policies. In sensitive situations, it may be wise to start by counseling with whichever campus administrator you report to, and either looking at relevant policy documents together or checking in with whichever other administrator is over finances, personnel, or whatever other area of campus management is relevant to the situation. (Or both.)
• Identify genuine stakeholders (as opposed to “interested parties”). In a post earlier this year I shared the four categories of “interested party” we’ve defined in our library to help us figure out who should have how much say in decision-making. The same principles apply when thinking about who should be informed and who should not be regarding sensitive issues and situations in the library. If, for example, a member of your finance team is under investigation, that may be something the finance manager or controller needs to know (on the other hand, institutional policy might forbid telling them) – but it’s almost certainly not something that the head of collection development needs to know.
• Work closely with HR. If you’re dealing with a sensitive situation in which it’s not clear what you can or should share broadly with your employees, chances are very good that the sensitivity arises from the involvement of personnel. Even delicate financial situations are usually delicate, at least in part, because of the people involved. And of course, your HR manager is also in a good place to help you map out the implications of sharing or not sharing information for those outside of the immediate situation. So as you begin strategizing about whether and how to communicate with your people, it’s always wise to do so in collaboration with your HR manager (and, sometimes, with HR administration outside the library).

None of the principles listed above is likely to surprise someone with experience in library management – however, as all of us can attest, just because they’re obvious doesn’t mean they’re always observed. Good leadership consists, among other things, in keeping principles like these in mind and following them consistently.

Takeaways and Action Items

• You can’t tell everyone everything all the time, and some of the toughest decisions a leader has to make are those that have to do with whom to inform and whom to leave in the dark.
• The first line of appeal is institutional policy: does it offer helpful constraints that forestall certain options? (Probably not, but it might.)
• Think back on a time that you had to make a tough decision about whom to red into a sensitive situation. How did you make that decision? Did it work out well for all involved? If not, what mistakes did you make, and do you have a clear sense of how to avoid them next time?

Most of us are familiar with the important distinction between necessary and sufficient. For example, air is necessary to human life: without it, you’ll quickly die. However, air is not sufficient to sustain human life: if all you have is air, you’ll also die (though much more slowly than if you didn’t have air). 

Let’s think about this principle as it applies to organizational decision-making. In this context, we could talk about the difference between essential questions (those that address necessity) and dispositive questions (those that address sufficiency).

An essential question is one that can eliminate options, but does not provide sufficient information to make a decision between the options that remain. For example: if I have four applicants for a position, and one of them does not meet the basic qualifications for the job, I can eliminate that candidate. (Because meeting the basic qualifications is essential.) However, meeting the basic qualifications is not dispositive: there are multiple candidates who meet those qualifications, so I have to apply other criteria in order to choose one of them.

A dispositive question is one that leads to a decision between available options. For example: among the three candidates for the job who meet the basic qualifications, I have to ask myself “Which of these is the best possible choice?”. That’s a dispositive question, because it leads me to opt for one candidate and eliminate the others.

One of the most fundamental examples of an essential question would be “Is X a good thing to do?” (This is an essential question because the answer must be “yes” in order for the question to advance to the next stage of analysis. If we decide that X is not a good thing to do, then we don’t need to keep talking about X. However, deciding that X would be a good thing to do isn’t enough to tell us whether we should do it, because our resource limitations mean we can’t do all the good things.)

Once the goodness of X has been established by the essential question, then it leads to a dispositive one. For example: “Does this good thing represent the best possible use of our limited resources in light of other demands?” (This question is dispositive because if – and only if – the answer to the question is “yes,” the resource steward will proceed with the allocation of resources. If the steward decides “no,” that doesn’t mean that X wasn’t good, nor does it mean that the steward doesn’t understand that X is good, nor does it mean that the steward wouldn’t have made the allocation if there had been more resources available. It means that we had no choice but to select a single option from among multiple good ones.)

This might sound like a stultifyingly complicated way of thinking, but in fact the process I’ve described is how all organizations make resource allocation decisions when they’re behaving in a more or less rational way. They don’t necessarily use the terminology I’ve described (“Phil, let’s move on from the essential question to the dispositive question about which venue we should select for our company retreat”), but their decision-making process follows the logic I’ve outlined, first determining which courses of action are desirable and then trying to choose the best (most cost-effective, most mission-aligned, etc.) of the remaining options. 

When organizations are not making resource allocation choices rationally, they make them in any number of other ways. For example:

• First come, first served: They allocate resources based on essential questions (like “Is this a good project?”) as they arise, until they run out of resources. This approach makes life easier for leaders, because they don’t have to make tough decisions based on relative merits; they only have to make the much easier decision about “goodness” – and then, when you run out of resources, they don’t have to make any tough decisions at all and can blame the lack of resources when worthy ideas are rejected. Unfortunately, this approach also means that projects are funded not according to their place in the institution’s strategic priorities, but according to the timing of their emergence, which is not a rational or mission-centered criterion.
• Personality: They allocate resources to the projects that are advocated for by people with the strongest personalities. Strength: this approach makes life easier for the decision-maker – at least, until it disadvantages another person with a strong personality. Weakness: it puts the decision-maker’s social comfort ahead of institutional priorities.
• Ideology of sub-institutional decision-makers: They allocate resources based on the ideological beliefs of people in stewardship positions. Now, one might say that ideology is just one way of determining priority, which is true, and in that sense it may just be another word for “priorities” – but what matters is whether the determinant ideology is that of the institution (and therefore expressed in its institutional priorities) or that of an individual with direct control over allocation decisions (and therefore may or may not represent institutional priorities). So, for example: if a manager makes assignments within his department based not on the library’s stated mission and priorities, but rather based on his own opinions about what the library should be doing, that would be problematic.

Takeaways and Action Items

• In all decision-making situations, it’s vital to keep in mind the difference between necessary/essential and sufficient/dispositive questions.
• Most proposals and options that meet the “essential” criteria will fail to meet the “sufficient” criteria.
• Analyze the decision-making processes in your library. What criteria do you apply when deciding how to allocate scarce resources such as budget, space, and staff time? Are those allocation decisions made in a rational way that reflects institutional mission and priorities?