Libraries and COVID-19

IFLA provides a pretty comprehensive overview of the impact of COVID-19 on libraries and the known factors involved in returning to something like business as usual.

https://www.ifla.org/covid-19-and-libraries

Baby steps out of lockdown.

Resuming business after closing a service — particularly after an unexpected closure — is always more work than the closing was. There are all the consequences of the closure to be tidied up, all the preparations for reopening, all the things that need catching up with before it's business as usual.

And then there's the additional complication where nobody knows if it's necessarily safe to go back to business as usual. And whether or not it will stay safe. It's like working in a building where you can't be sure there's not an unexploded bomb in the cellar or that somebody won't accidentally bring one in with them.

I suspect all returning workforces will have a tricky tension between the popular idea that they've had a rest so should have plenty of energy and the exhausting reality that lockdown will have released a lot of adrenaline over an extended period without the options of fight or flight. The challenge for managers is:

• Not to fall into the trap of making the assumption people have had a rest; 
• Making sure staff don't fall into that trap and start beating on themselves and/or colleagues; 
• And also watching out for their own wellbeing.

The return to business as usual needs to be treated as a managed change process.

• Each step must be specified, planned, and have a rollback plan in case of failure. 
• The physical and mental safety of staff and customers need to be success factors as much as much more than the delivery of intended outcomes. 
• An essential component is transparency: being upfront right from the start that business as usual will be a while coming and that each step taken towards it is dependent on the safety of staff and customers. It's imperative that all stakeholders are told this loud and clear.

There will be a lot of pressure for a sudden abracadabra transformation back to business as usual. It is the responsibility of senior managers and politicians to resist that. (Some will resist the responsibility or even be the loudest voices demanding a swift return to the old status quo. They will be godparents to the local 2nd and 3rd pandemic spikes.)

And then, of course, there's the question of how to manage staff who've worked throughout the lockdown. They'll need a lot of help processing the experience and returning back to normal. That in itself is a significant task and may need support from external agencies. Added to that is the need to manage the relationship between those who worked through the lockdown and those who didn't, the risk of resentments ("We had to work and you didn't," "Why are they getting special treatment?" etc.) needs to be managed out.

All of this is a big management load and I'm not convinced every library service is going to have enough management resource to do this by themselves, especially as many of these issues will apply to the managers as much as the people they are managing. There will need to be a national matrix of support coming in from both library and corporate local government perspectives. I'm hoping that the various national associations, professional organisations, unions and government departments are working on resources to help local managers address both the operational issues involved in the safe resumption of services and, just as importantly, the personnel issues involved in returning back to normal business in times that are very far from normal.

Sustaining change

Encouraging and managing bottom-up change doesn't have the razzmatazz of a big transformation programme and looks (but not necessarily is) inefficient at the input end but the output is more efficient and sustainable. A culture of continuous small, incremental change and review is healthier and more effective than the traditional years of stasis punctuated by short periods of stress and upheaval.

Here are a couple of useful takes on this:

• People Aren’t Sick Of Change. They’re Just Sick Of Change Programmes

• Minimum Viable Transformation: Change should be Small and Imperfect

The Normalisation of Deviance: How pushing your luck becomes the new normal

There was a useful thread on Twitter about the normalisation of deviance, the idea that if you get away with something outside the accepted norm and gain advantage by doing so then it becomes the new norm. In this case decisions made to cut corners or push technology beyond its specified limits eventually led to disaster but this needn't always be the case: it could be that similar decisions in a difference context might have lead to more streamlined processes or an easier life. How can we predict the outcome beforehand? Very often we can't, but we can — and must — manage the associated risks.

Perfection paralysis is always a potential barrier to change. "Good enough" is usually good enough but realistically there will be times when we have to cut a corner or two to get to "Good enough for now" within the available time and resources. It's as well to know the difference.

• "Good enough" — Job done to the specified requirements. Leave well alone and don't break anything unless the changes are part of a managed transition process.

• "Good enough for now" — Job done near enough to the specified requirements but the job needs to be reviewed to make sure it really is good enough and that the cut corners don't have any nasty unintended consequences. Then do a lessons learned to find out if there are any unanticipated benefits, remembering to look at both the processes and the outcomes.

"Good enough for now" is your deviation from the norm. Even if everything turns out to be hunky dory you'll want to amber list this in your risk register to flag up that the next change process needs to factor in the impacts you've identified during the lessons learned.

Archaeology

I'm at the tidying the folders stage of my current job, which is actually the tidying the folders stage of three successive jobs. And being the hoarder that I am I'm bumping into quite a few old memories.

Like the correspondence between myself and other library systems managers as we tried to manage the ambitious project of rolling out a lot of internet-ready public PCs to libraries that weren't networked and weren't laid out for this sort of provision whilst managing inconsistent mixes of conservatism and high (sometimes entirely unrealisable) expectation amongst our management teams. The implementation of the People's Network was easily the single biggest gear shift in English public libraries in the period between the 1964 Act and the current dissolution of the public library service so it was never going to be an easy thing to be able to manage at a local level. And it wasn't. By this stage of the game we had access to email (I know, but it's a long time ago) so we'd share the highs and lows, reassuring each other that we weren't alone in having problems and often coming up with solutions and/or ways of managing stakeholders' perceptions of how things were going and which were the priorities to be really worrying about (something I was ever so grateful for after a meeting that was planned to be about building the business case for the council's investment in the project became a three-hour discussion on the best placement of one desk at a particular library!)

Jocular mentions of the popular board game People's Network-o! became so frequent that in the end we had to have a go at mocking it up. My stab at it is typically over-complicated. A colleague from Yorkshire came up with the most elegant version: a grid of 50 squares, all of which said: "Go back to Start."

That implementation was bloody hard work but ultimately it was worth it. In many ways, even after so long, I think libraries are still only nibbling at the potential they have with the network. Personally, I was slow to realise how important having all libraries as UKOnline centres was going to become; a lot of brilliant and too-often very low-key work has been done on the ground to tackle the digital divide and go a long way towards making digital inclusion more than just a phrase to be included in bid documents. More disappointing has been the general realignment of the traditional reference and information services (though as always there's good work around if you look for it). This is starting to be addressed in some of the SCL's national offers. If the public library service survives the ravages of Austerity we may yet see the full fruition of the network's potential.

Change management: I'm asking you questions because I'm trying to help you get it right

If you were to say to me: "You have to make the following changes to your library management system," my response would be: "Perhaps. But not yet." This isn't me being precious or obstructive; this is me doing my job. There are times when the brown stuff is hitting the fan and you have to do something in a hurry but most of the time it isn't; and even when it is you need to go back and check your workings-out when the fuss has died down.

If you're working in an ITIL environment — and I am — the assumption has to be that you do what the customer asks, so long as it doesn't screw up the integrity of the system that you're managing. So I'd need to ask you a series of questions to make sure that it doesn't. It's important to point out that under ITIL it doesn't matter whether or not the requested change plays Hob with the business; so long as the system remains intact my job would be done. So, for instance, if you were to ask me to set the library loan period to two hours, with a £100 per hour overdue rate I'd be perfectly entitled to raise my eyebrows and ask: "Are you sure?" but the default position is that the change would be made. The customer is always right, within the confines of their rôle and competencies. (I'm not being "neoliberal" here: "customer" in this context has a particular definition.)

That's the principle of the thing. In reality it's a bit more complicated because we want to avoid the dialogue: "It doesn't work." "It does work, it just doesn't do what you wanted it to do." This is a dismal and unproductive conversation which could do serious damage to the working relationship so we make the effort to avoid it. So I'll ask a few more questions:

"What do you want to do?"
It's astonishing how often this question causes a problem. If you don't know what you want to do, how will you know when you've done it? How will you know if the proposed change will address the issue to hand? And if it is the solution to a problem, is it the best solution? You'd be surprised how often the first applied solution to come along becomes accepted as an essential compnent of the process, regardless of the impact on the efficiency or effectiveness of the business. Just because you know how to pick a lock within two minutes just with the aid of a hair pin doesn't mean you'd necessarily want to throw your front door key away.

"Who does this affect and are they OK with it?"
Systems and services don't live in hermetically-sealed bubbles. At least have a think about who's involved and/or do an outline impact analysis on the back of a fag packet. And do make sure that anyone affected by the change knows about it and what it means to them. If the impacts are big and scary enough you may need to sketch out a communication strategy for them.

"What happens if it goes wrong?"
Give the risks a degree of respect. Don't assume nothing could go wrong or they'll come and bite you on the bum. Make sure you know what could happen if it goes wrong; what the impact would be; and that you have a Plan B, a safety net and/or the capacity to go back to where you started from.

"What do you mean by...?"
Make sure you're talking about the same thing with the same meaning. "Better," "Improved" and "Modernise" are words that should be deprecated in this conversation: what do they mean in the working context? For instance, a set of catalogue records may be more complete, with every tag full of data; or may exhibit a purer adherence to current cataloguing standards; or may be Dewey classified to fifteen decimals, but is it actually better? For whom? You may need to sketch out a quality description document for changes to key data or even a quality plan if you're talking about large-scale fundamental changes.

"How will you know if it's worked?"
Because we want to avoid that dark and dismal dialogue, right?