What factors need to be considered when developing an innovation committee in a library setting?

Particularly when the committee is charged to be the think tank for the library system.

CVRader

• management
• innovation

Comments

Answer by dsalo

Phew. Big question. Here are the assumptions I'm working from (correct me if any are wrong):

• The charge is set and cannot be changed at this juncture.
• The group is supposed to feed new projects and/or services back into the rest of the staff (as opposed to a Clayton Christensen-style independent offshoot).

Process would be my first Big Question. Who suggests ideas to the innovation committee, and how do they do it? Once an idea is on the table, how does the committee make a yea-or-nay decision on it, and who has (de facto or de jure) veto power on a yea decision? Are promising ideas piloted? How? For how long? How are pilot projects assessed for promotion to standard library services? Must all changes the library or any segment thereof are contemplating feed through this committee? If not, which changes do and which don't?

(It needs to be clear from the outset that pilot-project failure is not only an option, it's an expectation. The only alternatives to that are bad ones: only the blandest, timidest ideas survive, or ideas that are bad or unworkable for whatever reason but still make it through the committee never manage to die. Fail, sweep up after the failure, move on with analysis but sans blame.)

Committee membership would be my second Big Question. I've seen "innovation committees" that were cliques. I've seen ones whose members were honestly desirous of innovating, but whose excluded colleagues believed the committee was a clique, or felt excluded for other reasons ("nobody from [x library division] is on that group, so clearly they don't care what we think!"). I've seen some with no members from management; they came up with wonderful ideas but had no authority or resources to put them in practice. This is a hard political problem; one way to attack it is to rotate membership on innovation committees, so that no one gets entrenched and everyone gets heard. Alternately, for each proposal, figure out which sections of staff would be affected and put a representative from each affected section on the project group for that specific project.

Change management would be my third Big Question. There's no point in starting a think tank if it's surrounded by immovable cement roadblocks... and that's as far as I'm willing to take that metaphor. Is the think tank responsible for selling an innovation? To whom (administration, staff, patrons)? What happens when the think tank has to deal with unjustified change resistance (n.b. not all change resistance is unjustified)?

Good luck. I have to admit my instinctive reaction to this question was "here there bee dragons."

Comments

• ksclarke: My instinctive reaction was (in big bold letters): INNOVATION DOESN'T HAPPEN THROUGH (OR ANYWHERE NEAR A) COMMITTEE; try something else, like giving people a percentage of their work time to play with new ideas they've been thinking about...
• dsalo: I wholeheartedly agree. But sometimes in libraries, a committee is what you're gonna get. /sigh/
• dsalo: The thought occurred that another kind of dysfunctional innovation committee is "put all the troublemakers in one place so they can be safely ignored." The sad thing is, the "troublemakers" usually aren't trying to make trouble, just change.
• CVRader: Yes, I know, yet here I am anyway. We are not dysfunctional yet, and we have a good mix of Power and Thought, as well as New and Established to get at least the largest problems in the open.

Answer by mbklein

I think dsalo's answer is a very good one.

One important qualification, IMO, for committee membership is for the member to be able to step outside his/her more regular role within the library. Yes, catalogers and web services librarians and managers and public service librarians should all be represented, but they need to hang their separate hats at the door when the "innovation talk" starts. You need to be able to discuss ideas from a "benefit first"/"default yes" position, without anyone immediately jumping in with "Yes, but this will have a disproportionately negative impact on my division!"

There will be plenty of time to knock down/pare down ideas for reasons of cost, feasibility, fairness, workload, and everything else. The people you brainstorm with have got to be able to put all of that aside and give ideas time to breathe, or the Innovation Committee will just become a Stuff That Will Never Happen and Hard Feelings Committee.

Comments

• dsalo: Re "default yes:" Bethany Nowviskie of the UVa Libraries has a wonderful take on it at http://nowviskie.org/2012/lazy-consensus/

Answer by Joe Atzberger

Basic stuff:

• Scope: The potential problemset facing libraries is enormous. What part are you actually working on? Do members agree on that?
• Efficiency: What part of the innovation is actually improved by having a committee and not just, say, a working group, task force or hackathon? A committee is a political body. It is suboptimal for creative and engineering processes. What political problem are you solving? Are you stuck trying to solve an engineering problem through "discussion" or a political problem through code? This comes back to scope.
• Power: Imagine you succeed and determine some damn thing is the best course of action. What happens? Can you actually hire people, set policy or acquire/deploy resources? Another way of saying this is: what is the output of group? Is it adequate to the scope of the problem or are you getting all the responsibility and none of the authority?
• Skillz: Interestingly, I don't think you need to staff the committee with mainly hardcore engineers. In practice the main value of a committee member is bullshit detection (because any chump can repeat what the last vendor salesman has been telling them -- if you say you need innovation, they are sure to have some for sale) and a strong understanding of your business.
• Recognition problem: innovation is already happening, both inside your organization(s) and elsewhere. Would you know it if you saw it? You should be able to find it in your problem-space and identify why it isn't already sufficient to be your solution, or the basis for your solution. This is the Turing Test of your raison d'être.

Other than that, "Innovation Committee" is a pretty funny joke in just two words.

Comments

• dsalo: indeed. it's not quite "jumbo shrimp" but it's darn close.

Answer by Sam K

Opinion: The committee should be tasked with as little as possible because committees are typically terrible at getting things done and worse at innovation. Group brainstorming doesn't work {citation needed} so don't even try it.

From actual experience: Be sure it's very easy to submit and resubmit ideas to the committee, with no negative consequences.

The committee should quickly put the ideas through a transparent process/rubric/matrix that everyone understands. Clarifications should be requested at the first sign of confusion.

Ideas deemed good the committee should redirect ASAP to anyone(s) who actually Makes Things Go.

The committee should be comprised of staff with a wide variety of roles for organization-wide Innovation.

Comments