Risky Business Creating a Nimble Culture

This presentation was by Denver Public Library. They restructured their organization based upon IDEO design thinking - experiment, empathize with community, prototype and fail and try again. Sound familiar? Throughout the presentation I was mentally checkmarking all the Rancho practices which Denver was outlining in their presentation. Rancho is a pretty nimble culture!

 In 2013 they had IDEO training (check) They melded IDEO techniques with the organizational restrructuring ideas from John Kotter. We watched a video of John Kotter who explained that the organization traditionally is like a solar system with groups sprouting off from main groups until the organization sinks by becoming stuck in the same routine and bogged down by more and more teams such as strategic planning groups. He advocated that in a faster moving environment that we need smaller organizational structures to survive and thrive.

Denver decided that there were four changes that need to be made to their organization : the need for many change agents (about 10% of their organization) - a want to and get to attitude changing to a "love to" mindset - head not heart change to genuine desire - more leadership, not just more management. 

Denver formed cross divisional and cross departmental teams for each branch. There was a manager for operational work and a manager over a strategic initiative. 8 strategic initiatives were identified they had over 100 members to tackle each initiative. And anyone could apply from pages all away up to librarians.some examples of their initiatives were: customer loyalty, adult and family programming, and services to new immigrants.

Some of the lessons learned - make the teams smaller. Too many people and adding some discordant personalities resulted in poorly functioning teams. Supervision of staff - staff direction - getting tasks done somewhat difficult if staff supervisors were not on same team - caused staff confusion.

Denver also offers pop-up grants of $2500. These are internal grants much like our staff Internal Staff   Innovation fund grants. Any staff could apply, applications reviewed by executive staff. They also hold pop your mind meetings - held once a month featuring either library staff or community members just talking about things that are happening in the community.

To sum up - having small teams working on initiatives that are important in the community, asking staff to step up and take more leadership roles, taking risks, supporting staff growth with internal grant opportunities and cross departmental and cross divisional collaboration are vital to today's library.