Rethinking what we do and how we do it: systems thinking strategies for library Leadership.

Library leaders at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo (Cal Poly--SLO) facilitate an organisational learning process grounded in systems thinking and fortified by information literacy. This 'thought leadership' approach employs data-driven dialogue to inform repurposing resources, redirecting programming, restructuring staff, and retooling expertise. Rethinking activities builds transferable workplace capacity through active learning experiences focused on interpreting and applying user-centered data.

This two-year project, begun in September 2003, embeds organisational learning within a systems context to transition thinking from a service to learning and teaching orientation. Organisational change is informed and furthered, iteratively, through identifying and framing questions, gathering and evaluating information, organising and synthesising it, and, finally, presenting insights to inform and advise. This practice shifts thinking among library faculty and staff members and prepares them to make higher-order contributions to 'holistic educational outcomes.' (1)

Organisational Change Context

Building on learning organisation initiatives elsewhere in the United States (2) and prompted by diminished usage and declining budgets, Cal Poly Library leaders recognised that 'better thinking' (3) was needed to ensure survival amidst increasing competition for institutional resources. Efforts to transform deeply entrenched, outdated service assumptions rely on a number of working definitions which characterise our systemic change framework. An 'organisation', for instance, is understood to be a purposeful social interaction system. (4) This definition emerges out of 'soft' systems methodology principles and practices, which--in contrast to 'hard' mechanistic approaches--explicitly acknowledge the human dimension of workplace environments. Within this context, our applied research approach uses soft systems thinking tools to intentionally initiate and sustain information exchange that cultivates collective 'sense making' to inform aligned actions.

Our organisational change activities intend to establish sustainable social interactions which investigate and negotiate interests, judgements, and decisions, through which people learn interdependently (5) and by which shared meanings evolve. We encourage 'communication', including facilitated conversations, to explore and negotiate differences, through which meaning is produced. (6) Our experiences suggest that dialogue-producing conversations, in contrast to monologues, improve decision-making and coordinated action. In our research, we consider culture and communication together because, for organisational members to communicate and cooperate, they must share enough common assumptions and standards, sufficiently representative of social reality, to make aligned judgments and actions possible. Therefore, 'culture', in this sense, consists of a shared basis of appreciation and action developed through communication within an organisational system. (7)

While our approach may be viewed as specific to the Cal Poly situation, we believe it may also be informing to other library organisations as, in the most general sense, we investigate the question: How can conventional academic libraries evolve into nimble 21st century learning organisations? In response, we apply information-intensive 'soft' systems thinking, fortified by relational information literacy, to reinvent organisational structure, service priorities, and staff assignments. We seek to discover how organisational leaders can co-create workplace spaces, places, and processes to support application and advancement of information literacy, knowledge generation, and collaborative learning among faculty, staff, and students.

Our research approach assumes that before a workplace can change, organisational members must learn how to see and how to think differently. Resulting new conceptions will produce the behavioural and attitudinal changes which over time and with practice can ensure continuous sustainable improvement. Cal Poly Library leaders' intervention in 'how it's always been here' (8) intends, therefore, to create a workplace environment sufficiently robust to support discovery that 'it is the circulation of knowledge--not book circulation counts!--that produces learning.' (9)

Systemic Thinking Fundamentals

While a variety of organisational development methodologies exist, (10) we chose Soft Systems Methodology, developed by Peter Checkland and his associates in the United Kingdom, because of its proven success in promoting organisational inquiry and learning. In addition, its abiding focus on the process of converting data into information and knowledge advances participants' information literacy, as expressed in the Australian and New Zealand Institute for Information Literacy (ANZIIL) framework. (11) This construct moves the North American standards (12) to the next level by explicitly placing information literacy within a continuum of generic skills which ideally advance concurrently with disciplinary competence--ie 'information literacy is necessarily demonstrated in a context and within a domain of content.' (13) This ANZIIL underpinning has informed the retooling and reorienting of Cal Poly Library faculty and staff.

Soft Systems Methodology (SSM) was also deemed particularly suitable because it does not require the establishment of clear goals before problem resolving can begin. Rather, it maps onto the normal managerial tasks of considering the 'mess', suggesting ways forward and seeking agreements for action. It offers an excellent way of exploring purposes, employing a robust suite of SSM tools such as rich pictures, root definitions, and conceptual…