by Sharon Morris, ALA, Colorado State Library

Thinking about the future is an odd thing. How do we imagine something that has not yet been? The best thing to do is to open our minds up to new ways of thinking. Below are some strategies to try.

1. Embrace uncertainty. The thirteenth century poet, Rumi, said, “Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment.” In other words, to see things differently, one must start with confusion.
2. Take time to dream.  Take a walk, stare out the window, sit quietly and let your mind float from subject to subject. Notice any images or vivid memories that come to mind. Be nowhere and everywhere.  Imagine and dream.
3. Talk it out. Share your ideas about the future with other future-minded people. They will keep you looking ahead. They will help you expand your own thoughts and ideas. Also, listen to them.  It is often easier to see what’s next for others than for ourselves.
4. Join forces. Form a confab with others who read about the future so you can keep each other up on things. Share blogs like this one with each other. Schedule time regularly to talk about new innovations and ideas that each of you is discovering.
5. Don’t just imagine, try stuff.  If you have an idea, do something to make it happen. Jump in and explore. Start small with a pilot project. Even mistakes and failure can lead to wildly unexpected innovation.
6. Read widely. Review blogs, journals, and publications from other fields to determine how they envision the future. This kind of environmental scanning can help you identify common themes and issues that may indicate the salient future trends.
7. Be curious about problems. At times, issues in organizations point to a need for systemic change. Finding opportunities where others see only barriers will open new paths to the future.
8. Give up perfection. We no longer have time to be mired in the drive to do things perfectly. We have to do what is good enough now so we save time to explore what can be.
9. Use our values. When you hear of a new technology, tool, or resource, view it through the lens of our values: access for all, intellectual freedom, privacy, and intellectual property rights. Will the emerging technology or innovation enhance or challenge those values? If there is a conflict, how might you resolve it?
10. See space. When learning to draw, students are encouraged to sketch the space around an object instead of the object. This gets them past their preconceived notions of what a common place object “looks like” and actually gets them to see the real shape. This attention to space rather than the object can apply to many things. You can notice the silence between words as much as the conversation. You can give attention to the time between activities as well as the activities. This builds awareness at a different level and opens us up to perceiving things in new ways.

–If you have remarks or would like to contribute your own strategies for being future-minded, please add them to the comments below.–

by John Creighton

20^th Century centralized institutions were created to solve a specific set of problems:  Scarce resources, high production and carrying costs, cumbersome logistics and limited (by today’s standards) communications.

Traditional libraries are a perfect example of a centralized institution. The cost to produce and store books, periodicals and other information was expensive and required a large amount of space. Very few people could afford to purchase their own reading collection or had the shelf space to store more than a few books. The solution: public libraries. Communities pooled their resources (taxes) to provide people with access to information.

When people share resources, it is necessary to create a set of rules and regulations to ensure fairness and equity in how resources are distributed and used. Libraries made rules such as “a person can only check out a book for one week so others have a chance to read it, too.” A system of penalties and, sometimes, rewards were put in place to encourage people to follow the rules.

It was and is the responsibility of public boards and administrators of centralized institutions to decide how to allocate scarce resources. Many public decision makers followed the mass market axiom of, “What will help (or appeal to) the most people for the longest time.” Controversy emerged when people couldn’t agree on how to spend their pooled resources. Should the library buy a controversial book or not?

Centralized institutions also need a set of rules to function as an enterprise. For instance, communities typically could neither afford nor wanted to keep their libraries open twenty-four hours per day. Libraries set hours of operation so people would know when they could access information.

For nearly a century, perhaps more, people have been satisfied with this relationship with public and private institutions because centralization was the most practical thing to do.  People deferred to boards to make decisions; they conformed to the institution’s rules and regulations, and embraced the systems of penalties and rewards (how many readers remember the importance of perfect attendance at school). Our language developed to reflect our willingness (even if we grumbled) to conform to the needs of the centralized institution: Working nine-to-five, working for the weekend, spring break, summer vacation, 10 o’clock news, morning paper.

People’s willingness to conform to the needs of centralized institutions is waning. People have lost their patience with public boards and other centralized decision makers. People aren’t willing to conform to the institution’s hours of operation. They want access to information now, on their own time. And, people ignore penalties and rewards. For instance, few schools award “perfect attendance” and many parents scoff at attendance policies.

Why have people lost their patience with 20^th Century centralized institutions? The problems these organizations were designed to solve are less severe or non-existent.  Put another way, it is economically possible and logistically practical for people to get what they want, when they want, how they want it.

Resources are more abundant than they were in the past. The costs to produce and carry goods are lower. The digitization of books and information is wonderful example of these shifts.  The marginal costs to produce, ship and store a book are all moving toward zero.

People are less interested in pooling their resources to buy things like books because more and more people can afford to purchase and store their own.  People are less interested in the product that appeals to the masses and more interested in products customized to their individual interests and needs. And, there is not as much need for people to agree on how to allocate scarce resources. Don’t like the history textbook the local school board chose for your child? There are several others online and the cost is next to free – or soon will be.

Indeed, people have come to expect options and choices. The idea of “one size fits all” is considered as old as the steam engine train. And, people’s growing expectations are not ending with choice. Increasingly, people expect to design, produce and manage their own experiences.  They will gravitate toward institutions that help them do these things.

21^st Century institutions will need to help people solve a new set of personal and social problems. On the personal side of the ledger, the challenges of growing importance include how to help individuals:

• Identify, organize and create options
• Make informed and satisfying choices
• Gain access to the tools of production, distribution, and collaboration
• Form ad hoc, short term and long term communities
• Sustain action over time.

On the social side of the ledger, the challenges are more difficult because the demand to solve them is not on the forefront of people’s minds. But, to ensure the ongoing health of our communities and our democracy, we will need to figure out ways to bridge differences between an increasingly diverse and segregated society and foster the democratic skills to ensure that we are able to make decisions around resources we still must share.

This is the challenge for libraries and other public institutions. How to make the shift from 20^th Century centralized practices to 21^st Century platform practices.

John Creighton, a Longmont, Colorado leadership consultant, writes on community life and public leadership at johncr8on.com. He can be found on Twitter @johncr8on and on Facebook.  See John’s presentation, “Emboldened Individuals – Platform Organizations” on SlideShare and read more of his work in Dispatches From The Heartland at the Communities at the Washington Times.

Pam Sandlian Smith, Library Director, Anythink Libraries, Thornton, CO

 “Gone is the time when companies could react quietly by just managing their assets.  Gone is the time when the success of the future was modeled on the past.  Disruption is a way of unearthing new opportunities.  It means being nonconformist, unorthodox, rebellious. It means always trying to change the rules.  It means believing that a company can transform its future through the sheer power of an idea.”   

Jean-Marie Dru, Beyond Disruption: Changing the Rules in the Marketplace

When the future is uncertain, to some people the safest thing is either to do nothing new, or simply accelerate strategies that worked in the past.  As marketing genius, Jean-Marie Dru notes, our future success cannot be modeled on the past.  To be future ready requires a willingness to rethink the rules, to be disruptive.  To be future ready requires a willingness to invent a future, hopefully one that works better than the present or the past.

Imagining our future at Anythink Libraries required a team of people who were willing to abandon library structures that were not working for our customers, or were not sustainable in a world of limited resources.  It required a collaboration of people who had infinite trust in each other’s abilities and perspectives.  It required a willingness to live with ambiguity as we were challenged to find the right answer, not the first answer, or the safe answer, but the answer that fit the criteria of a new paradigm. 

Instead of designing a library for books, we designed a library for idea people.  A place for people to connect, interact, discover, even play with information.  Playing with ideas, creating a place to think, discover and honor one’s inherent sense of creativity required a rethinking of our roles and responsibilities.  Our internal manifesto indicates a responsibility very different from merely organizing information:

You are not just an employee, volunteer or board member.  You do not merely catalog books, organize periodicals and manage resources.  You are the gateway into the mind of the idea people who come to our facilities to find or fuel a spark.

Part Wizard, Part Genius, Part Explorer

It is your calling to trespass into the unknown and come back with a concrete piece someone can hold onto, turn over, and use to fuel their mind and soul.

As Anythinkers, we are becoming future ready by exploring the responsibility of being part wizard, part genius, part explorer.

by Ryan Jones, Pubget

Researchers are turning to free search engines over licensed databases because of familiarity, simplicity and access to free content. By starting there, though, they face a fragmented experience across free and paid resources that’s fraught with dead ends, different formats and broken user interfaces. They also may pass up a perfect resource because it doesn’t crop up on the first page of the many results on Google. These shortcomings make up the Google Gap.

The Google Gap (or PubMed Gap or Science Direct Gap, etc) has been well explored by the library community. Technologies like link resolvers and federated search have cropped up to bridge the gap—with limited success. Link resolvers often mean errors in holdings (subscription collections), confusing resource choices and more dead ends. Meanwhile, federated search solutions connect resources at too high a level to provide a satisfactory experience and ignore holdings, the quality of metadata and the format, and usability of content.

So if link resolvers and federated search won’t do, what can bridge the gap between closed and web-based data? The “what” has to be something with enough computing power to provide a simple experience, yet span the web, free and paid content.  It has to be something with a high understanding of all the content types that sit at the end of each search task. The answer, it turns out is not a website or database at all. 

It’s an app.

Apps, as you’ve come to experience them on your phone or desktop, host more purpose-built code and processing power than traditional websites (as Chris Anderson wrote in this excellent piece in Wired ). Apps can provide enough intelligence to overcome content fragmentation among the user, the web, and library resources to deliver the simple yet powerful experience users ask for. They connect content destinations in highly customized ways, with intelligence, and can thereby standardize user experience across disparate resources. Apps can perform tasks in the background, fetching resources or content in anticipation of users’ needs. Apps can present a familiar and simple interface to the user.

This extra intelligence benefits the library, too. Apps can provide comprehensive data from both users and platforms, which in turn means better content management and more efficient libraries.

At Pubget, we think more intelligence is needed in the way users, the web, and resources are connected. As Chris Anderson says, “The World Wide Web is in decline, as simpler, sleeker services — think apps — are less about the searching and more about the getting.” At Pubget, we think there’s an app for that.

Ryan Jones is the President of Pubget, which provides full-text access to life sciences research. You can follow them on twitter.

by Christian Gray, Southern California Chapter, Pharmaceutical & Health Technology Division

My Future Ready tool kit: I have not rated, ranked nor explained where these links will take you or what value you might find… I truly believe that a key attribute to being Future Ready is a healthy curiosity. Please comment on those you find interesting or useful.

www.cluetrain.com

http://blog.duarte.com

www.slideshare.net

www.wikinomics.com

www.technologyreview.com

http://gist.com

www.fmyi.com

www.mailchimp.com

www.mindomo.com

www.jigsaw.com

www.yammer.com

www.roomtoread.org

www.ted.com

www.boingboing.com

http://radar.oreilly.com

www.techcrunch.com

www.presentationzen.com

www.tweetdeck.com

www.altimetergroup.com

www.wordle.net

www.salesforce.com

www.animoto.com

Christian Gray | Business Development
Reprints Desk, Inc. | The Content Workflow Company regarding SLA, I’m also the former Vendor Relations Chair

by Dee Magnoni, Boston Chapter

Being Future Ready can mean many things. Perhaps I have a great strategic plan in place. Or I’ve created strong partnerships, have developed & encouraged my staff, and have invested in the right technology. Personally, I believe that one of the most important aspects of being future ready is having the right frame of mind. I have long been an advocate of reading, listening, and viewing from a wide array of resources across many disciplines. You never know where your next spark will flash from. So first, have a broad mind that is open to new ideas.

To have an open mind, you must have a rested mind. Years ago I read about temporal exhaustion in a piece of futurist literature. When we are temporally exhausted we have scheduled our lives so tight with meetings, errands and obligations that we have no time to stop, breathe and relax. What to do? Think meditation, mindfulness, yoga, deep breathing, or that ever-valuable counting to ten before replying. These tools help us to slow down, to remember what is important, and to allow real thinking and creativity to enter our brains.

Finally, I attended a live TEDx event this past October at Woods Hole (http://tedxwoodshole.org). One of the speakers was Dan Ariely, author of Predictably Irrational. He talked about how our behavior in the future is always perfect. Yes, we’ll write that report. Yes, we’ll organize that meeting. Yes, we’ll get our budget in on time – and balanced! Our current behavior is the problem. We trade in long term benefits for short term gains. We spend more than our allotted time on social media rather than writing that report. We procrastinate. If we were completely rational, we would analyze the long term benefits and always make the correct short term decisions. We aren’t completely rational, thus the predictably irrational. What is the solution? Dan suggested rewards for short term good behavior, and talked about his own illness and the difficulty of treatment. His reward for suffering through treatment with severe side-effects three times a week for a year and a half was to watch movies that he would enjoy during those times. Dan’s talk was a true eureka moment for me. To be truly future ready, I must make my present behavior as close to my future behavior as possible.

In 2011 I will be Future Ready by continuing to read widely and watch TED talks, I will find time to slow down and recharge my mind, and I will find short term rewards to help motivate me to make my current behavior in synch with my future goals.

Dee Magnoni is the Library Director at Olin College of Engineering. She is active in numerous divisions and caucuses of SLA and is presently Chair of the Leadership & Management Division.