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Analyzing your organizational context using multiple frames

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I just returned from a great program that used concepts from Reframing Academic Leadership by Lee Bolman and Joan Gallos to  encourage the analysis of complex organizational situations using multiple perspectives or “frames”:

  • Structural – organizations viewed as complex machines; leader as analyst/architect, strategic emphasis on planning/analysis/implementation; focus on policies/rules/logic.
  • Human Resources – organizations viewed as families; leader as coach/catalyst/partner; strategic emphasis on building relationships/facilitation/empowerment; focus on communication/teamwork/skills.
  • Political –  organizations viewed as “jungles”; leader as advocate/negotiator; strategic emphasis on networking/attracting allies/defusing opposition; focus on building power base/gaining access to key players.
  • Symbolic – organizations viewed as “theaters”; leader as visionary/artisan; strategic emphasis on symbols/rituals/stories; focus on creating meaning/vision.

We all have our typical or preferred frames that we instinctively use to understand our organizational environment.  However, if we rely only on our preferred frame(s), we can easily misunderstand or misinterpret the situation and miss the big picture.    “Reframing” involves purposefully examining situations using all four frames to make sure that we are getting the full picture and identifying solutions that address the most important issues.

While targeted at leaders, I think that these frames are useful for understanding your organizational context regardless of where you are in the organizational hierarchy.

 

 

 

CRL webinar on Text/Data Mining, Libraries, and Online Publishers

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The majority of DSOT’ers attended this event in July:

http://www.crl.edu/events/9347

Direct YouTube play:

(Ann Okerson made some real good remarks on librarian involvement @1:08-1:15 or so)

Think of text mining as “smart indexing” or “smart information retrieval”; data mining as “smart research” or “smart knowledge discovery”.

Gist: more automation, more discovery, for one goal: support better (less time, more results) research. (imagine the pain of reading 20 papers a day, as a human – i’d be happy to let my dogs do it if they can write me back a report with keywords and relations. fortunately, in addition to dogs, i have something called a computer, with programs)

Challenges: one platform; standardization of content format; open access vs. subscription content; licensing metadata; cross-disciplinary research (terms, context)

Resources to follow up with if you are real interested in the topic:

  1. http://www.publishingresearch.net/
  2. http://www.niso.org/news/pr/view?item_key=d2e5f409bc6af6b7f504a10edf0329203ffec6f9
  3. http://prospect.crossref.org/
  4. http://www.stm-assoc.org/text-and-data-mining-stm-statement-sample-licence/
  5. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biomedical_text_mining (*biomed and chemistry are the pioneers)

(btw, new knowledge of the day – Google Translate is statistics based instead of semantics – no wonder it’s so bad at Chinese and Japanese! Bu Hao!)

The #1 Reason Leadership Development Fails (Forbes Blog)

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I stumbled across this Forbes Blog earlier this morning and thought it somewhat provocative in its contrasting of leadership training to leadership development.  The author argues, “Training is something leaders dread and will try and avoid, whereas they will embrace and look forward to development. Development is nuanced, contextual, collaborative, fluid, and above all else, actionable.”  He then lists twenty ways training and development differ – here a a few that stood out for me:

  • Training focuses on technique/content/curriculum – Development focuses on people.
  • Training is transactional – Development is transformational.
  • Training focuses on the role – Development focuses on the person.
  • Training focuses on efficiency – Development focuses on effectiveness.
  • Training focuses on reporting lines – Development expands influence.

That’s five.  There are fifteen more – give it a look!

 

The ‘X Model’ of Employee Engagement

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Check out the short video on “The ‘X Model’ of Engagement” shown today at the UCI Staff Engagement Town Hall Meeting.  Enjoy!

[iframe width=”560″ height=”315″ src=”//www.youtube.com/embed/gZ3wxgog4nc” frameborder=”0″ allowfullscreen]

 UCI Staff Engagement Town Hall
Thursday, July 25, 2013
12:00 p.m. to 1:00 p.m.
Bren Hall 6011

The Council of UC Staff Assemblies (CUCSA) and the Chancellor’s Advisory Committee on the Status of Staff (CACSS) invite you to attend the UCI Staff Engagement Town Hall. UCI Staff Assembly and CACSS will present along with guest speakers Ken Feer, CUCSA Chair and Joe Epperson, Executive Director of Systemwide HR Employee Relations.

Sincerely,

Jason Valdry, Staff Assembly Chair
Director of Technology Services, Claire Trevor School of the Arts

Valerie Jenness, CACSS Faculty Co-Chair
Dean, School of Social Ecology; Professor of Criminology, Law & Society

Natalie Schonfeld, CACSS Staff Co-Chair
Director, DUE Student Support Services

UCI Staff Assembly is a volunteer support organization for staff on campus and at UC Irvine Medical Center.  For more information on Staff Assembly please visit our website at:  www.staffassembly.uci.edu

To subscribe to the UCI Staff Assembly email list please go to My ZotMail at:
https://www.ddm.uci.edu/Office2/app/ZotMail/index.aspx

Frivolous First Year Epiphanies

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Last week I celebrated my first year anniversary with the UCI Libraries.  Because I could write a thesis on all of the important things I have learned in that span, and because posting a wordy thesis is frowned upon for a blog, I decided instead to share some fun lessons I have learned along the way.

1.  The UCI Student Center will ruin all of your directional self-esteem.  Budget a half hour for aimless wandering if you have a meeting in one of its lesser offices.

2.  The best way to get through a Monday morning or a Mega Meeting is to go to Peet’s and buy a Honey Bran muffin.  Be forewarned: Becky Imamoto and I will fight you for them.

3.  Your capability to find the person you want on the inter-office AIM List is inversely proportional to your urgency to speak with them.

4.  Hummingbirds are the noisiest birds on our campus.  Also if they were the size of ostriches, they would be utterly terrifying.

5.  Don’t work late in a library and leave when it has closed for the night.  Especially if you are acquainted with The Walking Dead show, or The Shining movie.  Twin zombies will lurch out from the shadowy stacks and ask you to play and eat brains with them.

Archives Leadership Institute: takeaways

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From June 16 – 23, I had the privilege of attending the Archives Leadership Institute, a selective, weeklong immersion program in Decorah, Iowa for emerging archival leaders to learn and develop theories, skills, and knowledge for effective leadership. The program is funded by the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC), a statutory body affiliated with the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), hosted at Luther College for the years 2013-2015.

This year represented a complete re-visioning of the program, which featured 5 daylong sessions: New Leadership Thinking and Methods (with Luther Snow), Project Management (with Sharon Leon, The Center for History and New Media at George Mason University), Human Resource Development (with Christopher Barth, The United States Military Academy at West Point), Strategies for Born Digital Resources (with Daniel Noonan, The Ohio State University), and Advocacy and Outreach (with Kathleen Roe, New York State Archives).

ALI has been one of the greatest learning experiences of my career. So much of this program related directly to my work and current role — but more importantly, much of it could be applied in the UCI Libraries. Enthusiastic participant responses and notes are captured in this Storify story from ALI and also this excellent recap by a fellow participant, but I will attempt to illustrate what I see as the biggest takeaways from the program that could relate to us here at UCI.

Each day of the program included introductions and wrap-up by Luther Snow, an expert consultant/facilitator who originated the concept of “Asset Mapping.” Luther’s background as a community organizer provided a solid foundation for his positive leadership strategy, which emphasizes networked, or “generative” methods of getting things done. There are several principles that I took away from this:

  • Leadership is impact without control. We cannot force people to contribute or participate; the goal is to get people to do things voluntarily by allowing people to contribute with their own strengths.
  • Generative leadership is about asset thinking. The key to creating impact is in starting by thinking of what we actually have: our assets. Focus on talent and areas of strength instead of “needs” and problems — avoid focusing on scarcity or pity.
  • Look for affinities. How can our self-interests overlap? Asset thinking helps us find common interests and mutual benefit — we can connect what we have to get more done than we could on our own.
  • Be part of the larger whole. By emphasizing abundance, we can create affinities, which leads to a sense that “my gain is your gain is our gain.” This sets up a virtuous cycle based on an open-sum (think: potluck; network) instead of a closed-sum (think: slices of pie; gatekeeping) environment.

Of particular importance to generative thinking is the fact that semantics matter. In one activity, participants took turns making “need statements” and then turning them into “asset statements.” One example? Time. Instead of saying “time is scarce,” consider saying “time is valuable.” Instead of “we need more staff,” say “we have lots of great projects and so much enthusiasm from our users. How can we continue to provide these services?” Some more examples of language choices were included in Luther’s (copyrighted) handouts.

Building affinity can be difficult, since it is based on trust and recognizing likeness. We can build affinity with stakeholders connected to our assets — emphasize what you have in common, or talk about how your differences complement each other. Relate to stakeholders by focusing on mutual interests, and try to create opportunities to do a project together. Keep in mind: we can do more together than we can on our own.

And now for some highlights from the daylong sessions…

Strategies for Born Digital Resources (with Daniel Noonan, The Ohio State University)

Project Management (with Sharon Leon, The Center for History and New Media at George Mason University)

  • Historical Thinking Matters, a resource for teaching students how to engage critically with primary sources
  • Consider collaborative, flexible workspaces that increase staff productivity: moveable tables, whiteboards, a staff candy drawer
  • Articulating the Idea, worksheets for project planning from WebWise, IMLS, and the CHNM at GMU
  • Leon’s presentation from a different workshop on project management, including guidelines for creating “project charters” that include a scope statement, deliverables, and milestones
  • Share full text of grant projects and proposals with your staff for learning purposes!
  • Recommended PM tools: Basecamp and Asana; deltek.com/products/kona.aspx … https://podio.com/  http://basecamp.com/  http://asana.com/  https://trello.com/ (we are using Trello with some projects in collaboration with IT) — trick is to use these tools yourself to get team buy-in
  • Example from my former institution on positive reinforcement: Dedicated Deacon, which sends automatically to supervisor of person recognized; weekly drawing for prizes

Strategic Visioning and Team Development (with Christopher Barth, The United States Military Academy at West Point)

Advocacy and Outreach (with Kathleen Roe, New York State Archives)

The next phase of my ALI experience includes a practicum, workshop, and group project. I plan to focus my practicum on building and empowering a new team — my current focus as Acting Head of Special Collections & Archives — by integrating asset-based thinking into our projects and strategic planning. Looking forward to continued growth both through my ALI cohort and the valuable leadership tools and resources I gathered from the intensive in June.

 

Reference research presented at ALA 2013 (RUSA RSS Forum)

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The RUSA RSS Forum was excellent this year. The first presentation (Andrew Walsh and Angela Pashia) analyzed students’ use of LibGuides with the plan to improve the layout of their LibGuides. By using Google Analytics they could see how students used the search box within LibGuides and found that most students did not understand what the search box actually searched. They decided to remove the search box completely from their LibGuides.

The second presentation (Christine Tobias) was about analyzing virtual reference transcripts to identify “pain points” — where do other librarians and patrons have problems finding information on the library web site (we’ve done a bit of this, but not as extensively). She used a product called Dedoose.com (free for the first month and then approximately $12/month) for the evaluation. It might be worth investigating this product.

The last presentation (Alexa Pearce)was really the beginning of a research idea. She has coded every single line of virtual reference transcripts and then created data visualizations. Her hope is that the visualizations would provide a different way to analyzing transactions. But she doesn’t yet have a result to actually discuss. It was rather interesting to think about how visualization MIGHT tell us something about virtual reference though.

Help Crowdsource a Library Project Management Toolkit!

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In my quest for new and interesting project management literature, especially in the LAM realm, I stumbled upon this “toolkit” in the form of a Google doc:

Library Project Management Toolkit

Started by Jennifer Vinopal of NYU, this toolkit is “crowdsourced”, meaning anyone is allowed and encouraged to add content. The toolkit already contains a fair amount of useful information, including some software reviews and presentations from colleagues at UCLA and CDL:

  • Description of PM software and use experiences from different Libraries
  • General PM methodologies in context of digital library projects
  • Bibliography of presentations & articles on PM and Library Project Portfolio Management

If you’re involved with or have an interest in library and/or technology Project Management, this is a great starting point for learning more. And if you discover some more info relevant to Library PM, feel free to add it to the toolkit!

4 (or 13) Things about Discovery and Research Library Transformation

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If you feel like driving your vision into a galaxy far far far … away this morning …

From OCLC Research Library Partners Metadata Management Interest Group (July 3) –

Lorcan Dempsey (OCLC Vice Present and Chief Strategist) and Judi Nadler (University Librarian at the University of Chicago) made presentations on the future of technical services in the library of the future at last Friday’s “Big Heads” meeting. (Big Heads is the common nickname for ALA’s Association for Library Collections and Technical Services’ Directors of Large Research Libraries Interest Group, most of which are also OCLC Research Library Partners.)

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This is a shortened version of the Educause article Lorcan wrote in December 2012, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at Libraries, Discovery, and the Catalog: Scale, Workflow, Attention.” (The second slide about hats is Lorcan’s amusing way of showing he also qualifies as a “big head”.)

Judi presented a “circular map” she uses of research library transformation, divided into five sections: service, collections, discovery, access, perpetuity, with concentric circles going from past to future. She uses it to talk about library priorities with different university constituencies.

Great food for thought! (and actions? :))

Notes from Special Libraries Association (SLA) Conference San Diego | June 9-11, 2013

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I had the opportunity to attend and present at the latest SLA conference in San Diego.  Some of the sessions I attended were more interactive than others so my notes are more complete for the ones that were primarily lecture/slide based, though I attempted to pull out the highlights of the interactive sessions.  I arranged the sessions by day and you can use the links here to jump to Sunday, Monday, or Tuesday.

Many of the speakers have already posted slides for their talks if you are interested in seeing some of the other offerings: http://www.sla.org/attend/sla-annual-conference/planner/

Sunday, June 9

Loyalty and Retention – Building leaders for your unit’s future

  • The person who interacts with sponsors must approach their duties as an opportunity to create and maintain relationships
  • When seeking sponsors for an event – show up front what your sponsors will get for helping and at what levels they can participate
  • Go beyond the basics for sponsorship and show what extras (if any your unit can provide)
  • Investigate non-traditional opportunities – sometimes local businesses will be happy to sponsor small events
  • Create incentive for members to attend multiple events et. SLA Maryland created a “CRAB Points” system where you received a specific number of points for attending each event and at the annual holiday party a reimbursement of membership dues was provided to the winner.
  • SLA Loyalty project has created a blog that can be mined for sponsorship, membership and other toolkits and ideas: http://loyalty.sla.org/
  • Be aware of what SLA offers for divisions – webinar software, fundraising advice, etc.
  • Above all know your audience and be prepared to keep track of how different people like to be contacted and how to reach them as well as their skills and what they can offer you.

Implementing Open Source

Slides are available here: http://www.web2learning.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/opensource-sla2013.pdf

  • Open access not the same thing as open source
  • Open source does not necessarily mean it’s free
  • Many companies exist to provide open source ILS support
  • Open source can be run, distributed, studied, modified for any purpose
  • Usually developed in a collaborative matter
  • The same logic behind the power of peer review can be applied to open source products
  • Peer review – or many eyes on a single project is what prevents a project from too much mission drift (“What’s to stop an ILS from turning into a video game?”
  • Community is crucial to the growth of open source projects
  • Critique comes from contributions
  • Contributing goes beyond writing code you can:
  1. Write documentation
  2. Debug
  3. Educate others
  • The mindset to bring to open source projects is once finished hand it off and say “here, try to break it” rather than “here, it’s done”
  • Open source software is so popular because
  1. Peer review
  2. Freedom to innovate
  3. Not locked into a vendor
  4. Information should be freely shared
  • Support is available for open source programs – nearly 50 companies offer support for different ILS and other programs
  • If you do not know how to code you can use local support, freelance developers or local students for assistance
  • Before picking a program make sure your IT can handle the different systems management and coding knowledge
  • If you want to learn to code, pick the project you’re most interested in then learn that language
  • Two popular open source ILSs are Koha & Evergreen
  • If you are interested in using one or the other you can look up a library in Lib-Web-Cats, see who’s using the software and contact people there to see if they like it
  • Know your local support and what they can use (for example Koha needs Linux server with Perl installed)
  • Recommended reading for more on open source are (books and websites combined):
  1. The Cathedral & The Bazar by Eric Raymond – Compares open source and proprietary software
  2. Crowdsourcing: Why the power of the crowd is driving the future of business  by Jeff Howe –The best person to do a job is the person who most wants to do the job
  3. Embracing Insanity by Russell Pavlicek
  4. FOSS4LIB is a website of free/open source software for libraries
  5. Lib-Web-Cats is a directory of libraries throughout the world and see what their ILS is, and details about their collect (For example Langson is here)
  6. Perceptions 2012: An international survey of library automation by Marshall Breeding
  7. VuFind enable users to search and browse through all of your library’s resources
  8. Blacklight discovery interface creation
  9. Omeka used to create online displays
  10. DSpace used for creating a repository
  11. PiWik open source alternative for Google Analytics
  12. LimeSurvey alternative to Survey Monkey

Monday, June 10

Next Generation Sci-Tech Librarians: Helping Institutions and Researchers Increase Their Impact

There were three presenters and their slides are available here, here, and here.

Beyond the Shelves; E Brown

  • Physical spaces are shrinking in favor of e-content, digital archives, and research data sets
  • It’s hard to show value added with internal numbers and traditional statistics
  • Library value encompass everything from library journal indexes, research analytical tools and informal scholarship
  • When looking for value added information you can look at either: personal data (individual level) or collective data (institutional level)

There are many ways to measure output:

  • Indexing/Abstracting databases such as SciFinder and Web of Science include citation sorts and H Indexes
  • Journal Citation reports show journal performance, not necessarily something that would be useful for faculty
  • Scilmago can track journal productivity/output

Research Analytical Tools

  • SciVal Spotlight:
    • higher priority research data to preserve
    • interdisciplinary strengths and relationships
    • can see the rank of the authors
    • Academic Analysis
      • 32 sectors of analysis
        • Book
        • Article authorships
        • Citations
        • Awards
        • Grant funding
        • Microsoft Academic Search (free)
          • A way to show impact of library collections
          • Reputation management is important
          • Need to collect different types of data to answer different questions
  •  You can use any of the analytical tools to compare collections with the competencies and areas of study seen in your results
  • If you have higher output performers you might need to move some collections resources to a different area to accommodate the usage
  • Can create peer analysis
  • Once you’ve obtained your data you can create customized reports, identify new data that may be useful and develop further analysis

Assessing and Increasing the Impact of Research at the National Institute of Standards and Technology;  Susan Makar

  • NIST produces ~12000 articles per year from 3,000 researchers
  • They produce data analysis and research materials
  • Assessing the impact and impact studies for labs for institution to Assess is important
  • Quantifying the impact of a report, analyzing division output, etc. is something the library may be called to do at any time
  • To determine the impact of a report they looked through different journals to determine which ones were top tier in their field
  • The impact studies could then be used to help researchers determine potential collaborators for future research endeavors
  • Help show researchers where to publish or where conference venues might be available
  • NIST has been contributing to Wikipedia citations to increase impact
  • Museum exhibits have been added as an extension of publication venues
  • Increasing impact of digital archives is being explored
  • Conducting market analysis for future research direction can be viewed through the lens of these reports
  •  Interest areas can be used to seek out potential speakers for conferences

Altmetrics and Revolutions; J. Priem

  • Communication is the soul of science and librarians act as a conduit for communication
  • The online revolution is not over just because journals are online – online journals are the same product with faster horse, not a new product
  • New class of web native to science is emerging
  • Dryad and Figshare are two ways to easily put data sets online so others can try to replicate or analyze your results
  • Web-native science is about making public rather than merely publishing
  • With the amount of information available, our understanding of citation has to change – many useful journals are not cited because their users are not publishing
  • Altmetrics measures the impact across many types of use and formats, think of it as an impact footprint
  • Impact story is used to track your impact and movement on the web – it looks at different types of impact than the traditional citation
  • Eg. The top number of tweets an article gets in a week correlates to the number of citations it will get in about two years
  • New research is going to have to find ways to reward broader impacts and web contributions
  • There is no way to curate the internet, instead data mining is going to be the best way to access information

Storytelling across multiple platforms

Three presenters: T. Baker (Invisible Children), T. Malory (U-T San Diego), and S. White (Inside Climate News)

Invisible children:

  • Focus on making films
  • Investment in media needs to be on the level with other competitors for your users attention if you want to be seen
  • Commit to good storytelling and it will yield hard front-line results
  • Speak simply and focus on an individual story
  • Take claim of your own narrative so someone else doesn’t do it for you

UT-San Diego:

  • Each new innovation starts with trying to jam the existing information on the new media in the same format
  • The value of the experience is not in the content – it is in the sharing
  • Let how people want to consume their information influence your format
  • Take time to get accustomed to any new formats
  • Think about different paths through content

Inside Climate News:

  • Don’t shy away from multipart narrative – know the audience and how to present the information
  • They experimented with Kindle Singles as a way to distribute their longer story

 

Tuesday, June 11

I presented in the morning at a Speed Geek forum – you can see some of the other presentation descriptions here but I’m not sure when everyone’s slides will be up.  Mine are here.

“How can I be a leader when I ___________________________”

it was very interactive: audience members ask panel members about questions they have about leadership and then the three panelists respond in turn.  I have a few pages of notes but no good format for typing them up so I tried arranging it in the form of question and answer

Q: Are leadership, management and supervision synonyms or how would you differentiate them?

  • They are very similar but they are not exactly the same
  • Leaders should have a vision for the future and how to get there
  • You can be a leader without having a leadership position
  • Leadership qualities should be apparent at all levels
  • Some people have a bent for noticing what needs to be done and they jump in to do it
  • Inspiration can be used to lead from behind/beside and gives others the faith and confidence to do what they can

Q: How can I be a leader when I need to keep a better work/life balance? How can I lead my team when I’m not there?

  • Reward  your team for initiative
  • “what gets rewarded gets repeated”
  • Create pre-work before you leave – what boundaries are there, who should work on what
  • It comes down to communication and collaboration with others
  • If your team feels abandoned offer to be in touch, know your worker’s preferences and follow through?

Q: How can I lead when my supervisor does not understand my role and what I do?

  • People often report to people who do not know what it is you do
  • If a boss is willing to learn – converse fact to face and show what you can do
  • Try to find an ally among other higher ups for support
  • Talk about your impact (direct and indirect) on important projects
  • Propose a project or a way to help existing teams
  • Know what they want and meet them where they are
  • Create formal and informal social conversations
  • Create a service that you can add to the organization or department
  • Make a friend with their administrators to find out some of their preferences
  • Lead with results – show what you’ve done or the actions you’ve taken to help the team

Q: How do I deal with an assistant who works differently than I?

  • Create a manual of clear directions and ask for her input on it
  • Create a sense of continuity and trust
  • Have her make something to offer others for future use
  • If you can figure out what makes someone proud, you can help them that way
  • Ask how they want to be approached and work with them to try to honor their preferences

Q: What do I do if my bosses don’t support professional development?

  • Do it on the evenings, weekends, breaks and honor their choice
  • Use vacation/personal time
  • Offer solutions first, share results and interesting things you’ve learned

Q: How can you lead if you do not have a leadership role?

  • Share what you’ve learned
  • Get to know people
  • Create short reports about trends relevant to your department and share them
  • Build relationships with others
  • Meet with people in social/casual settings so you can get a feel of how/when to share important information later
  • Go where people are and associate with leaders in the institution
  • Never offer suggestions first, start with projects and say what you can do to help

In addition to the notes and slides here, I also wrote a brief overview for INALJ that’s more job-hunter / first time conference goer oriented here.  If you have any questions or comments please feel free to email me!