Daniel W. Rasmus on Strategy for Libraries: My 2026 Computers in Libraries Presentation: Strategies for the Win

Daniel W. Rasmus on Strategy for Libraries: My 2026 Computers in Libraries Presentation: Strategies for the Win

Strategy is supposed to give you confidence about the future, yet most strategic plans are already obsolete by the time the ink dries. In an era when artificial intelligence, geopolitics, and funding realities all shift faster than conference programs can be printed, libraries cannot afford five‑year plans that sit on a shelf.

In my 2026 Computers in Libraries session, “Strategies for the Win,” I argued that strategy is not a glossy document or a once‑a‑cycle retreat; it is an evolving story organizations tell themselves about who they are becoming and which obstacles they are willing to name and overcome. Drawing on decades of work in scenario planning, knowledge management, and the future of work, I challenged library leaders to move beyond strategic planning acts like posters, slogans, and metrics that measure busyness rather than progress, and toward coherent choices that align purpose, policy, budgets, and daily practice.

At a time when AI is transforming everything from information retrieval to warfare, I also suggested that libraries do not need an “AI strategy” in isolation. Instead, they need a clear library strategy and a disciplined way to ask: How does AI help us turn information into practical progress for our communities, and where does it threaten our purpose and values? This post shares the key ideas from that talk, including a worked example you can use to reframe your own plans, metrics, and conversations about the future.

Key takeaways from my strategy for libraries presentation

• Strategy is not a five-year document. It is a living story the organization tells itself about its future, and every action edits that story.
• A strategy is only needed when an organization is trying to become something different or overcome real obstacles. If it does not name and address obstacles, it is not strategy.
• Good strategy is not performance. Posters, retreats, and polished documents do not create strategic action by themselves.  
• Activity is not strategy. Being busy, producing documents, and reaching consensus can all masquerade as progress without forcing real decisions.  
• Slogans, aspirations, and targets are not strategy. “Be the best” does not explain what will change, what will stop, or how choices will be made.  
• Real strategy requires trade-offs. Everything cannot remain equally important. Strategy gives leaders and staff permission to say no.
• The pain has to be named. If the organization cannot discuss its actual constraints, politics, resource gaps, risks, and tensions, it cannot develop a useful strategy.
• AI does not need a separate strategy detached from mission. For libraries, AI should be evaluated by how it supports the library’s purpose, such as helping people turn information into practical progress.
• Scenario planning makes strategy more resilient. It shifts the organization from prediction to preparation by testing assumptions against multiple plausible futures.
• Strategy has to show up where work happens. Budgets, policies, measures, routines, staff training, service design, and technology choices should all reflect the same strategic story.

2026 Computers In Libraries Daniel W. Rasmus Presentation Transcript: Strategy for the Win (lightly edited)

Welcome and Intro

I have to say, I did not pick the title. This is kind of like if you ever worked with a publication and you’ve sent in an article, the editor usually picks the title. So “Strategies for the Win “ was not what I pitched to Jane Dysart and Brian Pitchman. It was something about strategy; I don’t even remember what. It’s interesting in the age where I am writing weekly missives about the changes in artificial intelligence that you can even plan a conference program, especially around a changing topic like we’re dealing with on a regular basis now with artificial intelligence and geopolitics, that you can even plan a conference program that will be relevant when the conference actually happens. So I know we’ve done some adapting, a little adapting as I’ve gone through the weeks and months since I submitted the proposal.

I will endeavor to talk to you about strategy. I did that last year, and as I may have shared with you then, I’ve been doing this for a very long time. That’s me (black and white picture of me in a computer room) in about, i don’t know, 1984, maybe 83, 84. Those are 512-megabyte hard drives running a $15 million-a-year manufacturing company. On a computer that had the same amount of memory, five hundred and twelve kilobytes of memory on a mini computer. And I upgraded it for several tens of thousands of dollars to one megabyte of memory. So all of you can run a manufacturing facility on your watch now.

Here’s my visual bio. I know it’s a lot, I am also a little eclectic. I write poetry, I publish books, and I teach at various universities. I’ve taught at Pinchot University, Bellevue College, and now I teach how to think about the future with a strategy bent, which we’ll get into in a little bit at the University of Washington in their Communications Leadership Program. And then I do a lot of writing and speaking. So come hang out at my booth in the back.

I do want to encourage you all to do that, not just to come and see me in the booth, but the huddle is next to me. The huddle again was Jane Dysart’s love child last year. She saw Brad Pitt at the beginning of the Super Bowl, talking about the huddle. I don’t know if you remember two years ago —not the year the Seahawks won the Super Bowl, hold on— the Seahawks won the Super Bowl, but the year before.

And she wanted to do a huddle for librarians, and so we’re doing the second iteration of that this year. And we’re doing a one-three-year, one-three-five forecast on your thoughts about the challenges, the innovations, and the opportunities around the future of libraries in those timeframes. So please come and play. We’re going to write that up in Computers and Libraries and on the website, and share it with people who were not at the conference. (See the huddle results here.

I also write books about management, and my first book, right here, Understanding Artificial Intelligence, 1988. So happy to talk to you guys about AI as well. And I saw this morning that there was applause for books, so there are some pictures of my library at home. And do we have any nerds in the audience? Anybody? There we go. Science fiction nerds? People who would be like to hang out with me at Comic-Con. I run the Science of Science Fiction panel at San Diego Comic-Con, where I cover the future of work and artificial intelligence. I have NASA physicists and astrobiologists with me, and often flight engineers from spacecraft companies, and sometimes we get the science advisor to Star Trek, who I argue with about the choices she’s allowed them to make.

Strategy for the Win

But today we’re here to talk about strategy again. Happy to talk about that in the Q&A or any other time. But from a strategy standpoint, I want to kind of start off with, you are in trouble with strategy. The last time your strategy rolled out was five years ago, right? Everybody has a five-year strategic plan. You should not have a five-year strategic plan. You should have a strategic plan that is always becoming the new strategic plan—like always, not just every week. Every day, every minute, as you execute in your organization, your strategy has to adjust.

The world is impinging on you from multiple directions, and you have to think about how you deal with that on a regular basis. Many people do it through the accreditation; they go, “Oh, we’re getting accredited. We’ve got to do this strategic plan because it’s part of the checklist. “ Some of you just before this meeting, maybe said, “Let’s think about strategy because there’s a session on it.”

Often, the board or the president or the director or somebody says, “What’s going on with your strategy?” And they’re asking you for metrics. As you’ll see, my belief is that it’s a story that the organization tells itself about its future. And it’s an ongoing, ever-evolving story. It is a story that unfolds every single day in all the work that we do.

As I was listening to some of the panels this morning, thinking about the strategy for artificial intelligence and how to deal with it, you’ll see that I don’t think you actually need a strategy for artificial intelligence. You need to figure out what it is that the library’s strategy and purpose is, and artificial intelligence is underneath that. And we’ll go through a kind of worked example of that. Do we need a strategy? That’s a good question. You do not actually need a strategy unless you are trying to become something other than what you are, or you’re trying to overcome obstacles. You do not need a strategy. If you write a strategy that does not help you overcome the obstacles, then it’s not a strategy. I’ll go into that in a little more detail because there is a lot of “strategy theater” in many organizations.

We’re going to get everybody together. We’re going to talk about what our future is going to be, and then we’re going to have some posters, and we’re going to have a retreat. And we’re going to write some documents, and then we’re going to say, “We have a strategy.”

I was recently looking at an organization, a college that I worked with, reconvene for their strategy, where I think we did a very good job at the time. I was doing it. We’re two or three presidents now into a new organization, and they’re doing exactly this. They’re having a lot of retreats. They decided they were going to make some choices, and they put some stuff down. And then there was a faculty uprising about them we weren’t involved enough in the strategy. And you know, we don’t like what it says. And so they’ve now pushed off the strategy, and they keep pushing it off, that in itself is an obstacle to overcome, right? That’s part of it: the organization not understanding how to think about itself should be part of how it actually rolls out its strategic thinking.

There is also the misnomer that, you know, just being busy is a strategy. We’re doing a lot of good stuff, so that’s very strategic. Or the documents equal decisions, or that consensus is clarity. We can all agree that you know, we’re going to be a really good organization, and we’re going to accept people, and we’re going to give people information, and we’re going to transform young minds, and we’re going to help people find their way in the world. And that’s great, but again, that’s not saying what the organization is going to become or how it’s going to achieve those goals.

And then also, likewise slogans, aspirations and targets. A lot of time, people will say, we’ve created a lot of things we want to make sure that we have, X number of patrons who come in. Every year, we want to make sure that we service them. And when we do a survey, we want them to say they like us. And so we put those targets out there, and they say, “You know, our strategy is that our patrons are going to come in and they’re going to like us.”

Also, not a strategy. Right? And then I’ve heard a couple of times, I heard one yesterday, where it was all, “everything on the plate is always on the plate, and the plate never has anything taken off of it, except our time. We don’t have enough time.” That’s not a strategy either. You need to make choices when you do strategy. Everything is not important. There are priorities, and part of having a strategy is being able to make decisions and say, “This was a great idea, Richard. I am glad you came to me with that thought, but you know, we’ve decided as an organization this is how we’re going to spend our money and our time, and that’s not part of it”

That’s a very hard conversation to have at a public institution with the city council or a county council or with stakeholders within a law library or an academic library. But those choices have to be made. And again, if you’re creating a strategic planning document and you can’t have that kind of conversation, then it’s probably not really a strategic plan. And most importantly, that the pain remains unnamed, right? Because it’s very hard. I had somebody walk up to the huddle board today and say, “You know, I can’t talk about some of the things that are on there.“ They were from a very public-sector organization that operates here in the local area. And you know, that’s a reality.

If you are doing strategy in the way that I think it needs to be done, where you are actually trying to overcome obstacles, you need to actually say what those are. You need to say these are the problems we have. And up to and including, we can’t talk about our problems. That’s probably the first one on there, right? Another initiative lists roadmaps, work plans and also not strategy stuff.

The other place that we go is, and I love, this: I was having a conversation with the president of a college, and he asked me to come in and explain scenario planning to him. I’ll give you a very brief one-slide overview in a little while. Essentially, thinking about the future in a very systematic way, taking it and using it to challenge your assumptions about today, so that you can think through and be more resilient about the future. And it’s very systematic in how it builds out these futures.

He looked at me, and he said, “Yeah. I’ll give you a future.” Right? And so unsystematically, I am sure he thought about it. But one of the problems with thinking about the future is that we have a lot of uncertainties that we have in our heads, and we collapse those when we start talking about the future. You collapse all of those uncertainties into a set of variables that get values. And then you start telling a story about the future. You have not thought about all of the possible ways those could play out, which scenario planning forces you to do. And you are probably creating a future that is either not plausible, though it may sound plausible to you, or not achievable. And interestingly, his vision of the future ended up as they were going through the strategic planning process, being pushed back upon.

One of the things he wanted to do was that, since they are the biggest in that neighborhood of colleges in our area, we should be the convener. That’s the role we want to have. And he was trying to push that as a narrative. And that was good. The obstacle that he was really trying to overcome was that nobody wanted them to be the convener, right? They wanted to be the convener, but everybody else said, well, we’re just as equal as you are. And you don’t get to be the big dog on the block, right? And that didn’t get named, but he was also then predicting a number of things. And trying to put that into the process, and those predictions,

I stay away from predictions at all costs. Even though I am listed in the brochure, if you’ve noticed, as the resident futurist at Computers and Libraries. Again, thank you, Jane. I think of myself as a forecaster slash scenario planner, and that means that the real answer to how you think about the future is: I don’t know, but I have a really interesting way of thinking about it. It’s not going to predict the future, but it’s going to help prepare you for it.

And so again, I’ll come back to that in a little bit. And I think the big issue on this as well. Is that when you start taking that stuff, and you’re putting it into a document? Is that you’re now bringing in those forecasts and those predictions and saying we’re going to be this or this thing is going to be in this way? And we institutionalize the assumptions, and the assumptions may be wrong, right? So if you are doing, for instance, artificial intelligence right now, and you are writing anything that you think is going to last more than twenty minutes, then it’s probably wrong. Right? There is nothing you can do that’s going to change that at this point.

I mean I just today, as I was sitting in two sessions ago, a piece came up in my Apple news feed, saying that I was Merrill Lynch or J P Morgan, that said that twenty-six is going to be a landmark year for artificial intelligence, and we have no idea what’s coming, that it’s going to be revolutionary, and you are just starting to see it with ChatGPT 5.4. And you are just going to have your socks blown off, and nothing that you’ve planned for is going to be worth anything.

We’ll see how their prediction goes. But if it’s anything like over the last couple of years, that’s something again, that statement that we have a technology coming at us, and we don’t know what it’s going to do is an obstacle. That’s something that you put in a strategic plan. How do we run an organization when we have a technology that’s fundamentally reshaping the organization and the role that we have in the world, and we don’t know what it’s going to look like?

How, do we run an organization when we have a technology that’s fundamentally reshaping the organization and the role that we have in the world, and we don’t know what it’s going to look like?

That’s something, and that’s a very good example of why you have to keep the dialogue going. If you wrote a strategic plan today and you had an artificial intelligence section in it, in five years from now, you pulled it out and said, “We’ve got to do a new strategic plan,” you’d probably laugh at yourself. In 2031, after reading your naive plans from half a decade ago.

And then there is the other problem: Leaders know it, the staff hears about it later, maybe not and work never changes. If you have a strategy that is actually not embedded into the things that you do or that your executives go, “Yeah, that’s all good, thank you very much,” and you never hear about it.

That is also not really a strategy because it doesn’t affect the day-to-day choices you’re making. A strategy also does not mean you agree with everything, which is one of the reasons executives keep it to themselves. They know, well, if we actually have this and we try to do these things, People are going to be upset at us, and we don’t want to deal with that. We’re just going to keep it to ourselves, and we’ll tell the shareholders that’s what we’re doing. And then of course, five years later, the shareholders, stakeholders, whichever you know, public or private and five years from now, we’ll deal with the fallout of that. We didn’t do any of the stuff we said we’d do because we never actually told anyone about it. To me, strategy is a story. Stories evolve, and they compete with each other, right? You have competing stories; we have competing stories right now.

I just wrote a whole article on the future of artificial intelligence through Sam Altman’s eyes and those of Anthropic’s Modi. Anthropic believes, and you’ve probably heard that Anthropic has been throttled by the US government and been put on the supplier risk list because they said, “We don’t want to be used for targeting humans and for automated warfare. We don’t want to be part of that.” But we already are, right? They already are. So that’s a whole different problem. But they’ve stated they don’t want to do that. And not only were they kicked out of the Pentagon, but President Trump said, “We’re going to make them put them on the risk list.” And OpenAI went, “Oh, cool. We’ll go move in and do that.” They were already there as well. Palantir is a systems integrator that some of you may have heard about. They use everybody’s tools as well as their own. But that’s a strategic, and you know, existential conversation about the Anthropic view of the world.

Anthropi wants to test everything. We need to understand the ethics. We need to make sure the tools we’re giving people work, aren’t threatening, and don’t hurt people. And on the other side, Sam Altman goes, but I am from Silicon Valley too. And I think we should do it, let’s put it out in the world. And if it breaks something, we’ll fix it really fast because we’re smart and we have AI. And we’re not going to worry about having those big boundaries on it. Quite frankly, and this is true for both of them, and I don’t know if I’ve heard anybody say this yet, we don’t even know how the artificial intelligence works or what it’s capable of doing. It’s very hard to think about all of the ways it could be used when you don’t know what it actually can do. And on the other hand, it’s also a little dangerous to say we’re not going to know what it’s going to do. We’re just going to hand it to a bunch of people and see what happens. Right?

I will almost. guarantee you that Sam Altman’s view will probably get us both in more danger, but also teach us more quickly. Because a systematic check, you know, as safe as that sounds, we’ve got this stuff out there. And we’re already in the process of again, if we’re thinking about those consequences and the strategies that you’re dealing with, OpenAI is there. You need to experiment with it and see how far it can go for your applications.

That’s one of the challenges that needs to be in your strategy: we don’t know what AI does. Some people say we need an AI literacy program. That’s our strategy. You can’t have an AI literacy program. You can’t have a literacy program for a thing you don’t know what being literate means, right? And so that’s the thing you would put in your strategy, right? So how do we get to good? How do we get to a good strategy?

Diagnosing the state of play

It’s terrible diagnosing the names of the real challenges, right? So I just gave you an example of that, and I’ll give you some more. Guiding policy that makes trade-offs. So you’re actually going to say, “We’re going to do this and not that,” right? If I look at the literacy program work that I’ve seen over the last couple of days, I’m almost guaranteeing you that those people who did the literacy programs didn’t not do anything else, right? Let’s do the literacy program and everything else we’re already doing, right? It is a near full-time job right now because it’s most of what I spend my day doing, keeping up with what’s happening with AI.

Organizations need a coherent set of actions that reinforce each other, so, just random things, thinking about the relationships between the choices that you are making, the actions that you are taking in the organization, and make sure that those are coherent and work with each other. A strategy statement that people can actually repeat. I did a strategy workshop at Knowledge Management World, and it was a little interesting. So we were talking about knowledge management strategy, and I was teaching how to improve it using artificial intelligence, right? We were. We were actually trying to do a workshop where we’re using AI to take in the problems that people were facing and then look at what AI’s suggestions were about how to phrase ways of overcoming those, and creative ways of looking at that. And I asked the people in the audience, and I’ll ask you guys now,

How many of you actually know and could, if we walked out of the room, tell me what the strategy of your organization was? How many of you know what that is?

A couple of hands, a couple of waving hands, right? So that’s a problem by itself, right? That should be the first item on the list: nobody understands our strategy. And it needs to be something that you don’t have to go back to the PDF and go, “Hold on, I think I remember, Dan just asked me a question. Let me go. Let me look it up. And find it on the PDF.” Or maybe you have an internal chat where you can do that. Embedded in execution resources, metrics boundaries and learning. The thing is, when you run professional development, it’s not just that we saw this guy at Computers and Libraries and think he should come in and do a professional development thing. When you have a strategy, you make a choice of: we’re doing computer literacy on how large language models work in information retrieval within the libraries, in public libraries.

And, we’re going to bring in somebody who helps us understand how to do that. We’re not going to bring in somebody who helps us break two-by-fours with our hands because that’s a good team-building exercise, right? We’re going to concentrate our money and time on the things that actually help us achieve our strategy.

This is a list of things that could/should be on the obstacles list for most public libraries. Safety and security; trauma-informed service needs without matching resources; intellectual freedom and censorship pressures; privacy expectations versus the demand for personalization. And I would also say privacy demands, perhaps, pressure to share information with government agencies, right? Aging facilities and deferred maintenance, ADA accessibility upgrades are competing with other capital needs. Right?

That’s a very good example, right? If you say we want to be ADA compliant, and you make that part of your strategy. We have to say that we are not ADA-compliant. We want to be more accessible, and then you don’t fund that, or that’s the equal of everything else. And you don’t actually say, “We’re not going to do this, we’re going to do this, “ making that choice and making sure that the policies and the budgets and the metrics and everything else that you’re doing are actually getting you to be ADA compliant. And it may mean not doing something else. And it’s really hard not to do something else. But if you’re doing real strategy, the fundamental choices that you have to make are hard. And you do have to say there are things we cannot do.

We do not have the money. We do not have the time. We do not have the resources, right? Here is a worked example. community needs are pulling the library in too many directions at once, with patrons seeking digital help, workforce support, trusted information, a welcoming space and civic guidance, while staff time and budgets remain constrained.

So that may sound familiar to a lot of you, right? And then you start talking about strategy. Rather than spreading itself thin across every demand, the library chooses to center its role on helping people turn information into practical progress through learning, access, and trusted human support. So if that’s your strategy, does anybody else know what that strategy would also include? If you’re doing information, turning information into practical progress through learning, access, and trusted human support. What would that also drive? That’s also. Anybody?

It’s also your AI strategy. You don’t have to have an AI strategy. How does AI support doing that, right? You don’t have to have an AI strategy saying, “How do we use AI?” What does it mean to us? The strategy is: it’s a tool that helps you turn information into practical progress, right? How do we use it to help people think through their problems? Some of the futures that we developed over the last several weeks were discussed in the workshop on Monday. One of them was a library that helped navigate public systems. Somebody would come in and say, “I got this notice from the county about my property taxes, and it looks wrong, but I don’t know what to do about it.” Right, which is practical progress, access to trusted human support. You go in, and that is what the librarians do. They help people navigate the county systems.

And this is ten years in the future. So you have AI agents that are hooked into the county systems, and you can actually start working with this person to figure out why their property tax is what it is. They don’t know how to navigate it. Your role as a librarian is to help them navigate. That question, right? Perhaps it should be the property tax people, but that may not be their strategic role. They send out the tax bills, right? So you’re helping them navigate information.

And in different futures, there is privacy or less privacy. So as soon as you say, “Oh, I’ve got a property tax thing,“ that means they have to give me their information in order for us to log into the systems. And I am going to see stuff I shouldn’t see. In some of the futures that’s tokenized, they can just wand a card. And in some of them, they trust you, and you work with them. And so different ways that things can work out.

But if you think about that as a simple strategy, then staff training, services, desk redesign, collections decisions, technology, access and community partnerships all align with that goal, right?

I’m giving you a very simple, high-level view aligned with the partner experience: one connected system rather than a patchwork of disconnected services. So you think about the services in the space and everything as holistic. If this is what we’re trying to achieve, how do these things fit together? And then you go to the old game of which things don’t belong there anymore, right? If I am looking at the map of everything we’re doing, checking out fly-fishing equipment may not be what we want to do anymore. I know there are libraries that check out fly fishing equipment. Is that strategic, or are we just going to do all the things?

Perhaps we want to be a connected hub to educational resources to our community, maybe fly fishing is part of that, right? You are actually teaching people, and there is a whole set of books about how to fish and conservation around fishing, waterways and pollution, and all kinds of stuff. And that may be part of your remit, right?

So I just gave you a version of a choice. The choices you make will all be yours. The library’s role is clear enough for staff partners and patrons to repeat. This is the place that helps people move from confusion to capability, from questions to next steps. That sounds like a slogan, I grant you, but if it is actually the thing you are doing, it’s not a slogan. It’s a slogan only if, and you’ve probably been in rooms where you’ve said, ” That’s it.

I don’t know how many times as an IT director in aerospace and high tech we went: We’re going to give people the right information at the right time in the right format to the right device, and you know, and so became our mission. We exist to give people the right information at the right time in the right format to the right device.

And then we did a bunch of stuff that had nothing to do with that. Right? We had a few people who did that, but that’s not what the organization was really trying to do. Right? And so the strategy was scattered. We ended up spending a lot of money on things that did not provide people with the right information. And, we had a handful of people who were dissatisfied with their job because they didn’t have enough resources to actually do the thing they thought we were all going to do together. And then, importantly, budget decisions, performance measures, service boundaries, regular reviews—all of that gets built in. Right? The strategy is not something we’re going to dust off again in five years.

If you are trying to help people go from confusion to competency, and you know—are you actually looking at that as a metric, right? It’s not how many patrons came in, what’s the circulation of our stuff, and you know, whatever metrics you want to use. You come up with new metrics that are actually about the value that you’re trying to create.

We get trapped in benchmark metrics. We look across the industry, and everybody in whatever industry, it is libraries, and I know each subdivision of libraries probably has its own benchmarking. Perspectives about: here is what other legal libraries do, or here is what other academic libraries do. But if you are making a strategy, you have to decide how you’re going to measure it―you’re actually going to execute that strategy. What is everybody else doing? Because again, you are now getting to the dilution of everybody else is doing that. So we’re going to do what everybody else is doing? And then you are actually not making any choices whatsoever, except the choice of we’ll let everybody else decide what we’re going to do.

As soon as you make your own choices, you have to come up with your own metrics, and that’s a whole set of discussions internally as well? And that becomes part of your kind of strategic obstacles. We don’t know how to measure the thing. I’ll give you an example. When I was at Microsoft, I was not a proponent of productivity measurement. I was leading the future of work programs at Microsoft in Redmond. And everything was about the “we’re going to”-the new version of PowerPoint saves every user 27 seconds because the new menu bar is cooler, right? And if you save time, and if you take twenty-seven seconds by ten thousand employees over the course of the year, what does that get you? Enough money to get a renewal from that client. That’s what they were worried about, right? I don’t know if you’ve ever thought about that, but that’s what they were worried about.

And I was sitting there going, “You’re leaving a bunch of money on the table.“ There’s a lot of value that you actually give people that you don’t account for because it’s really hard to measure. And so I came up with this idea. I won’t go into it in depth today. There’s a paper on my website called, Welcome to the Serendipity Economy, that looks at the long tail of value, right? So if I give the PowerPoint presentation and somebody likes it, even if it took me longer, if they like it, they’re going to possibly change their perspective on something they’re going to buy, and they’re eventually going to buy some of that. And it may take weeks or months for that to happen. If you are doing academic publishing, Microsoft Word helped me do all this; the references were good, I could make it all pretty and all that kind of stuff. And then what happens six months later? It gets published, and it gets trashed by the reviewers, right? Who cares that you save time on writing it? The content wasn’t right, so you know you have to think about both the long tail value and the time delays, and how do you actually determine what value looks like?

And so those are some hard things to go through. If you’re doing metrics, try not to just pick the easy ones. Think about the thing that’s going to show over time. In community colleges, one aspirational metric is: Do people who graduate from this program actually go into that field? And make a living? In the field that we just graduated into, right? So you can get a two-year nursing program or a four-year registered nurse program. Do those people actually become, and I’ve asked, nurses? And they said it’s too hard to go back and find the people. How are we determining its value when the organization is telling me it’s too hard to measure the value that we’re promising people?

That’s a tough choice to make. And then, finally, testing against shocks, policy changes and everything else, right? So this puts in resilience, and this is where we get to scenario planning. Scenario planning looks at uncertainty. It puts a name on the things we don’t know. I have very rarely seen strategic planning outside of a few military organizations or Royal Dutch Shell. They publish their scenarios, where they actually name the uncertainties: we don’t know what these things will be or how they will turn out. And I’ll give you one of the ones that we’re using right now for the future of libraries: “The boundaries of automation.” What’s that going to look like? Are we going to have a cooperative world with artificial intelligence? Or are we going to have a world of human replacement? We don’t know how that’s going to turn out.

The other primary uncertainty is the character of power allocation. Are we going to have a lot of concentrated power? Are we going to find a way to redistribute wealth and redistribute power? Those are axes that we look at. But there are many other uncertainties for librarians. How will adults learn? How do people consume content? Ten years from now. You have no idea. Right. The extrapolation will be more e-books and the web, and, you know, we can extrapolate, but there are probably going to be breakthroughs.

And I mean, I heard this from one of the presenters this morning: “I love summarizing everything.” They consume a lot of content because AI now summarizes everything. It doesn’t tell you everything when you summarize something, right? You guys know that. So there is a lot of gray space left. On the chopping room floor, when you summarize something, you can get the highlights. But you are not getting the nuance. You need the nuance. And then if you’re going to use AI well, you also need the nuance.

One of the other problems with artificial intelligence is that we’re not asking it very good questions right now, and it’s actually capable of answering very difficult questions. And we’re not asking very difficult questions. I’ll give you an example of within the purview of scenario planning. If we create multiple futures, we can think about what might surprise us and watch for it. It’s not going to be exhaustive, but it’s better than saying we didn’t think about the future, except for this one linear vision we had during the strategic planning session.

Here’s our vision for what it will be like in five years. A vision should inspire resilience. If you say there are multiple futures driven by uncertainties, And we’ve populated all of the uncertainties with values that are unique to those different futures, and we’ve created rich narratives about at least in this case four different futures, and we’ve tested our assumptions against those, And we found out that some of our assumptions don’t hold up against any of the futures that we have, then you learn something. Right? And then you can make the choice. We can’t imagine a future where that will work. Or you say, “four out of four, this idea is resilient; it works against all these futures. “ Then maybe we should spend more time looking at that and thinking about how that works. And there are also innovations that come out of it. There are ideas that you have as you’re having the conversation about it.

One of the ones that popped out of our research was microgrids at the library? So what’s the library’s role in climate resistance? So I was creating these futures with grad students, and so there was an environmental emphasis. Although you know it’s a hoax, I know, but they were worried about the future environment. I have grandchildren. I’m also worried about the future of the environment for them. We asked questions about the role libraries play, particularly public libraries, in the resilience of public infrastructure. Because of fire and drought and tornadoes and floods and other things, do we harden the libraries? And do we give them, you know, microgrids that work so that when the power goes out, there is still power on at the library?

And those are ideas that are probably not in any of your strategic plans. And you probably look at it and go, “Ten years from now, that’ll never happen. “ But, it’s forcing you to think about something that you probably didn’t think about the day before. And, you may gnaw on it for a year or two, and look at what’s happening, what’s unfolding with climate stuff and going, “We could do this right. “ Why do they always send everybody to the high school gym when there is a flood? That’s the first place they go. I know for a fact that many libraries are used in areas with high heat because your air conditioning is especially valuable to people who are unhoused there. And thinking about that, is that part of your strategic remit, right? If it is, you then have to say, how do we find the money not only for ADA compliance, but how do we find the money to make sure that when there’s a flood, we’re not underwater. Right? We don’t have to recover from it. We’re actually a moat in the storm.

And then lots of other ways, exploring options, the early warning system. So once you put a name on uncertainty, you get to the point that you are looking at it in a way that you can start saying, ” How is this playing out?” You can watch that uncertainty play out, and it will give you, I’ve had it described as a pin and a cork in the bottle in a bucket of water. It’s very much like a compass because it’s not going to be just directional and always be this way. ;. It’s going to move, and that is an important benefit. Also, SWOT analysis: many of you, when you do strategic planning, you’re going to do strengths, weaknesses, opportunities or threats for today. Right? And, it’s very non public sector. It’s because when you talk about threats and opportunities, a lot of it’s about competition.

I also heard this week that the public sector shouldn’t be worrying about competition. I think you should. You have competition. It’s not just that the libraries are competing with each other; you’re competing with Amazon, you’re competing with Ann’s Archive, you’re competing with lots of different places. And so it’s not just library-to-library. But now, imagine: if you do scenario planning, it’s not only about your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities or threats now, but also about what they will be 10 years from now. What are they in different social, economic, and political circumstances? That’s a very different exercise. So here are the four futures that we did. I’m not going to spend time talking about those. Just show you the power distribution boundaries of automation, metered commons, cooperative commons, the uncommons, and the stable commons. Happy to talk to you about those at the booth later, if you are interested. And then we have what it looks like in practice.

I put “culture” in quotes in my book “Management by Design,” and I’ve had crap from the internet for saying we shouldn’t talk about culture. But very much like strategy, I think culture is one of those overloaded, vague, wishy-washy terms. We go, “Oh, we want to have a culture where we care for people,” or “we want to have a culture where we share stuff.” If it’s not embedded in the way that you work, it’s just a phrase. And so to me, culture is something that again, strategically we decide we’re going to have a culture that does this, which means we’re going to do these things. And so, in the book, I talk about policy and practice. Policy being things you write down that you may or may not actually do, right? Practices are things that you don’t write down that may actually be an implementation of policy that you do or that you do that aren’t supported by a policy. That’s always an interesting discussion.

And then how you use space, who you allocate space to. When you walk into a place, and I often do this, I’ve had this discussion with library directors. I’ll walk in, and I’ll just say, “ Let me stand here for a minute and see if I can figure out what you do.“ Right? And what’s important to you. And the space tells you pretty quickly what they’ve decided is important. It may not be what they think is important, but it actually communicates what is important. And so you immediately have a strategic disconnect. And then technology. What technology do you deploy, how you deploy that, and how you support people who deploy and employ technology? Budget decisions mirror the priorities; the measures reflect it. And then the scenarios look for the triggers: When do we have to do something differently?

You want to get your strategy down to the thirty-five-word test: Is your strategy thirty-five words or less? That again is not a slogan, as long as it actually reflects the strategy. You know it’s going to be condensed, but hopefully, it’s something that’s meaningful to people that they can articulate and that they can actually say, “You know, I work at this place. This is our strategy. And here is how what I do fits into what we’re trying to achieve as an organization.” And you do that by embedding budgets, policies, measures and routines. The way that you work becomes the way that you strategically execute.

And then communications on a rollout is part of the strategy. So often, there’s a we’re going to do the strategy, then we’ll have a communications plan with the strategy. Building the strategy, doing the work every single day, that’s how you communicate it. You don’t necessarily need a communications plan for the strategy. We’re going to write up summaries and do slide presentations and all that kind of stuff if it’s embedded in the budgets, if it’s embedded in the policies, if people’s job descriptions reflect what it is you are trying to do. That’s communicating it, right? You’re actually living it. You don’t have to tell people about it. And then making trade-offs. So again, if you want to do something and you’ve got two or three or four multiple things to do, and you choose to do one of those, people should understand that it’s the strategy of the organization that’s driving the choice. It’s not personal. It’s not because it’s a bad idea. It’s because that’s what we’re trying to do to execute our strategy.

When we talk about the livingness of strategy, someone may come up with a perfectly valid idea that could challenge the current perception of what the strategy is. Don’t just take it at face value. Don’t reject it because it doesn’t align with the current strategy. Strategy may be a good reason for not doing something operational that reallocated resources away from the goal. But a great strategic idea is something else. It can become a personal mission to influence the strategy. People who believe they are in the right organization at the right time to pursue a strategically valid initiative should be making that bet. It is imperative for organizations, if I go back to AI, that’s one of those that you know. It’s reinventing around you. An idea, and an outside force, may be pushing from outside the organization to stress its strategic position, or the idea may be pushing from within to challenge assumptions. Organizations need to reinvent themselves, and you need to be an active participant in that process. And, if you’re not budgeting for that and giving people time to figure out what it is and what it does and how it affects the roles and the obligations of the organization, then you’re making a poor strategic choice right now. That should be where some money and time are allocated. Being strategic is an investment.

And again, within the confines of what you are trying to achieve as an organization, name the challenge. Write the thirty-five words. This is what I’d love you to do by next week. Your homework: name the challenge, write the thirty-five-word strategy, test it against some scenarios, and then think about your plans and actions. And then every action edits the story. Everything that you do. To me, if I am an executive and I am sitting in a room, and we make a decision, and we actually do something, and somebody gets up and says, “We just you know, we just went out. We handled all ADA compliance for the library. We are now very accessible. We’ve got hearing stuff and things that help people with sight impairment and with mobility impairment. We did all that stuff.” And you say, “Great! That was part of our strategy. We want to be accessible.” Now what? Right?

Just checking something off a five-year plan, you go, “Okay, great. Now what?” Now those resources have been freed up. What’s next? And are things that are on the list that you’re trying to do, or co- do at the same time, still the important things? Did you learn anything by finishing that piece of the strategy or executing on that piece of the strategy that affects the other things? You should have a new conversation about what things we should be investing in now. It’s fine to come up with: it’s fine, and we’re good. That’s a fine answer. We’re still going to do it. It didn’t really modify any assumptions about our strategic position or what we want to achieve…but you should have the conversation. We achieved what we said we would. And now what does it mean?

Thank you. I look forward to seeing your homework.

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All images via OpenAI ChatGPT from prompts written by the author.

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