A Matter of Change
The current Chronicle of Higher Education Tech Therapy podcast is all about Change, a phenomenon that we deal with constantly. Warren Arbogast asserts that people must first feel pain in their status quo situations in order to be willing to change. That’s somewhat ironic, since change itself seems to be painful to so many. Change means having to give up comfortable ways of doing things and to begin new learning processes.
In the IT and library worlds change is constant and it is everywhere. First the Internet, then the Web, then Web 2.0, each requiring us to review our services and how we provide them and to revisit our organizations and their structures. Change is an evolutionary process, influenced in large part by the the new information and communications technologies that are reshaping our lives at home and in the workplace.
A common adage states that if you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there. Before considering strategies for change and developing processes, we must understand what needs to change and why. In order for change to be effective we must carefully analyze our current situations and thoroughly understand what we do and how we do it. We need to review everything – our policies, services, organization, staffing patterns, facilities, and our technologies and how we use them. As a metaphor for this process, the Chronicle podcast uses the activity of clearing out old vines. We must first separate the vines and understand how they are growing before carefully pruning them so they can sustain a healthy growth.
As we continue to face rapidly changing and often unpredictable environments, we must constantly assess and modify our operations. Our future successes depend on how well we manage and anticipate change at all levels of our organizations.