Week 3: Develop a Framework and Implement Strategic Planning

HowEmployeesShapedStrategyattheNewYorkPublicLibrary.pdf

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STRATEGY EXECUTION

How Employees Shaped Strategy at the New York Public Library by Bruce A. Strong and Mary Lee Kennedy

DECEMBER 05, 2016

The New York Public Library is one of the largest public libraries in the world, with 18 million

visitors yearly, a budget of nearly $300m, and 93 branches. It serves vastly diverse populations:

toddlers and caregivers, new immigrants, lifelong learners, famous novelists, and scholars.

Although based in New York City, it serves a global audience of researchers and tourists.

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Library leaders knew that given the immense changes brought on by digital innovations, as well as

shifts in the communities that the Library served, it would need to evolve. How to transform such a

huge, iconic institution, wrapped in history, into a nimble player? How to provide hyper-local

services tailored to the diverse needs of its patrons while also upholding a consistent and high

standard of service?

In the spring of 2014, we proposed a radical approach: offer anyone on staff – over 2,500 individuals,

many of them union members – the chance to shape the library through strategic conversations with

senior leaders. We believed that if the Library was to be truly nimble, senior leaders couldn’t

unilaterally come up with a plan. Involving staff in conceiving, designing, and implementing the

change would result in a course of action that was more fit-to-purpose and more likely to be well

executed. Staff would fully understand the changes and be accountable to each other for their

implementation.

The conversation would be neither bottom-up nor top down. Staff would take a lead role in

designing, testing, and advocating solutions. Leadership would shape the conversation to ensure

proposals were strategically on-point. Senior leaders also would provide resources, guidance, and

act as decision makers.

But would involving so many people work in practice? How to get them engaged? How to ensure

that the conversations didn’t bog down or become chaotic?

Several organizations for whom we had worked or had researched used a technique we call

“innovation communities” to structure strategic conversations so that they’re both efficient and

effective. These diverse groups of volunteer employees work across organizational boundaries and

outside of their regular operational duties. They are empowered by – and in frequent

communication with – senior management. Innovation communities had been used by Best Buy to

grow its portion of the women’s consumer electronics market by $4.4b in less than five years.

Boston Children’s Hospital used them to make advances in telemedicine. Japanese pharmaceutical

Eisai used them to improve care for Alzheimer’s patients.

Convinced, the library’s management team created three innovation communities with each one

focusing on a core library function: circulation, collections, and reference.

The Teams Each community was structured as three embedded circles. The smallest was the “core team”

consisting of five to seven staff members from each of the three boroughs served (the Bronx, Staten

Island and Manhattan). Their expectation was to spend about a day a week for the next six months

on the identification, design, and testing of a business model innovation.

The next larger circle was made up of “testers,” approximately fifty staff members who piloted the

solutions. Finally, all staff were invited to be “conversationalists” and participate by providing their

ideas, critiques, expertise, and encouragement.

Internal experts helped innovation community members with unfamiliar tasks such as data

collection and analysis, environmental scanning, and preparing and delivering management-level

presentations.

Shared Spaces The three innovation communities shared virtual, physical, and temporal spaces to promote cross-

community exchanges. The virtual space was a social media platform open to all staff. This social

network was designed to reduce the friction typically found in a hierarchical organization: we

wanted staff from any branch to be able to communicate with each other and with senior managers,

unmediated by reporting structures.

The physical space was a room in the Library’s Midtown Manhattan branch dedicated to the

innovation communities where the core teams, and other interested parties, could work together.

Painted on many of the walls were huge whiteboards, where the three teams worked on designs and

exchanged ideas.

The temporal space was a day set aside each week: the three communities met on Wednesdays in

order to reduce scheduling issues and allow support people – for instance the data and analytics

experts — to meet with the three communities within a predictable block of time.

The Process The three core teams were given a month to present to senior leaders options for their experiments,

and the capabilities needed to try them. They were asked to describe their solutions, the benefits to

the intended audiences, and to list up to five hypotheses that could be tested before the end of their

six-month project. Built into the template were the library’s guiding principles: that its services had

to be consistent, convenient, empowering, and inspiring. Each team came up with two to three of

these “options statements.”

We knew from the start that coming up with all this in a month would be a challenge. But we

anticipated that the very rawness of the presentations would create opportunities. Because the

recommendations wouldn’t be fully baked, it would be easier for senior managers, and the rest of

the community, to challenge assumptions and conclusions without seeming threatening. We wanted

to create an environment where “thinking out loud” was encouraged.

The discussion around the options statements played out as we had hoped. In the crucible of these

conversations, the library’s strategy was transformed from an impersonal statement into a living,

internalized guide. Having to develop testable hypotheses forced the participants to think deeply

about how to structure their work so that it was rigorous and data-driven.

In partnership with senior management, and with the support of the internal experts and the rest of

the community, the options statements were strengthened and then approved. The core teams then

moved to design and test their solutions with senior management, the testers, and the

conversationalists. Nearly 250 staff members (almost 10% of Library staff ) became involved in the

process, providing their own input as they became familiar with the core teams’ work.

The Results The Circulation team examined how books flow through the NYPL system. Of the total circulation of

about 23 million, about two million items are reservations (called “holds” in library lingo)

— typically items that the library needs to transfer from another location. The team discovered that

the library was processing holds more slowly than its North American peers because of inefficiencies

throughout the process. Implementing the team’s recommendations should result in at least a 20%

reduction in wait times for books while providing patrons with better information about where they

are in the queue. The changes will also reduce staff workloads.

The Collections team focused on improving the library’s ability to provide content to youth and

young adults. They made a major discovery: this population was two and a half times more likely to

use books and other materials in the library than check them out. NYPL librarians had long

suspected that in-house use was substantial, but the magnitude was surprising and something for

which the library’s business model had never accounted. Of course, more usage is good news. But

given this evidence, the team concluded that the library could do much better at serving this

population. More materials could be made available for in-house use (as opposed to expecting

patrons to put them on hold from other branches). And the collections could be tailored to serve

local needs though more interaction with local educators and schools. The team also believed that

this solution would appeal to branch librarians’ professional pride by providing them more

autonomy to shape their collections. The solutions, which required a radical rethinking of how

materials circulate, are scheduled to be rolled out to all branches by the end of 2017.

The Reference team came to another startling–and in this case concerning– revelation. While NYPL’s

online reference service was heavily used, and its research libraries conducted in-depth

consultations on a regular basis, patrons almost never consulted with librarians at neighborhood

branches. The team discovered that when general reference support was sought, staff often didn’t

have the time or skills to meet patrons’ needs. Based on its analysis of the issues, the team piloted a

“reference receipt” for patrons with recommendations for book titles and online resources to

support research beyond the initial reference conversation. The teams also tested signage at the

local branches to guide patrons to such common services as signing up for using computers so that

staff would have more time to offer reference services. And finally, they recommended modular

training sessions for staff on providing those services. All three recommendations were adopted.

Both staff and senior leaders were enthusiastic about these outcomes – in fact, the library already

has launched the next set of experiments.

Staff was energized by the opportunity to shape how the library worked. As a core team member put

it, “We entered the process with the perspective of employees and came out with the perspective of

leaders.” They were deeply appreciative of the chance to interact with, and learn from, peers across

NYPL, something that rarely happened otherwise. They were excited to master new skills and

knowledge relevant to librarians such as sophisticated data collection and analysis.

The core team members turned out to be superb community organizers. They rallied their peers to

take on significant testing tasks and to participate in the overall conversations. They also were the

best advocates for their solutions. And they had an innate notion of the types of conversations that

would generate real change.

The project expanded their sense of belonging. Many had felt isolated in their individual branches.

Now they had a clear line of sight to the entire system through their interactions with colleagues

from across the institution. This institution-wide connection went beyond the work per se; staffers

also felt much more connected to the library than ever before. As one participant put it: “Doing

Innovation Communities changed everything for me. I went from looking for jobs outside of NYPL

to looking at this system and thinking, ‘Where do I want to be next?’ It helped me think about the

NYPL system and where my career could go here.”

It wasn’t just staff who were transformed. Senior leaders better understood how the library operated

“on the ground” and they began to see how employee involvement in strategic conversations

opened up real possibilities for reducing managerial burden. Staff — when offered meaningful

autonomy and real opportunities for mastering their professions — become problem-solving leaders

in their own right. And the cost was marginal. The project released staff energy that was more than

ready to be tapped.

This isn’t to say that everything went completely smoothly. We were initially overly enthusiastic

about exposing staff to new management concepts and templates, unnecessarily overwhelming

them. The Reference team’s pilots didn’t immediately produce the desired results. Not everyone in

the hierarchy –top, mid or bottom – was comfortable with networked, open conversations that

exposed problem areas for all to see. And two of the three teams went beyond their six-month

mandate, over-burdening participating staff and the branches in which they worked.

Despite these difficulties, innovation community participants more than rose to the occasion. Staff

cared deeply about the work and put in much more effort than anticipated.

What surprised us most was the importance of the social aspect of the innovation communities.

Community members consciously forged new and strong bonds of comradery, commitment, and

common purpose.

And that brings us to our concluding point: strategy as currently practiced rarely emphasizes the

importance of community. Our experience with the Library highlights it. The social bonds created by

the innovation communities, we believe, will be integral to the Library’s continued efforts to realize

its strategic direction. It will be up to leadership to continue to foster the social environment and the

conversations in which strategic ideas are born, nurtured, and carried out.

Bruce A. Strong is an author, consultant and a founder of the Network Leadership Group, which offers coaching and action-learning programs to help management fully engage the smarts and energy of staff and partners.

Mary Lee Kennedy partners with organizations to build strong communities that take full advantage of the information landscape. She was director of Knowledge Networks at Microsoft, Senior Associate Provost at Harvard, and

most recently, Chief Library Officer at the New York Public Library.