David Kelley, co-founder of the design consultancy IDEO and the Stanford d.school, has been credited with the modern adage, “You need to fall in love with the problem to solve it.” Design thinking stresses the importance of deeply understanding and empathizing with the problem you are trying to solve before moving to solutions. The process acknowledges that many potential solutions exist. Focusing on the problem also sets teams up to move on from proposed solutions that fail and, perhaps most importantly, from problems we can’t or don’t need to solve.
In this keynote, Lindsay Cronk, Dean of Libraries at Tulane University, will describe her career-long work of developing high-performing teams focused on problem-solving. Since there is no shortage of problems in academic libraries and in the world today, this talk will provide practical insights for galvanizing collaborations within and across our organizations, including examples of solutions that worked and didn’t and what ensued. She will share her rubric for problem prioritization and lessons learned from her personal philosophy of doing the hard parts first while still having a good time.
The challenges of scaling and scoping projects, crafting multi-audience communications, and successfully navigating change are ones that all of us in academic libraries know well enough to love. Cronk notes that the choice to “love” a problem sets certain conditions for joy, including deep familiarity with a subject and opportunities for humor, experimentation, and shared experience. This model requires that we change our mindset, avoid deficit thinking by acknowledging our strengths and limits, release our grip on notions of expertise and expectation, and begin to work on the important problems we share.
Cronk will speak to how we can approach these challenges without creating burnout and disengagement. The key, in her assessment, is to emphasize enjoyment, play, and delight for our teams as well as our patrons. Setting a norm of moving from understanding to action also avoids a familiar pattern of long-standing problems becoming a source of resentment and low morale. Modeling this behavior as an organization has broad positive impacts, perhaps most importantly shifting assumptions of academic libraries for ourselves as much as our patrons.
