Why a dancing elephant? Well, I think of public libraries as being a lot like elephants. Smart, slow-to-move but once they get going in a direction, hard to get them to change direction! Public libraries need to become more like dancing elephants…still smart but a lot more likely to move quickly, able to change direction easily, nimble. How do we do that? One great idea I got from attending ALA in Chicago – encourage risk-taking and develop a process to learn from experiments that don’t work. If an organization learns from its mistakes and failures – then they aren’t mistakes and failures. Good food for thought.
