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I just read a blog post about successful initiatives that falls somewhere between ’serendipity’ and ’strategy’. The post by a Dean Dad, Community College Dean, was titled “Make it Look Planned.” The point was that sometimes, maybe even often, successful things happen not because of of the “fetish of extreme planning” or totally by random luck, but somewhere in-between.

I think what Dean Dad is pointing out, that if you rely only on well thought out plans or conversely on pure luck, you probably aren’t going to go far. Using initiative and trying thinks on gut instinct is where real progress can be made. I think many librarians understand this. In fact, it is almost a necessity in the library world because we often do not have enough data to make evidence based decisions – even if we wanted to. Of course, I imagine this can be a tough sell at Universities that are focused on data-driven planning, but that doesn’t mean we should try somebody’s “what the hell” inspiration on how to improve the library experience. Trying out and implementing new ideas like this is how one can lead from wherever they are in the organization.

The trick is to implement the “what the hell” ideas in a manner that if they don’t work out, they can be rolled back. This can sometimes be a problem though. Often when these types of things are implemented, there has been little thought on how they are to be evaluated and how to migrate them, when successful, into the flow of the organization. In other words, how to move them from pilot to production.