guilds in a time of rapid change

I'm not going to name a particular profession, but...

All organisational structures have a purpose.  A guild is a structure to protect and preserve information and power in a challenging but relatively unchanging environment.  Guilds can endure when there are incredible outside stresses, which is why they were an organisational structure of choice in the Middle Ages.

Some characteristics of guilds:
* strongly hierarchical
* secretive
* exclusive
* conservative

In a guild, knowledge is held close, and solutions come from the top.

Now imagine the guild in a time of rapid change.  In such a time, the most junior members of the guild, as well as outsiders, may have the most understanding of what is going on.  But the guild is structured neither to reach outside itself, nor to reach to junior members, nor to even ask for help with solutions at all, because solutions must always be dictated from the top down, from the Keepers of the Secrets.

How can a profession break the barriers of the guild mindset?

1. Define problems and ask for help from both junior staff and experts external to your guild.
2. Instead of secrecy, strive for transparency
3. Be open to continuous experimentation

Why is this important?
Look at the Web 2.0 timeline.
We are in an era of transformative change.  We are 15 years into the web, a decade into the Google Search Era, and only 4 years into Web 2.0

If you're working on a traditional 5-year planning cycle, that means you're only three plans since the information environment transformed completely, and your last plan may have been fixed in print before Web 2.0 even existed.  These are challenging times.

I think this is some of the challenge that Tom Peters is trying to articulate in Barnacles on the Ship of Librarianship.

No single speciality can have all the information about how to deal with these times.  Decades of pre-Web experience may have limited applicability in the new environment.  You need a willingness to experiment, to learn, and to be wrong. 

Why do you need to experiment?  Because otherwise you will inevitably fall behind.

The non-experimenting management approach goes something like:
1. Dismiss a new technology (e.g. blogging)
2. A tipping point arrives and "suddenly" everyone is blogging
3. Panic and demand why your organisation isn't blogging
4. Listen with frustration as staff tell you it will take time to build the necessary infrastructure in order to support blogging
5. Fall farther and farther behind

I call this "build the attic before the foundations".  No resources are devoted to a moderate strategy of experimentation and infrastructure building, and then all of a sudden the organisation tries to leap ahead to the latest technology (the "attic") before they have put in place all the necessary underlying support structures of process, software, and hardware (the "foundations").

I think this underlies some of the ideas about whether librarians should be programmers, as covered in Caveat Lector's Proto-librarians and computers. 

But that idea is also to some extent missing the point.  Yes, in a Guild, you need to be Master of All Information.  But in a regular organisation, while being an expert in your specialty, you don't need to be an expert in all specialties, you just need to know how to ask the right questions, how to pose the right problems.

Now of course, there are huge constraints here that need to be recognised.  First many smaller libraries have no technical staff to call upon, or very few tech staff.  Second, even in a large academic library, you may be relying upon a central IT department that has many other demands on its resources.

So yes, librarians do need to understand a few key things, particularly library technology, like link resolvers and proxies.  But at a high level, not at a low level (as I mentioned previously).  Knowing the right questions is more important than being able to provide the entire solution.  There's a whole world of programmers out there, including your own superpatrons, who may be able to help you if you can just formulate the right problems for them.

You need to understand how to use technology, particularly search, which (I would hope) any university graduate today is going to have learned organically.  You need a high-level picture of how things fit together, an understanding that machines can talk to machines, something like "Introduction to Internet and Software Concepts".  And as I've said before, you may need to be a bit of a scripter, in order to glue useful pieces of existing technology together.

In summary, we do not need to replace the (I'm not going to say it) Guild with the Programmer's Guild.
That misses the point.  We need people with enough technology knowledge to be dangerous, and enough respect for other professions to ask them for help whenever external expertise applies.

Previously:
January 10, 2005  the fall of the temple of books