2012 Best Practices for Government Libraries

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BEST PRACTICES 2012
own perspective, providing a variety of views, again not a typical debrief. Instead of
just saying, “Here are our findings.” the team spoke about the challenges they had
faced and how they had navigated those challenges, providing context for how their
conclusions had been reached. Having laid out their findings, the team indicated
they were ready to open the floor for dialogue.
I noticed that during the give and take of the conversation the team members were
able to strongly advocate the findings they had developed as well as demonstrate
their openness to our (the executive team) views. However, one of the team
members, Carrie (not her real name), said something that really bothered me. She
made a claim that a certain piece of information was non-existent. Now, I was
aware that she was wrong, that piece of information was available. I said just that,
perhaps a bit more forcefully than I intended. And I said that if the team had been
thorough enough in their search they would have found it. However, rather than
becoming defensive, Carrie said she found my comment interesting, because even
the senior member of their team who had full clearance to look at all the available
data did not come across it. She began a discussion among us all about the
availability of information across silos. Out of that discussion I gained a new
understanding about the issue of information availability from the perspective of
analysts doing a search. It was a very stimulating conversation."
The Fresh Look Team
"The meeting with the executives was even more successful than we had thought it
would be. The executives were impressed with the quality of our findings. And we
were pleased with the skills we were able to exhibit in being able to respectfully
detect and overcome the “old guard” approach.
As a team we were particularly proud of our interaction with Sam, the senior
executive who reacted critically when he realized that the team did not know about
the existence of a critical piece of information, saying, “Everyone knows it exists.”
We were able to recognize the role-based behavioral pattern in Sam’s remark and
were able to avoid the emotional trap that could have deflated and sidetracked us
away from the issues. We were able to detail the process we went through to find
the data, what was made available to us, and what had been hidden from even the
most senior analyst member of our team who specialized in the issue. This detailed
explanation led to a more general discussion of how information is shared and
accessed which brought new insights both to us and to the high level executives
present. Through using the critical discourse skills, our goal of using review
meetings to jointly develop knowledge was realized.
The Director of DIA attended the debrief and told us later that what he witnessed
was the embodiment of team behavior - the kind of team behavior DIA needs for
detecting new threats. He said the discussion with the team was cathartic for him."
Fresh Look is one of many examples of changes in the ability to speak truth to
power at DIA. To do so analysts and seniors first needed to recognize their own
contribution to the dysfunctional patterns that existed inside DIA. Secondly, they