This blog post is being posted to Future Ready 365 today. Are you a future ready information professional?
A few weeks ago Jane Dysart, Kim Silk and I were fortunate to hear Daniel Pink talk at the Rotman School of Management Life-Long Learning Conference for Leaders, ‘How to Get Your Business Back to Reality.” His latest book, Drive, bases “the surprising things that motivate us” on 40 years of human motivation research (here’s a pdf summary of Drive). It wasn’t his discussion about what does or doesn’t motivate us that caught my attention, although that is fascinating and worth a blog post(!); it was his discussion about the need for organizations to challenge and re-think base assumptions on which they are building their strategies.
I’m increasingly concerned that that the library sector and information profession must do just that: challenge, re-frame and quite possibly re-think our base assumptions and the practices and approaches built on those assumptions. Pink re labels assumptions “orthodoxies”. Labelling and viewing what we, as a sector and profession view to be truths as “orthodoxies” rather than assumptions forces us to see the deep-rooted concreteness of these “truths”. It is these deep roots that make it somewhat painful to question the validity of these orthodoxies today and, more importantly, tomorrow and into the future.
I laugh, both because laughter is healthy and because for a profession that has an orthodoxy (yes, a truth – an assumption!) of finding and delivering answers to any question, we aren’t
Continue reading Curious Enough to Question “Orthodoxies”