Strategic Planning

Had a neat experience today. Our entire library staff went off-site for a meeting from 8am til noon to discuss our strategic plan with a man from our company that takes an interest in those sorts of things. His goal, and our goal really, was to get the entire staff to work together on creating a vision and plan that we could use to help us with our annual performance reviews. It was kind of interesting and I liked his idea of how to begin: imagine going 10 years into the future and then coming into our library and seeing how it would look if it were wildly successful. Would a wildly successful corporate or government library look like in 10 years? Are there any print materials? What are the users like? How are we helping them? What technologies exist? It's a fun brainstorming experience. By exploring where we want to be in the long run, we can create the first few babysteps of things we want to accomplish in the next year or two to set us on our path.
Of course, as expected, not everyone participated. We knew that some people are just burned out on performance management. Some people are 'short timers' and plan to retire in 5 years or so. What was their 10 year vision? Coming into work with a visitor badge! But almost everyone participated and I think we got a lot of the meeting. Kudos to Matt Sieger for leading the talk. There was some great food to be had, as well! ;)
The depressing part of the talk was that the more we imagined outselves being as successful as possible, the less librarians are needed. Automation, improved databases, natural language searching that actually works, fully digitized collections.... I told my boss that it's much like how a doctor's dream is for there to be no injury or illness-- he'll wish himself out of a job! Much in the same way we are thinking ourselves out of work. My only consolation is that technology doesn't move quite fast enough, and business sensibilities lag even farther behind. Maybe I can squeeze a 30 year career out of traditional or transitional librarianship afterall. :D