Tag: Reading Public Library

Reading Public Library: Scenarios to inform resilient strategy

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“The flexibility of the plan in part helps us to present our goals and efforts, because those goals and efforts can reshape as real world events interfere with business as usual…It really leaves room for creativity and the flexibility to adjust to the real world.”

Melissa Adams, executive director of Pennsylvania’s Reading Public Library, interviewed by Nancy K. Herther of the University of Minnesota, explains how a COVID-era scenario planning process informs robust and resilient strategy for her organisation and community.

“Another advantage was experienced during the transition between executive directors. The plan was decidedly not the prior executive director’s plan, it was the organization as a whole body’s plan. This made it easier for me, as the incoming executive director, to keep the plan moving forward…the article we co-authored has helped me really take ownership of this strategic plan.”

Reading Public Library, Pennsylvania

More than a Game: Scenario Planning, Imagination, and the Public Library’s Future

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For Public Libraries Quarterly, Bronwen Gamble and Melissa Adams of the Reading Public Library co-wrote an article with me on our scenario planning journey through a leadership transition in the depths of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“More than a Game: Scenario Planning, Imagination, and the Public Library’s Future” explores the use of frugal, online scenario planning methods during the pandemic and the benefits of a scenarios process in times of leadership transition.

It builds on Dale Leorke and Danielle Wyatt’s notion, expressed in their book The Library as Playground, of the library as “a space and institutional order innately imbued with playful qualities” to consider how libraries may be the perfect hosts for scenario processes which “play with expectations, hopes, fears, and desires, in a strategically consequential game of ‘What if?'”

Find out more about “frugal” scenario planning on the Oxford model from Rafael Ramirez and Trudi Lang at Saïd Business School, University of Oxford here.