Today I will have a recap of what I saw and heard at PLA, yesterday, Wednesday April 3, 2024. Please note, I write these posts at night, after a long day at conference.
Today I presented and had meetings so this is my lightest panel day.
I started my day at the Opening Session with Shola Richards:
Shola Richards is the CEO and Founder of Go Together Global™, the best-selling author of Making Work Work and Go Together, and he is a civility writer with a passionate worldwide following. His articles and extremely popular "Go Together Movement" email series have been read by readers in over 160 countries, and his work has been featured on the Today Show, CBS This Morning, Forbes, Black Enterprise, Complete Wellbeing India, Business Insider Australia, and in numerous other outlets all over the world who recognize him as an authority on workplace happiness and engagement.
As a speaker, Shola has shared his transformative message with top universities, leading healthcare organizations, Silicon Valley, the motion picture industry, on the TEDx stage, and in his greatest honor to date, in September 2021, he was invited to testify in front of the House of Representatives on Capitol Hill to share his expert recommendations on how to bring more civility to Congress.
Last, but certainly not least, Shola is a father, husband, identical twin, and self-professed "kindness extremist" who will not rest until bullying and incivility are extinct from the American workplace.
The talk was about looking at kindness and resilience and just how we are to each other specifically in the work environment. It was inspirational and a great way to kick off the conference. He was an engaging speaker. This is a great example of a talk that is better to experience than to trip to recap. I know I did not capture him as well as I could have, but I did try to get down some of what was best to share here.
He uses Three Questions to frame his talk: Is it kind? Is it true? Is it necessary?
Is it kind?
He showed a sign from a hospital: "Please take responsibility for the energy you bring to this space." And then told us about the 2 kinds of people in the world, and once he began describing them we all knew where it was going:
- the ones who make you feel good the second they walk into the world
- the ones who make you feel good the second they walk out of the room
I am glad he took the time to talk about the difference between "nice" and "kind" because I live my life not worrying about nice and focusing on being kind. Nice means you are agreeable and it is a breeding ground of passive aggressiveness. Kind means you try to leave everything you touch a little better than before you came.
He had a slide about how we all need to actively practice self kindness. There were many things on the slide, but two that resonated with me were:
- maintain healthy boundaries-- including saying no
- some people in your life need to be loved from a distance
Is it true?
This part was about building trust. And a central question, "how are we expecting people to do what we can't do ourselves.
He talked about bad behavior and how it is the manifestation of an unmet need. Also the concept of being an "upstander" over a "bystander." And up stander sees bad behavior that harms people and speaks up.
He talked about his childhood library-- The Jones Library in Amherst, MA (love that library)-- and an experience as a child when a library worker was an up stander for him.
Is it necessary?
He told a story from his West African father about being the Buffalo vs the Cow. The cow runs away in a flood and the buffalo stays put and deals with what the flood brings.
He reminded us all that what we are dealing with tin the world is not going to get any easier, so we need to figure out how to deal with it. When we have to do hard things, doing them together means we can deal with them easier and face what is coming.
Since true reliance needs to be done together, not alone, he asked us to reimagine resilience. He defined it as:
- Someone who will feel with you
- Someone who will laugh with you
- Someone who will stand with you (also can be the person who reminds you why you do this)
He then said to use those three questions about in conjunction with a reimagined concept of resilience to being us back together.
He mentioned the
Dunning Kruger Effect, the concept that the people who are very incompetent at something are too incompetent to know they are incompetent at it.
And then left this fact which I think was the most powerful thing he told us because it is the most obviously problematic pairing of statistics, and if I saw them before this talk I might have looked twice at them, but after his talk, they are stunning in presenting the problem we are all dealing with together:
- 75% of Americans think incivility has reached an all time high
- But, 94% of Americans think they are always or usually polite.
Now I can see what he is saying-- both things cannot be true. It is a huge problem that in our country we all see ourselves as polite but we also see everyone as being uncivil.
He was not going to solve this problem in our 60 min talk. But he was going to help us learn to be resilient without getting overwhelmed by how big the problem is by telling us: You don;t have to do the right things everyday, you just have to do the right things today. You only have to being the fight to show up just today.
Right after my talk I went to this:
RA Meets AI: Building and Launching a Reader’s Advisory Kiosk
Allow us to introduce you to the Recommendation Station: Scan a book barcode, browse read-alikes, check local availability and print shelf locations—from a touchscreen kiosk with built-in barcode scanner and receipt printer. Learn the motivation behind the project. Hear how Worthington Libraries leveraged the Novelist and Polaris APIs to build the software. Find out how they branded and promoted the new kiosks. Discover insights on how the new technology service has impacted the library.
Here is the 1 page handout they provided on the site:
This program explained how they created 7 kiosks across 3 buildings that give out reading recommendations to people without a human giving them the recs. Except, it is not AI. They kept calling it AI but they use NoveList Select's recommendation engine to print out readalikes for people and NoveList Select's reading recommendations are made by humans.
Now, I did appreciate the detailed discussion of how they built the software and how they want to use this as a gateway to interacting with the staff, nudging them to take advantage of the RA Service they offer at the desk by using a self-service model.
And, I also liked their next steps which will include "While You Wait Lists" for hot titles and using the stations in a more promotional manner, almost as another display opportunity where they can have timely, staff created lists that are scheduled to appear and disappear, being replaced by a new list.
But, I was uncomfortable that they used NoveList as the main software to drive this service without checking with NoveList. Yes they pay for NoveList Select, but that is an add on product to be used in your catalog. This is not their catalog. I know people from NoveList also attended this session. I am interested to see what happens.
My advice, don't use someone else's product to make a brand new service and then present it at a national conference without checking with the company whose product is providing the intellection property behind your service.
After this I had a lunch meeting, went to the exhibits for about 45 mins after they opened and headed to the LibraryReads dinner where I got to see many of my favorite people.
Tomorrow, I will not be going to the "Big Ideas" session so I can get a tiny bit more sleep. I do have a full day of panels and I will need energy to report on them when I return to my room in the evening.
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