The Permission to Stop (or at Least to Do Things Differently): Leading Libraries Through VUCA

russellsmichalak
Jul 1
10 min read

recently attended the ACRL President's Program at the American Library Association Annual Conference. The session was titled "Leading Academic Libraries through VUCA in Higher Education," and it left me thinking about a few things that have been lingering with me for a while. VUCA, for those unfamiliar with the framework, stands for Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity. It originated in military strategy and has since found a comfortable home in leadership discourse, particularly in sectors like higher education that are experiencing simultaneous, seismic disruption on multiple fronts.

The panelists, who represented R1 university libraries and a liberal arts college library, were candid, thoughtful, and helpful. They spoke about budget pressures, the shifting political landscape, the erosion of public trust in higher education, and the relentless pace of technological change. Throughout the discussion, the topic that stayed with me most was deceptively simple: how do we stop doing things? This is a question we continually ask, and for which I posit not many have found the answer.

A Quote Worth Thinking About

One of the panelists shared a quote from Peter Drucker that I still think about:

"There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all."

I have been in this profession long enough to know exactly what Drucker is pointing at. We are remarkably good at refining processes, improving workflows, and optimizing operations, sometimes without ever pausing to ask whether the work itself still makes sense.

A friend later added a corollary that made me laugh before it made me wince:

"There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all, except doing inefficiently that which should not be done at all."

In some libraries, that second version may be the more accurate diagnosis.

The Service Trap

Libraries are, at their core, service organizations. That orientation is one of our great strengths. We step in when others step back. We fill gaps. We say yes. Over the decades, we have accumulated layers of work, some of it clearly ours, and much of it that migrated to us because we were willing, capable, and present.

The problem is that service orientation, unchecked by strategic intentionality, can become its own form of institutional drift. We take on work that arguably belongs in other departments of the college or university. We hold onto services that once addressed a genuine need but have since outlived their moment. We keep doing things because we have always done them, and because stopping feels like a kind of failure or abandonment.

This is not a character flaw. It is a structural one. And in a VUCA environment, where every resource decision carries real consequences, we can no longer afford to let inertia make our choices for us.

Why Stopping Is So Hard

To understand why stopping is difficult, we have to take seriously what work means to people. Staff often define themselves through their responsibilities. The cataloger who has maintained a particular collection for fifteen years, the archivist who built a finding-aid system from the ground up, the librarian who pioneered a service once considered visionary: these are not just job duties. They are identities. They are sources of purpose and professional pride.

Change management research is detailed on this point. William Bridges, in his foundational work on transitions, drew a crucial distinction between change and transition. Change is the external event. Transition is the internal psychological process of letting go of what was, navigating the uncertain middle, and eventually orienting toward something new. Leaders who focus only on managing change and skip the transition, in Bridges' framework, set people up to fail.

This means that when we decide to sunset a service or restructure a workflow, we have an obligation to create space for grief. That word may sound dramatic in a workplace context, but it is the right one. People lose something real when the work they have invested in is discontinued. Acknowledging that loss, naming it, and not rushing past it is not soft leadership. It is effective leadership.

John Kotter's eight-step model for leading change reminds us that generating short-term wins and communicating a clear vision are essential, but so is building the coalition that helps people move together. In academic libraries, that coalition often includes department heads, frontline staff, and faculty partners who have come to depend on specific services. Their voices belong in the conversation, not as a veto, but as a vital source of intelligence about what the work actually means and what might be lost or preserved through redesign.

The question "what should we stop?" is best answered not by leadership alone, but through a structured process that invites honest input, sets clear criteria, and separates the emotional weight of transition from the analytical work of evaluation.

A Different Path: Doing Things Differently

Stopping, of course, is not the only answer. Sometimes the right response is not to eliminate a service or function but to reimagine how it is delivered. This path, doing things differently or more efficiently, can be harder to see clearly precisely because it requires us to hold two things at once: a commitment to the underlying purpose and a willingness to release our attachment to the current method of fulfilling it.

Consider how many library workflows were designed in an earlier technological era and have simply never been revisited. A process that once required three staff members and a stack of paper forms may now be handled in a fraction of the time with the right tools, or it may be ripe for automation, consolidation, or elimination of redundant steps. The work still matters. The way we are doing it may not.

This kind of redesign demands honest self-assessment. It is easy to believe that a process is irreducibly complex because we are close to it and have invested in mastering it. But complexity is sometimes real and sometimes inherited, a historical artifact of decisions made under different constraints. Lean thinking, which has been applied with real success in library settings, invites us to map our workflows and identify waste: unnecessary steps, handoffs that add time but not value, approval chains that exist by convention rather than by genuine necessity.

Process redesign also opens conversations that pure elimination forecloses. When staff understand that the goal is not to take their work away but to improve it, resistance softens. The cataloger, freed from repetitive data entry because a system now handles it, can redirect attention to complex materials that genuinely require professional judgment. The reference librarian whose administrative burden is reduced can spend more time with the patrons whose questions matter most. Doing things differently is not always a consolation prize for failing to stop. Sometimes it is the more honest and more ambitious goal.

What this requires of leaders is clarity about purpose. We must be able to articulate, with conviction, not just what a function does but what it is ultimately for. That clarity is the anchor that allows everything else to be questioned.

Guardians of Knowledge, Not of Process

Another panelist shared, “We are guardians of knowledge, but we do not have to be guardians of our processes”.

Academic libraries have a deep and legitimate commitment to preservation, access, and the long arc of the scholarly record. That commitment is worth protecting fiercely. But the specific methods, platforms, workflows, and organizational structures through which we fulfill that commitment are not sacred. They are instruments, and instruments should be evaluated on whether they still serve the purpose for which they were designed.

This requires us to change our mental models. The assumptions that worked well in a stable environment become constraints in a volatile one. When we operate inside a fixed mental model, we optimize within it rather than question it. Chris Argyris called this "single-loop learning," in which we adjust our actions to fix errors without examining the assumptions that produced them in the first place. "Double-loop learning" goes deeper, interrogating the governing values and frameworks themselves.

Libraries that will thrive through VUCA are those that can distinguish between what they do and why they do it, and remain willing to redesign the former while protecting the latter.

Building a Culture of Innovation

Whether we are stopping things, redesigning them, or doing both at once, none of it is sustainable without the organizational culture to support it. That is the work of building a culture of innovation, and it deserves serious attention alongside the operational decisions we make.

Research on innovative organizational cultures consistently points to a cluster of shared characteristics. Psychological safety, as Amy Edmondson has documented extensively, is foundational. People must believe they can raise questions, flag problems, and propose unconventional ideas without fear of embarrassment or punishment. Without it, the status quo is always the safest option, and no one will surface the honest assessments that strategic decision-making requires.

Innovative cultures also tend to share a tolerance for productive failure. Not recklessness, but a genuine understanding that some experiments will not succeed, and that the learning embedded in those experiments has value. This is easier said than sustained, particularly in public institutions with limited budgets and real accountability to stakeholders who may not share that view. But the alternative, an environment where no one proposes anything unless success is guaranteed, is not cautious leadership. It is organizational stagnation. I am reminded here of a quote I first heard from former Princeton University President, Shirley Tilghman, “An institution that stands still is an institution that gets left behind.”

Shared vision matters too. Teams that understand not just what they are doing but why they are doing it, and who see a compelling picture of what success looks like, are more likely to generate novel approaches and more willing to absorb the discomfort of change. This is where leadership communication becomes a strategic act, not just an administrative one.

Finally, innovative cultures tend to distribute decision-making closer to the work. Frontline staff often know before anyone else which services are failing, which processes are wasteful, and which opportunities are being missed. Creating structured channels for that intelligence to flow upward, and actually using it, is one of the most straightforward things a leader can do to accelerate a culture of innovation. Skip-level meetings, discussed in a previous blog, can be one such mechanism.

Embracing AI Without Surrendering to Fear

No conversation about the current landscape of academic libraries would be complete without addressing artificial intelligence, if only minimally.

There is real anxiety in our profession about what AI means for library work and for library positions. That anxiety is understandable. It is also, I would argue, not the most useful lens through which to engage the technology.

The Drucker principle applies here with particular clarity. If we are spending time and human effort on tasks that AI can perform well, and those tasks are ones we should not be doing with expensive professional attention anyway, then AI is not a threat to our work. It is permission to do our work better. And when stopping outright is not the right answer, AI is also a powerful tool for doing things differently, compressing the time and effort required for certain functions so that human capacity can be redirected to higher-value work.

Routine metadata processing, certain literature search functions, repetitive data formatting, and some aspects of interlibrary loan workflow are likely candidates for augmentation. Not elimination, augmentation. The goal is to redirect human capacity toward the work that genuinely requires human judgment, human relationships, and the kind of contextual intelligence that no model can replicate. Reference librarians who build trust with researchers over time. Collection curators who understand the intellectual trajectory of a discipline. Instruction librarians who can read a classroom and adjust in real time.

The framing that I find most useful is that AI is not coming for our profession. It is coming for our busywork. And if we can release that busywork with some grace and clear intention, we will be better positioned to articulate and demonstrate the irreplaceable value of what human library professionals actually do.

That requires us to be honest about what we have been protecting. Sometimes the resistance to AI adoption is not really about professional values. It is about the same thing the resistance to stopping any service is about: identity, habit, and the discomfort of change. Naming that honestly is the first step toward moving through it.

A Leadership Imperative

The VUCA panel at ALA reminded me that the challenges facing academic libraries are not temporary disruptions on the way back to stability. This is the environment. Volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity are the conditions under which we will lead for the foreseeable future.

That means the question is not whether we will need to change, but whether we will lead that change intentionally or allow it to happen to us. Deciding what to stop, determining what to do differently, supporting people through the transition, shifting our mental models, cultivating genuine innovation, and engaging AI as a tool rather than a threat: these are not separate initiatives. They are facets of the same leadership challenge.

We have an opportunity to model something important for higher education right now. Not just efficient management of decline, but principled, creative, human-centered leadership through genuine uncertainty. I believe libraries are capable of that. I believe the profession has the values and the talent to rise to this moment.

The permission to stop is also the invitation to begin. And sometimes, it is simply the invitation to do the same important work in a better, more efficient, more honest, and more sustainable way.