photo by Ellie Collier / CC-BY-NC

I play Magic. It’s a fairly complicated card game which calls on many of the same skills needed for games like chess or poker. Poker has suits, Magic has colors. And I hate playing black. Unlike other colors, when I play a black card I often have to sacrifice a few of my life points or one of my other cards. Good players know that this instinctually painful cost is often negligible compared to the positive effects of the card. But my gut reaction is still a big knee jerk “NO!”

I’m suffering loss aversion and I would be well-served to pause and analyze the situation.

Magic isn’t my only bit of nerdom. My partner and I play a lot of games. We host regular game nights and play just the two of us several times a week. His favorites are German-style board games which rely heavily on strategy and resource management. After a game, he and some of his friends will often point out which decisions were likely the most pivotal in the outcome. It always seemed placating to me, an emotional self-defense justification for not winning, but he insisted that studying your mistakes is the best way to learn.

What’s all this got to do with libraries? Well, the only way to avoid loss aversion is to know about it. To know when to trust your instincts and when to doubt them you need to spend a lot of time thinking about how you think. And it turns out the best way to become an expert at something is to spend a lot of time studying your mistakes. These are the first of several lessons in Jonah Lehrer’s How We Decide that immediately made me think of current library hot topics like “transparency” and “perpetual beta.”

In How We Decide, Lehrer spends a lot of time talking about experts in high tension situations, but there’s still plenty that can be applied to the library, which is what I’ll be doing with the remainder of this post. In the interest of full disclosure, I was not drawn to this book on my own as I was with Made to Stick. This review is the result of a request from fellow Lead Piper Brett Bonfield. (Yes, we do take requests for post topics, or at least I do.) Its relevance to libraries didn’t jump out at me as immediately as Made to Stick‘s did, but it did give me many ideas for my interpersonal relations, both at work and at home. For one, I’ll be asking my partner to help me study my gaming mistakes more often.

I was particularly impressed with the quality of the writing in How We Decide. It opens with a detailed first person narrative of Lehrer’s experience piloting a Boeing 737 over Tokyo when one of the engines catches on fire. It turns out to have been a flight simulator, but you’re already hooked. Lehrer continues to introduce a number of incredibly engaging professional scenarios and scientific studies and repeatedly calls back to them to reinforce his ideas. He seamlessly jumps between analogy, example, research study, and overarching theory. His main argument is that the age-old dichotomy between the rational and emotional sides of the brain is not only false, but destructive. His overall advice is to think about why you’re feeling what you’re feeling, to think about thinking and become a student of your errors. In that very first story Lehrer pulls you into an emotional state then takes you back through the experience to try something different, which is exactly what he continues to ask of you throughout the book.

Your emotions are super smart, if you train them

Lehrer explains that conscious thought is only a small part of what the brain does. Our orbitofrontal cortex is responsible for integrating much of our subconscious analysis into our decision making process. The orbitofrontal cortex “connects the feelings generated by the “primitive” brain—areas like the brain stem and the amygdala, which is in the limbic system—to the stream of conscious thought” (p. 18). These feelings are actually a summary of data processed by our subconscious, transmitted to our orbitofrontal cortex and interpreted as an instinct or gut reaction. It often provides a highly accurate shortcut to a drawn out conscious analysis. What makes expert chess, poker, and football players able to trust their instincts is that their instincts are finely tuned by a constant focus on mistakes. These players know that “self-criticism is the secret to self-improvement; negative feedback is the best kind” (p. 51).

While I’m not suggesting you point out every mistake each of your colleagues or students makes, I would propose you try it on yourself and encourage it in others. We already know that students learn better when they are active participants in the learning process as opposed to passive recipients of information. We can insert that active learning even earlier in our instruction process by moving from having students apply what we’ve just shown them to having them reason through and come up with the solution on their own.

Taking it one step further than merely analyzing our mistakes, Lehrer argues that mistakes aren’t things to be discouraged: they should be cultivated and carefully investigated. A crucial ingredient in education is the ability to learn from mistakes. This grabbed me both from an instruction standpoint—we should be cultivating those critical thinking skills—and from the idea of perpetual beta. I think a valuable question worth asking is, “will it take more time and effort to set up a committee to evaluate every possible scenario before launching a new service or to troubleshoot after?” The answer will definitely not be the same for every situation, but look for opportunities to jump in and learn as you go.

Lehrer explains a study by Carol Dweck which shows in startling statistics how important it is to cultivate an attitude of learning through analyzing our mistakes. Dweck had 400 fifth-graders take a puzzle test. The children were given their scores and praise in the form of one of the following two sentences: “You must be smart at this” or “You must have worked really hard.” The children were then offered the choice to attempt a of set of puzzles similar to the ones they had just taken or a set that were more difficult, but from which they would learn a lot. Dweck expected the different forms of praise to have a modest effect, but the results were dramatic. The children praised for their effort nearly all chose the harder test while those praised for their intelligence went for the easy one. Later, when given a test written for eighth-graders the children in the hard-working group were excited by the challenge while the smart group became easily discouraged. The last set of tests were the same difficulty as the first. The hard workers saw an average score increase of 30% while the smart group’s scores dropped by nearly 20%.

“Instead of praising kids for trying hard, teachers typically praise them for their innate intelligence (being smart). Dweck has shown this type of encouragement actually backfires, since it leads students to see mistakes as signs of stupidity and not as building blocks of knowledge. The regrettable outcome is that kids never learn how to learn…. The problem with praising kids for their innate intelligence—the “smart” compliment—is that it misrepresents the neural reality of education. It encourages kids to avoid the most useful kind of learning activities, which is learning from mistakes. Unless you experience unpleasant symptoms of being wrong, your brain will never revise its models. Before your neurons can succeed, they must repeatedly fail” (p. 52-53).

Often times at the reference desk we are as much counselor as information specialist. After much conscious effort, I have gotten better at verbalizing my search strategy as I work with students. One of the benefits has been helping students learn that for more complicated topics refining your search terms is often an iterative process. I remember working with a student on a particularly finicky subject. The fact that I (the expert) did a search and got zero results, then tried again with a different term, and again with a third phrase before hitting on something that got us usable articles, was validating and enlightening for the student. She went from feeling stupid for not knowing the right magic word to learning a process she’ll be able to apply to every search in the future. It’s not about being smart, it’s about making the effort and learning from the failures.

Your emotions will also sabotage you

Many of our gut reactions are actually our vast amounts of experience (learned from mistakes) processed by our subconscious and passed up to our conscious mind via emotion. But we all know that we can’t always trust these instincts. Lehrer covers the most common cases where our emotions lead us astray. One example is the loss aversion I mentioned at the beginning of this post. We put more weight on bad than good. Lehrer states that, “in marital interactions, it generally takes at least five kind comments to compensate for one critical comment” (p. 81). The only way to avoid loss aversion is to know about it.

The way to regulate our emotions is to think about them. “If the particular feeling makes no sense … then it can be discounted” (p. 107). Lehrer suggests that you consciously question your emotions. Think about why you’re feeling what you’re feeling. You may still go with your instincts, but by taking the time to think it through you may just catch yourself falling into a trap.

“Patients who have undergone cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT), a form of talk therapy designed to reveal innate biases and distortions of the human brain, have also been shown to be less vulnerable to these same biases. Scientists speculate that these patients have learned to recognize those maladaptive thoughts and emotions that automatically occur in the responses to certain situations. Because they reflect on their thought processes, they learn to think better” (p. 242).

This message really struck home with me. Knowing you’re being irrational is only the first half of overcoming a misguided emotion. The second half is knowing why. While I wasn’t calling my hatred for black Magic cards “loss aversion,” I did realize I was being irrational. I knew the better players knew more than I did, and I trusted that they had a more appropriate sense of which cards were better and worse. But learning that this is a typical reaction and, more importantly, understanding why it is a typical reaction, pushed me over the top from trusting the better players to actually “getting it” myself.

The importance of regulating our emotional responses struck me especially for its use in interpersonal relations—our dealings with our colleagues, our managers, our staff, and our students. Lehrer includes a great quote from Aristotle, “Anyone can become angry—that is easy. But to become angry with the right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose, and in the right way—that is not easy” (p. 107). This bit of advice was well timed for me. I had been getting more and more stressed at work over the course of a few weeks. I knew I needed to address it, but hadn’t decided how. In the end I realized I was taking too much personal responsibility for something that I shouldn’t have. That realization allowed me to actively decide where I wanted to continue to be involved and where I would choose not to invest my emotional energy. When you have a strong emotional reaction to something or someone, think about why you are so upset. Often realizing exactly why you are having a strong emotional reaction is enough to give you the tools to deal with the issue.

Relying solely on rational thought will also sabotage you

For starters, that’s how professional athletes crack under pressure and experienced performers freeze on stage—by thinking too hard about things that are typically automatic.¹ Lehrer’s tip—don’t think of the details of what you’re doing, but instead think of a descriptive adjective, words like smooth or balanced, that evokes your overall goal.

Choking isn’t the only danger of thinking too much. You’re also in danger of overloading yourself. You have a limited amount of working memory. The prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for active analysis and decision making, can only handle so much information at one time. I was interested but not overly surprised to read that a bad mood is a rundown prefrontal cortex.  That’s all the more reason to make sure to regularly take time to yourself and especially to take the extra time to clear your thoughts before sending that impassioned email.

Lehrer explains how our rationality can become a liability, “since it allows us to justify practically any belief” (p. 206). He cites studies where republicans misremember the deficit under Clinton, Christians chose not to push the button to alleviate static over an atheist broadcast, Israeli intelligence disregarded its own information leading up to the Yom Kippur War, and pundits on both sides consistently showed correlation between high confidence levels and incorrect predictions. In all of these situations each group was mislead by its own certainty and ignored contradicting evidence.

Lehrer argues that, “the only way to counteract the bias for certainty is to encourage some inner dissonance. We must force ourselves to think about the information we don’t want to think about, to pay attention to the data that disturbs our entrenched beliefs” (p. 217). In addition to working to develop our own internal dialog, “we can create decision-making environments that help us better entertain competing hypotheses” (p. 217). Abraham Lincoln is famous for his cabinet full of rival politicians. His ability to tolerate dissent and foster diversity was an enormous asset. He encouraged vigorous debate and discussion before making any decisions. Airlines have implemented a highly effective decision making strategy called Cockpit Resource Management (CRM). They discovered that many errors were at least partially due to the “God-like certainty” of pilots. “The goal of CRM was to create an environment in which a diversity of viewpoints was freely shared” (p. 253). Hospitals have also adopted CRM with great results.²

“The reason CRM is so effective is that it encourages flight crews and surgical teams to think together. It deters certainty and stimulates debate. In this sense, CRM creates the ideal atmosphere for good decision-making, in which a diversity of opinions is openly shared. The evidence is looked at from multiple angles, and new alternatives are considered. Such a process not only prevents mistakes but also leads to startling new insights” (p. 255).

While it would be wonderful if we all worked in supportive, collaborative environments where constructive criticism and active dialogs were encouraged, the truth is that it takes a lot of effort to create and maintain that atmosphere. Anyone can take the first steps. I am particularly excited to have our E-Resources Librarian as my partner on the student technology use survey my library will be doing this semester. I know that I have a definite bias towards looking out for those left on the far side of the digital divide so her focus on technology integration provides an excellent balance.

Lehrer suggests being your own devil’s advocate. This is another place where you may be able to look for additional external substitutes. When we were working on our pitch for the student technology survey we wanted to be ready for any question library management might throw at us, but we weren’t entirely sure what those would be. Our college has an internal grant proposal process. By completing the grant proposal we were prepared to answer questions about goals, objectives, timeline, budget, and how the project tied in to the library and college mission. We didn’t win the grant, but management approved and funded our project.

A brief aside

After explaining how our emotions can stand in for our experience, and when they shouldn’t, Lehrer concludes that how we decide should depend on what we’re deciding. But before detailing his final conclusions he explores morality. Moral decisions are unique in that they require the brain to take other people into account rather than act on purely selfish motives. Moral decisions are strongly based in sympathy. It’s part of the reason we are more moved by the plight of one child than by statistics about millions. Statistics don’t activate our moral emotions. It’s also why my college’s I Am ACC campaign is so much more moving than a list of statistics about the importance of community colleges.

At this point I do want to warn any sensitive readers—and I include myself in this group—there are some upsetting animal studies described in Lehrer’s section on morality. If you’d like to avoid them I suggest you skip about 3-5 paragraphs (sometimes more) any time monkeys are brought into the discussion. You won’t miss the gist of the lesson and there are compelling (and less graphic) human stories that still back up the message.

Deciding how to decide

Throughout the book Lehrer repeatedly emphasizes that the most important thing is to think about how you’re thinking and study your decision making process so you can learn to make better decisions over time. Make an effort to see the situation as it is, not as you want it to be. I’ve run into a related statement at faculty gatherings at my college that has really stuck with me: Teach the students you have, not the ones you wish you had. In my community college we are seeing more and more students who are less and less prepared to do college level work. I often hear disparaging remarks towards the K12 system or pining for the academic rigor of the past. But just as often I hear faculty explain how proud they are that so many more students who wouldn’t have considered college a possibility in the past are now enrolling. These faculty challenge us to do everything in our power to meet students wherever they are along their path of educational development and help them reach their personal goals—which may or may not be a four-year institution.

Lehrer closes with an analysis on how to put all of this science to practical use in your life. If you have significant experience in the domain in question (your own personal preferences fall into this category), even if it is a highly complicated issue, you’re best served by collecting all the relevant information, then setting it aside and letting your subconscious decide. For all other situations you should at least question, and possibly ignore, your emotions. They’re particularly dangerous in situations that you’ve never encountered before. “Emotions are adept at finding patterns based on experience… but when you encounter a problem you’ve never experienced before, when your dopamine nuerons have no idea what to do, it’s essential that you try to tune out your feelings” (p. 128).

Postscript

While not covered in the book, one of the strongest lessons I took from it was the importance of how, when, and from whom you hear a particular message. As I read through this book I kept running into things I had been told before, but had dismissed initially. My partner had explained the importance of dissecting your plays in order to improve, but I thought he was just trying to make me feel better whenever he pointed out certain things were chance. My mother (a psychologist) had suggested I try to identify the reason behind the particular emotional reactions that were triggering my stress, but in the moment I was worked up enough that I didn’t see how that could possibly help. The next day when I read the same advice in Lehrer’s book it clicked. (I called Mom to share the laugh.³) It’s impossible to be calm and rational all the time, but by being aware of potential cognitive biases, we can more easily recognize when we are falling prey to them and incorporate good advice when we are calm enough to take it in.

Study Questions

Lehrer’s final message is another call to think about thinking and to become a student of your errors. My personal goal this year has been to focus on improving my teaching, so this semester I’ll be applying that lesson to my instruction sessions by writing out my reflections after each class. Here are some suggestions for other areas to focus on, based on the studies Lehrer describes.

• Can you find places in your teaching to let students try something on their own without instruction, help them verbalize what did and didn’t work, and allow them to try to come up with reasons why?
• Can you set aside time after your sessions to critique your own teaching? Or after a program to critique the planning process or the execution? Or after a year purchasing for a new fund area or interacting with new faculty? What worked, what didn’t, what will you do differently? What are some of the other things that you do often that could benefit from reflection?
• How can we encourage ourselves and our students to see mistakes as learning opportunities rather than failures? Can we work encouragement and instruction into the zero results pages of our catalogs? What can we do to help mold our workplaces into environments where we encourage sharing our failures and our learning process as much as we encourage sharing our successes?
• Are there people you can partner with in your institution that can help balance any of the biases you know you bring to the table? Are there other resources you can use as your own devil’s advocate?

Thanks to Brett Bonfield for the book recommendation and edits and to Kim Leeder and Rachel Slough their feedback and edits.

1. Rachel Slough pointed out that Barry Green’s Inner Game of Music also supports this idea in the “performance” context–and that under pressure we tend to become overly critical.
2. “Before CRM training, only around 21 percent of all cardiac surgeries and cardiac catheterizations were classified as “uneventful cases,” meaning that nothing had gone wrong. After CRM training, however, the number of “uneventful cases” rose to 62 percent.” (p. 255)
3. On a related note, I remember learning about emotions in elementary school and being told that we choose our reactions. No one can “make you” angry/happy/sad. I refused to believe this until after college. In that same call my mom reminded me of another helpful way to phrase the same thought, “Don’t give anyone that kind of power over you.”

Photo by Flickr member houseofsims

I always feel the need to preface my praise for this book with a little background. I’ve read a slew of best sellers on behavior. I started when a friend was raving about Malcolm Gladwell. I picked up Blink and The Tipping Point and read through them to join in the discussion. I was generally entertained but not particularly blown away. Then I read Predictably Irrational in preparation for a panel with Dr. Ariely at ALA last year. The reviews compared it to Freakonomics, so I read that one too. Figuring I was on a roll, I ran into Sway and added it to my list. They were all quick, easy, and entertaining reads. But Made to Stick was the first to truly inspire me. I had to stop every couple of pages and share a passage with someone or make a note to myself about how I could apply a concept to my work. I’m not claiming that Made to Stick is full of revolutionary ideas. It’s not. It’s also not a librarianship book. It’s not even a teaching book. It’s a marketing book, and yet page after page I found ideas to apply in my information literacy classes and to other areas of librarianship. What Made to Stick does have are excellent examples across various disciplines. (It also has a nice sized font and a conversational tone that make for easy gym reading.)

I would like to share some of the insights that stuck with me, and, in the process, encourage you to read outside your typical areas and think of how you can apply what you learn to your work. Right now, in my personal practice, I’m focusing on my teaching and how to make my one shot presentations more effective, both with my students in the library and at conferences. The examples that dealt with teaching and the possible applications that struck me while reading are the ones that stuck with me, but there’s so much more to mine here, especially in terms of management and marketing.

The Heaths “wrote this book to help you make your ideas stick. By ‘stick,’ we mean that your ideas are understood and remembered, and have a lasting impact – they change your audience’s opinions or behavior.” With that in mind they organized the book (and titled the chapters) around 6 major qualities of sticky ideas:

• Simplicity
• Unexpectedness
• Concreteness
• Credibility
• Emotions
• Stories

Again, none of this is revolutionary, but the examples (concreteness) and the Idea Clinics (sidebar thought exercises) in each chapter bring home the points. The acronym of SUCCESs was a little cheesy for my taste, but as one of my reviewers pointed out, librarians love acronyms and people remember mnemonics. So if it helps you, use it.

Simple

In the chapter on “Simple” there is an excellent detailed explanation of military strategy and the importance of the Commander’s Intent. The Commander’s Intent is the one line summary of the main objective, written at the top of the document that spells out the full strategy. There follows a detailed plan for how to achieve this, but there’s also a saying, “No plan survives contact with the enemy.” The message here is to find the core of the idea. The corollary is, “No lesson plan survives contact with teenagers,” something that I can relate to in my instruction. In fact, the majority of my sessions to coworkers begin with my asking them what they hope to get out of the class. I then sketch out the details of the lesson plan on-the-fly based on their answers. I have my Commander’s Intent in the form of the topic of the session, but am free to rearrange the actual class time based on the learners’ needs. I am still working on how to pull this method into my one shot classes, where the students are much less likely to be there of their own volition and therefore less likely to have personal objectives for the class.

Made to Stick stresses that making an idea simple is “about elegance and prioritization, not dumbing down.” I’ve been struggling to determine how much information to cover in my one shot sessions. My main objective that I repeat throughout my presentation is, “I don’t expect you to remember how to do all of this. I want you to remember that the librarians know it and you can always come to us with questions.” Likewise when I cover evaluating web sites, I’ve cut it down to “Ask yourself ‘Who wrote this?’” Yes, there’s much more to it, but not much more that can be covered and absorbed in such a short period of time. “People are tempted to tell you everything, with perfect accuracy, right up front, when they should be giving you just enough info to be useful, then a little more, then a little more.” I think so many of us struggle against this Curse of Knowledge – having difficulty seeing what we’re trying to teach through the eyes of someone who doesn’t already know it. “As a result, we become lousy communicators.” Working to make our ideas simple is probably the most challenging idea covered in the book, but certainly worth the effort.

Unexpected

The Nordstrom’s customer service training teams use a list of unexpected examples to drive home the importance of outstanding customer service. Some stories of outstanding “Nordies” include the salesperson who warmed the customer’s car while he finished shopping, the one who ironed a customer’s shirt so he could wear it later that day and the one who refunded a set of tire chains – even though Nordstrom’s doesn’t sell tire chains. Telling people something unexpected shakes them out of their standard assumptions. Most people would presume to know what good customer service is, but the unexpected story of warming a customer’s car causes them to reevaluate the meaning of outstanding.

This brings up another common problem in my classes: battling over-confidence. If my students assume they already know everything they need to know about doing research, why would they want to listen to me? Both Made to Stick and one of my colleagues have suggested the same solution: engage people by having them vote publicly and commit to an answer. Made to Stick tells of a study of 5th and 6th graders who were assigned to interact on a topic. They were broken into two groups. One group’s conversation was lead to foster disagreement, the other group’s conversation was steered towards consensus. The group whose discussion had more disagreements was more likely to skip recess to watch a video on the topic. They were more engaged than the group that quickly came to consensus. As I reviewed this section I was reminded of a recent discussion over iClickers. One of my coworkers said that she has the students vote on whether a particular site is appropriate for college level research. After they vote she has them find someone with the opposite point of view and try to persuade them. She has them vote again after their discussion and finds that the majority have come around the the right conclusion.

Concrete

“World class customer service” is abstract. A Nordie ironing a customer’s shirt is concrete. Simple and unexpected are hard and take effort. Being concrete just takes remembering to do it and not slipping into the Curse of Knowledge. There are a number of great uses of concreteness in terms of marketing in this section. In one example the people behind Hamburger Helper took the abstract idea of their users and nonusers and made them into concrete detailed pictures of individuals. The Hamburger Helper product team had multiple binders full of data on their customers, so much that it was overwhelming. They put the binders aside and sent small groups into homes where they saw that mothers valued predictability in flavor and convenience to make. Seeing the mother searching for her child’s old familiar flavor on the shelf amongst a slew of new alternatives and then preparing dinner with a child on her hip made the idea of convenience concrete. Hamburger Helper ended up simplifying the product line and, subsquently, increasing sales. Creating a concrete, detailed description of your library’s users sounds like an excellent exercise for an all staff day or, even better, an outcome of a full blown user study. At my community college we would likely create three: the transitioning-to-a-4-year-university student, the two-year-certificate/workforce student, and the continuing education student.

Credible

Authority and celebrity are two ways to boost your credibility, but thankfully this chapter spends more time on options that are readily available to the average person. One such option is the anti-authority. Take Pam Laffin – the 29 year old who started smoking at age 10, developed emphysema by 24, and suffered a failed lung transplant. Pam became an anti-smoking spokesperson appearing in ads on MTV and Dawson’s Creek. Using these kinds of vivid concrete details and putting things on a human scale are two alternative ways to evoke credibility. To show just how powerful details can be, the authors tell the story of a study in which jurors were deciding a custody case. The jurors were more likely to believe the defendant was a good mother if her testimony included the specific description that the boy used a Darth Vader toothbrush while she ensured that he brushed his teeth at night. This little detail of the type of toothbrush lent significant credibility to her testimony. One of my coworkers tells a cautionary story of the student who waited to the last minute and tried to find everything online and the one who followed the steps she was about to teach them for good research. What other ways can we bring instruction out of the abstract, into the specific and human?

One of the most applicable ideas in this section is that of testable credentials. The book gives two great examples of this. First is Ronald Reagan asking the American public in his 1980 presidential debate, “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?” The second example is taken from a workshop held by the Positive Coaching Alliance. The trainers “use the analogy of an ‘Emotional Tank’ to get coaches to think about the right ratio of praise, support and critical feedback.” They ask the coaches to say something to drain a player’s tank after he has flubbed a key play. The coaches excel at this. When they are asked to fill the tank the room goes silent. “Observing their own behavior, the coaches learn the lesson – how they found it easier to criticize than to support, to think of ten clever insults rather than a single consolation. [They] found a way to transform [their] point into a testable credential, something the coaches could experience for themselves.” I know that my instruction could benefit from relying less on the authority and lecture angle. It’s a hard habit to break, especially since the lecture style is my personal preferred learning method, but I also see the need to foster increased critical thinking skills, allowing students to reason through more lessons on their own.

Emotional

This was my favorite chapter. Getting people to believe you is only one step in changing minds. To take action, they have to care. There are a number of incredibly compelling stories in this chapter. There’s the effectiveness of charity on a human scale (sponsoring a child rather than giving to the general cause) summed up by the quote from Mother Teresa, “If I look at the mass, I will never act. If I look at the one, I will.” And there’s the success of the Truth cigarette campaign, which tapped into anti authoritarianism. The authors also remind us not to overlook self interest – what’s in it for you? They discuss Maslow’s Pyramid and comment that most self interest appeals invoke the physical, security, and esteem layers. We need to come out of Maslow’s basement. The shining example of this is the military mess hall operator who deemed himself in charge of morale (transendence on Maslow’s pyramid). He has soldiers that commute in from the well-protected Americanized areas just for Sunday dinner. We tend to realize higher level appeals work on us, but then assume we need to appeal to the base needs of others.

This chapter also has an excellent idea clinic on the need for algebra. It begins with the question “Why study algebra?” and a typical conference answer suffering from the Curse of Knowledge which includes gems like “Algebra provides procedures for manipulating symbols to allow for understanding the world around us.” The following slightly better example has things like, you need it to get your diploma, it will help you with reasoning skills, etc. But then the winner:

Stories

Stories “provides simulation (knowledge about how to act) and inspiration (motivation to act). Note that both benefits, simulation and inspiration, are geared towards generating action … we’ve seen that a credible idea makes people believe. An Emotional idea makes people care …the right stories make people act.” There are a number of great stories in this section, but the most important aspect for me was the emphasis on the art of spotting – not making up – these stories. We encounter inspiring stories all the time. I know that a number of libraries collect these stories from their patrons and put them on their web sites. This section has ideas on how to spot ones that are most likely to inspire others to action. I will be looking for ways to incorporate more stories into my instruction, but I think the real strength here would be in promoting libraries to our communities at large.

I hope that I’ve inspired you to pick up a copy of Made to Stick, read through it yourself and look for ways to apply some of the ideas it explains. The ideas from Made to Stick are also a good example of how reading outside the library literature can help us expand our practice without reinventing the wheel. There are so many options. You can start with the straight one to one correlation. Interested in marketing in your library? Read general marketing content. Same goes for management, teaching, presenting, etc. Also consider going to primary sources. Watch good presentations and think about what was good about them. Swap out “presentations” for “managers” or “teachers” and do it again. I’m also including a list of suggestions for further reading, mostly on presenting, that I’ve found inspiring recently. If you have suggestions to add to the list that have inspired you or ways you’ve incorporated some of these ideas, please let me know in the comments.

Suggestions for further reading:

• Authors@Google: Garr Reynolds – “encourages you to think differently and more creatively about the preparation, design, and delivery of your presentations”
• Financial crisis simplified (a whiteboard presentation) – an example of a great concrete analogy
• Book Recommendation: Letting Go of the Words – a book on designing for web content, useful for our websites, but also for presentations
• TED Talks – a collection of amazing and inspiring speakers

Scenes From The MOMA: sometaithurts © LarimdaME / CC-BY-NC

In 1968, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, a couple of newlywed architects, had the humility to laugh with Las Vegas rather than at it. A few years earlier, Tom Wolfe had written,

Las Vegas has become, just as Bugsy Siegel dreamed, the American Monte Carlo-without any of the inevitable upper-class baggage of the casinos… At Monte Carlo there are still Wrong Forks, Deficient Accents, Poor Tailoring, Gauche Displays, Nouveau Richeness, Cultural Aridity-concepts unknown in Las Vegas. For the grand debut of Monte Carlo as a resort in 1879 the architect Charles Garnier designed an opera house for the Place du Casino; and Sarah Bernhardt read a symbolic poem. For the debut of Las Vegas as a resort in 1946 Bugsy Siegel hired Abbot and Costello, and there, in a way, you have it all.

For Wolfe, this was neither a good nor a bad thing, but many architects found Las Vegas and what it represented (such as Route 66′s commercial strips and the emergence of suburban Levittowns) less than inspiring. Venturi and Scott Brown thought architects should “suspend judgment on it in order to learn and, by learning, to make subsequent judgment more sensitive.”

Though relatively young—Venturi was 43, Scott Brown, 37—they were established and confident. Influenced as much by Pop artists as by Rome’s piazzas, they believed Las Vegas could help their peers “learn a new receptivity to the tastes and values of other people and a new modesty.” For them, the charm of Las Vegas was inextricable from its neon-steepled wedding chapels (“credit cards accepted”) and reproductions of Venus and David with “slight anatomical exaggerations;” they described the exaggeratedly phallic sign at the Dunes as “an erection 22 stories high that pulsates at night,” yet still declared it “more chaste” than the sign for the Aladdin. They saw in Las Vegas an architecture that acknowledged Americans’ desire for pleasure and catered to their taste.

Venturi and Scott Brown first published their thoughts on Las Vegas in the March 1968 issue of Architectural Forum. A few months later they turned their article into a graduate studio course at Yale: for the fall semester, thirteen students and three instructors—Venturi, Scott Brown, and their partner, Steven Izenour—“spent three weeks in the library, four days in Los Angeles, and ten days in Las Vegas,” followed by ten weeks back in New Haven. In 1972, Venturi, Scott Brown, and Izenour documented their article and course, and detailed their philosophy of Pop-influenced architecture, in Learning from Las Vegas, “a collage of passages, short essays, maps and diagrams… meant to evoke the lived experience of the Strip (and) challenge traditional two-dimensional modes of representation.” The book included frames from a movie, tourist brochures, and their students’ studio notes.

Like Learning from Las Vegas, Sophie Brookover and Elizabeth Burns’s Pop Goes the Library is part textbook and part manifesto. Instead of growing out of an article and a studio, it grew out of a blog, also called Pop Goes the Library, that Brookover founded in 2004 and has since expanded to include eight regular contributors, including her co-author, Burns. In place of studio notes, Pop Goes the Library has survey responses from librarians—they call these “Voices from the Field”—that read very much like comments on a blog post. And, as Venturi, Scott Brown, and Izenour did in Learning from Las Vegas, Brookover and Burns in Pop Goes the Library argue that understanding, anticipating, and accommodating popular taste is a professional responsibility:

You don’t have to like pop culture to embrace its importance in your library. You read that right: You can be uninterested in pop culture, or even harbor a bit of antipathy toward at least some aspects of it, and still put it to use in your library’s collections, services, and programming. So take a deep breath—if you don’t watch American Idol, have no interest in anime, or think most Top 40 music is unlistenable—it’s okay. Obviously, we encourage you to enjoy a varied media diet and to experiment with your listening, viewing, and reading habits—after all, having access to your library’s holdings is one of the small luxuries of working there, right? But we recognize that not every pop culture trend is going to float everyone’s boat. That’s reality, and it’s perfectly fine. What’s not fine is dismissing pop culture as something that’s of interest only to teens (or any other demographic group) to rationalize its perceived unimportance.

Brookover, the Library Media Specialist at Eastern Regional High School in Voorhees, New Jersey, and Burns, the Head of Youth Services for the New Jersey State Library for the Blind and Handicapped, have written a book “about identifying and harvesting the power of your community’s pop culture… about your library, your community, and how to build better and stronger relationships between the two using pop culture,” which they define as “whatever people in your community are talking, thinking, and reading about”—an intentionally broad definition. Anything and everything can be pop; readers are taught how to identify what pops in their community, as well as how to make it as accessible as possible for their neighbors.

The book is itself as accessible as possible. Where Learning from Las Vegas is occasionally tongue—in-cheek-like Warhol’s soup cans it is a high art appreciation of low art—Pop Goes the Library is written like the well crafted blog entries that Brookover and Burns and their blogging collaborators produce, in general, a few times each week. Imagine an articulate, pragmatic how to article in a glossy magazine or a great email from a friend, useful yet chatty, full of rhetorical questions and exclamation points. For instance, here’s a typical passage, taken from its chapter on advocacy, marketing, public relations, and outreach: “Since outreach is about going where you patrons are, don’t forget the patron at home. We don’t mean instituting door-to-door outreach projects! Just don’t forget the person sitting in front of his or her computer. Knowing that your website reaches a sizeable portion of your audience, why not view it as an outreach opportunity?”

There is a message, and that message is important, but Brookover and Burns have decided not to dress that message up in theory or historical context. Instead, they focus on combining practical advice with serious fun: Melanie Griffith’s character in Working Girl provides an example of applied research; Angelina Jolie’s transformation from wild child into latter day Mia Farrow illustrates good public relations; and Johnny Cash, David Bowie, martinis, and iPods are listed as celebrities and trends that are Cool (Kenny Chesney, KC & the Sunshine Band, cosmopolitans, and Zunes are Not Cool).

If you’re not interested in pop culture, it may be tempting to dismiss the importance of this book’s message or to overlook its ambitiousness. That would be a mistake: Brookover and Burns cover most of the important lessons on librarianship that can be taught in a book: creating a niche; building a collection; using technology; and developing crowd-pleasing programming, among others. As an added bonus, their writing style is as much fun to read as Michael Buckland, S.R. Ranganathan, Jesse Shera, or Elaine Svenonius. (Speaking of pop culture: does anyone know if Elaine is related to Ian?)

Like Learning from Las Vegas, Pop Goes the Library is meant as an example of the ideas it is promoting. In addition to its pop-inflected, chatty tone and “Voices from the Field,” it includes interviews and guest essays as sidebars, an extensive list of links and other resources, a calendar of events for pop-related programming, and it features a companion wiki. Some of this works marvelously—think Martha Stewart meets Jesse Shera—and some of it seems less effective. As with Learning from Las Vegas, there may be a need to publish a revised edition before this book reaches its full potential. The first edition of Learning from Las Vegas was expensive, included pieces that were not central to its thesis, and suffered from some design flaws. It still deserved the attention it got, and would likely have remained influential had its authors not released a smaller, more tightly edited, and less expensive revised edition, but it’s likely the work they put into their revisions helped their book remain a generalist classic.

If Brookover and Burns decide to produce a revised edition, they might consider:

• Making the sidebars into traditional sidebars, with text adjacent to the narrative. Right now, the text is periodically interrupted, a guest writer takes over for a couple of pages, and then the narrative resumes. Because adjacent sidebars are tough to include in a small paperback, it may have made more sense to include these pieces at the end of chapters or in the appendix. Another option: go larger. Edward Tufte’s beautifully designed and manufactured, full color, hard back books on information design have about the same retail price as Pop Goes the Library. It would be fun to see what Brookover and Burns would do with added space and color, and with better print quality;
• Deleting anonymous responses from “Voices from the Field.” It didn’t seem like the anonymous responses were needed, since none of the responses seemed to require anonymity, and dozens of respondents to this survey identified themselves and were comfortable with attribution. It is also useful to know what type of library the respondent is referring to, as well as its location;
• Making “Voices from the Field” easier to read. The responses are presented in a tiny typeface against a grey background, which is not a reader-friendly combination;
• Focusing as much attention on recipes as ingredients: that is, there are dozens, maybe hundreds, of exceptionally good ideas, but little explanation of how to assign those ideas a priority or sequence;
• Providing a conclusion. The book just sort of ends after the chapter on pop programming year-round.

It’s worth mentioning that Sophie Brookover lives in a neighboring town and she gave me my copy of Pop Goes the Library. However, we’ve only met once and I’ve enjoyed her writing for a number of years. Her generosity was certainly welcome and appreciated, but not enough to compromise my objectivity. The fact is, I very much like this book’s execution and I strongly agree with its message: we’re going to remain relevant by acquiring and marketing materials, and by providing programs, that appeal to the people whose libraries we steward. You don’t have to like every popular item in the collection, you just have to make sure it’s available.

As Denise Scott Brown wrote a year before the publication of Learning from Las Vegas,  “…liking the whole of pop culture is as irrational as hating the whole of it, and it calls forth the vision of a general and indiscriminate hopping on the pop bandwagon, where everything is good and judgment is abandoned rather than deferred. Yet artists, architects, actors, must judge, albeit, one hopes, with a sigh. After a decent interval, suitable criteria must grow out of the new source. Judgment is merely deferred to make subsequent judgments more sensitive.” Scott Brown and her co-authors succeeded, not just in deferring judgment about architecture, but in making sensitive subsequent judgments about their own work. Brookover and Burns excel at figuring out what people want and delivering it to them, so they’re certainly capable of doing the same. They’ve already done a wonderful job of creating a book that everyone who cares about libraries should read. And they may well have a book, in this version or a revision, that attracts a far greater audience to the sort of questions we ask ourselves on a regular basis.

Reaching a general audience is a tall order. Few fields have a Stephen Jay Gould, Paul Krugman, or Atul Gawande, serious practitioners who document the major issues of their field in popular essays that are collected in bestselling books. In Pop Goes the Library, we have an encouraging sign that librarianship might someday produce its own bestselling scholar.