I love the Little House series by Laura Ingalls Wilder. No, not the TV series, but the books themselves. I've read them so often and for so many years that I can quote passages from memory. When I open one of these books, I'm convinced that I get a rush of serotonin.

One of my favorite quotations from the series comes from Little Town on the Prairie. I've been thinking about this quotation lately as I contemplate library organizations and their ability to accommodate the kind of nimble, flexible change that the 2.0 world requires.

The scene takes place during the winter of 1881 in the small town of De Smet, South Dakota. One Friday evening, the men sitting around the stove at the local hardware store spontaneously decide to add some excitement to their lives by creating a literary society. The first meeting is called on the spot.

Most of the town's population gathers in the schoolhouse. The mood is jolly. Then Mr. Cluett, the schoolteacher, gets up and proposes a roll call of members and nominations for temporary chairman. The temporary chairman will oversee the nominations and balloting for permanent officers.

As Wilder writes, "Everyone was a little taken aback, and felt less jolly."

Wilder's Pa intervenes. Here comes the quote.

Source: Laura Ingalls Wilder, Little Town on the Prairie. NY: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1953, p. 214.

Pa Ingalls was onto something. "From what I've seen, the trouble with organizing a thing is that pretty soon folks get to paying more attention to the organization than to what they're organized for." I'm sure that many of us can relate to this statement. Especially in medium and large-sized libraries, our organizations can be multi-layered and complex, and a fair amount of (not always agreeable) energy is expended in maintaining their bureaucracies. In my library, for example, we have a top-level administrator body, a mid-level administrator body, an academic governance structure, administrative committees, departmental committees, department head groups, ad hoc committees, and project working groups. It can be a challenge, sometimes, to know exactly which body to approach with issues or proposals. It can also be a challenge to move through a designated structure in order to accomplish anything significant.

Can an organization gum up the works of change? I'm hardly the first to note that bureaucracies can take on inertia. There is the structure itself to navigate. The more hoops through which you're required to jump, and the more uncertainty there is about which groups to approach, the less nimble you can expect your initiative to be - if your initiative survives at all.

And by the way, I'm not here to address specific types of administrative structures. I know that good arguments can be made that certain structures are more participatory, flexible, effective, and so on, than others. My intention here is to address organizations per se and our interaction with them to facilitate change.

My next point is this: organizational structure isn't always the problem. I've sat on ad hoc change committees that were meant to cut to the chase but accomplished little. Despite their best intentions, there was extensive (albeit interesting) talk but not much action. So, even when the organzation made an attempt to bring about designated change, this change didn't materialize. In fact, change committees can sometimes evolve into another layer of red tape. One such committee on which I sat finally had the wisdom to disband because its members felt that we'd turned into an approval body for experimentation. We decided to let smaller, working groups do the job of innovation. This was one of the finest hours I've witnessed at this library, when a group of people had the good sense to get out of the way.

Even in a large organization, there are ways to expedite change. The blog program in my library is an example. A couple of years ago, our Systems Administrator started playing around with Movable Type and I joined in. We showed our experiment to staff, inviting them to contribute comments to a blog and let us know what they thought. At that time, a proposal to implement a blog program was being written up as part of a larger proposal to enhance the library's Web presence. That proposal was enmeshed in a year-long effort. Since the blog experiment was going so well, I got permission from the proposal group to extract the blog section and take it directly to the top-level administrator group. The proposal was quickly approved.

In other words, when it comes to creating change through an organizational structure, there is no rule. I think Pa Ingalls was absolutely right that organizations can be self-involved, and that this self-involvement can obstruct their goals. But this can't be the end of it. This is why I think it's important to learn to work the system as an effective advocate. I don't see myself as any kind of expert here. (Roy Tennant, who is an expert, is giving a workshop this fall at Internet Librarian 2007 on "Tips for Effective Technology Change Agents.") But I'm learning to take my opportunities when I can, using different strategies depending on the lay of the land and what I hope to get done. Sometimes I succeed. Sometimes the bureaucracy gets the better of me. And sometimes, bureaucracy or not, my ideas are just not popular.

During the past couple of weeks, I've been doing my first reading of the chapters that will make up the ACRL Library 2.0 book that I'm editing. Each chapter presents one or more successful initiatives taking place in academic libraries. These chapters describe a heartening variety of circumstances that have led to success. This ranges from the vision of a single individual to an inclusive, administration-sanctioned group that implemented a number of projects. I've also been reading about the advantages of autonomous skunk works.

Pa Ingalls had a good insight. But unlike the 1881 literary society of De Smet, we can't forego the sum total of our organizational structures. We can, however, develop strategies that help us to work within these structures to meet our goals.