Public Services Managers Minutes - August 04, 2022

The Public Services Managers met on August 4^th for their quarterly Professional Development meeting. The meeting topic was to begin brainstorming ideas on how to address system staffing needs for the future. We have several building projects and potential new libraries in our future. ED2 is moving forward, the City of Spencer is looking for a library location, and the Mayor of OKC would love to see new branches as well. We know that we cannot add significant numbers of staff and stay within budget. The exercises in the meeting were for generating ideas, not to make any decisions about staffing.

We spent time with five activities:

• Identify what the problem is – how do we expand our library system without greatly expanding staffing?
• Review the available data – we reviewed trends in circulation, public computer usage, and anecdotal information from the managers.
• Share feelings about the problem
• 8 ideas in 8 minutes – a creativity exercise designed to come up with more creative possibilities. Participants were to write down 8 ideas in 8 minutes without regard to how feasible the solutions are.
• Bad Ideas – participants wrote down their Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad ideas! These are ideas that the participants would never want us to implement. Some ideas were duplicated between this and the last exercise.

The managers all participated and provided some very creative options and great discussion which are summarized in the attached document. The conversations in this meeting were the first of a series of conversations that will involve multiple groups.  We are seeking information and ideas at this time and no decisions have been made. Any future decisions and updates made will be communicated to all staff.