What will library heaven look like in 20 years?
The Challenge
King County Library Systems, the busiest library system in the US, enjoyed almost impossibly high customer satisfaction ratings, but they believed they could do more to improve their customer experience even further, and deliver it more consistently. They also wanted to transform their organization towards, in their words, a more proactive, customer-centered orientation. Their question became: what would “Library Heaven” look like in 20 years, and what should they do today to get there.
The Solution
I assembled a team and partnered with an organizational consulting firm, SLR, to lead the library staff through a comprehensive internal and external discovery process to help KCLS understand their organizational capacity for change and external trends likely to impact the library system; deepen their knowledge of their existing and potential future patrons; articulate the “gold standard” experience from the patrons’ point of view; and lead the staff in the creation of a positioning statement and strategic blueprint that would guide all aspects of their operation, from policies to library layouts. KCLS has been successfully implementing this strategic blueprint for over five years.
