In Praise of Libraries
In an earlier article (see The Origins of The Big Data Trend) I pondered the reasons for and the consequences of sticking with the technical mindset as it goes about some business and technology trends, for better or for worse. Metaphorically speaking, if someone knows how a second pair of legs of a centipede moves, but has no idea of what makes this creature glide using all of its 100 legs, they will be at a loss if asked to fix — or to explain — this stunning pattern of movement. Software development craves more people who see and who know how the 100 legs interact and flow as they carry the multi-legged centipede forward. That’s why it’s in the best interest of IT/tech businesses to encourage the culture of learning with their employees. If a formal STEM education has left some voids, we’ve got to invent our own ways to catch up. And, reading appears to be one of the easiest and most obvious catch-up strategies.
The culture of continuous learning has to be nurtured at orgs and startups, at least, at those of them that are here to stay. We — and by “we” I mean anyone who fosters the culture of learning at their organizations — welcome people who are genuinely interested in learning and who are curious about all things life. We learn, explore, share knowledge, run workshops and events, and… an old-school library in the office can be very supportive of the culture of learning. A physical library makes learning even easier as compared to the digital one. When you see all those books every day, it’s hard not to stop by and not to skim through a book, or two, or three. There’s even no need to have a formal curation strategy, as to who is supposed to read what and when. If someone wants a book, the book is ordered, and little by little, the collection would grow to include hundreds of books:
Managing the inventory of books
At least, that’s the way things used to be back in the day, at a company where I once worked, and I have fond memories not only of the library itself, but of the way it was managed. We’d track the circulation of books with the software we’d been developing. Actually, a similar logic can be used with any work or inventory management app that supports Kanban board. And, the logic would be this: start a container project and name it “Library”. When someone wants a book, they create a user story and put it to “Please order” state. The next state would be “Ordered”, followed by “In Stock/Reading”. If a book is shown as “assigned” to someone, the assigned user is the one who is currently reading it. If the book is available, no user is assigned to it.
Here’s how the books would look as a list of user stories:
.. and broken down by some tags:
Which books?
The library (see the image above) included books on management, agile, lean, Kanban, testing, programming, machine learning, artificial intelligence, continuous delivery, statistics, mathematics, data science, psychology, linguistics, philosophy, writing, marketing, SEO, design, visualization… Ufff. What else? I find it hard to categorize all the books that this library kept. Tags might be able to do this job better than I can. Perhaps, there’s even no great need for categorization. Software development is a fusion of many disciplines, that’s why developers will want to know what visual arts and cognitive sciences are about; designers will want to get an idea of what developers are doing; marketing people will want to learn more about data science and visualization, etc. etc. Everyone has to catch up in some field of knowledge. Reading would be the very first step; what goes next, depends on the individuals.
Either way, a library is the low-money investment with a huge return on an org’s ability to innovate. Ultimately, all things learning transform to innovations. The spirit of innovation will surely reveal itself in the way people think, get insights, and discover fresh perspectives as they look at things with the new eyes. If the culture of learning were to become mainstream with the tech/IT companies, I’m certain this world would be a much better place.
Related:
Continuous Problem-Solving Is No Accident
Better The Devil That You Don’t Know
Further reading:
This story has been revised and re-written from an earlier article.
