Monthly Archives: October 2013

“The better we feel about ourselves”

Posted on October 30, 2013 | Leave a comment

Singer-songwriter and civil and human rights activist Odetta once said, “The better we feel about ourselves, the fewer times we have to knock somebody else down in order to feel tall.”

After graduating from high school in the late 1940s, Odetta worked as a domestic worker. She studied music at Los Angeles City College. Odetta admired Marian Anderson, whom her mother hoped she would follow in to operatic singing, but “took the clues” from the limitations placed on Anderson in the 1930s and 1940s. Odetta found fame instead as a folk singer. Pete Seeger said of her, “She sang straight, no tricks.” I found the Wikimedia Commons photo of Odetta in 1968 on a Wikipedia page about her.

Digitizing content, using social media to engage with the public, turning to technology to share content–my Twitter feed and my own experiences show how widely these are accepted nowadays by archives, libraries, museums. Is it really only two years since I put up a post here called “Social Media revolution (let’s connect!) wow” after attending the Seventh McGowan Forum on Communications at the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA)? Yes.

I greatly enjoyed chatting with Arian Ravanbakhsh, Merdith Doviak, Adam Minakowski, and (of course!), the Big Dude, AOTUS David S. Ferriero, at the Fair at Archives I on November 4, 2011. As I noted at my blog then, “I told David at the conclusion that this was the most enjoyable NARA presentation I’ve heard to date. I added, ‘so much cool stuff, so much to think about!’ I myself had only been blogging as Nixonara for just under a year then. And I’ve shared some of what I’ve been thinking since then here.

But NARA was wise never to hold another Social Media Fair. It instead has relied on its products to show how it approaches communications. It’s a fast moving world out there! And the National Archives is just one of several cultural heritage institutions making its way through a new way of doing things.

Libraries, archives, museums face different challenges in working out strategies for digitization. NARA especially has a lot to work through, given the very wide range of people who use its records and view its exhibits. The museum visitor, K-12 teacher, the student, the genealogist, the academic scholar, the government historian supporting policy making officials now in office, the journalist, the investigative reporter, the advocate–all approach the National Archives a little differently.

Many exciting opportunities for NARA to work through as it looks to transform how it carries out its mission. Yes, as a former employee of the National Archives, a historian, and a supporter of Ferriero, I’m all for the Big Dude’s Transformation vision. But that doesn’t mean I think what NARA needs to do is easy.

Serendipity. I still remember the joy of browsing the stacks at the Library of Congress while a graduate student in history in Washington during the 1970s. Collections security was looser then and I had a pass that gave me access to the stacks at will as I did research. That wonderful “aha” moment when you walk down the aisle to pick up a book but stumble across another one you didn’t know existed. In a different way, the digital world has those same moments of delight.

An article in the New York Times this past weekend pointed to how the Metropolitan Museum of Art is using technology. The Met’s Chief Digital Officer, Sree Sreenivasan, a professor of digital journalism at Columbia University, explained how he sees his role:

“I call the chief digital officer ‘the chief listening officer’ — to help the staff in various departments think about how they can do their work in better ways through technology. I also work closely with the chief technology officer, Jeff Spar, and we ensure the infrastructure, processes and protocols are optimal for the museum.

The title of CDO is relatively new in American business and means different things in different institutions. At the Met, the role is to help connect the physical museum experience with the digital, the in-person with the online.”

Sreenivasan shows sensitivity to the range of user experiences, from the person experiencing the “magic” of standing in front of an object in the museum to the one who seeks contextual information on the web. He wisely observes, “Striking that balance and letting the visitor have options is key.” I like the way he avoids the trap of “Ur doing it wrong.” Yes, I’m a fan of positive incentivization, not conformity through putdown.

It doesn’t surprise me that Sreenivasan, a fan of art and an avid “museum goer” whose undergraduate major was history, focuses on storytelling as a key component in his job at the Met. I like how he describes the key contributions of the Met’s technologists (a “world-class team”) but takes a sensible approach to technology as a tool.

“The curators and conservators are the experts. They collect and care for the objects here. My team’s role is to help amplify their work and get that content seen by as much of the world as possible. The idea isn’t to shove technology into places it isn’t needed. The idea is to make sure the right technology, in the right amount, is available, in the right context. Just today, I had a meeting with the curators in the American Wing. We talked about everything from in-gallery technology to social media. I am on a listening tour of various departments, making sure they have the best possible tools to tell their stories.”

The Met has been “very digital for a long time” so Sreenivasan sees his position as part of its evolution. He only has been on the job since August so it remains to be seen how it works out to have a Chief Digital Officer. That he is beginning by viewing himself as a “listener” and a partner to mission staff not only is encouraging, I think it is essential for an executive to succeed. Seeing yourself as a partner and supporter of line staff starts you off from a position of respect for others that can take you through the inevitable zigs and zags change requires more readily than insularity can.

At least in Washington, the “listening” part can get complicated. Skip the step at the outset and you can easily go askew in any number of ways. Insularity, balkanization, lack of a big picture coordinator with an eye on disparate elements, unacknowledged or unacknowledgeable external and internal pressures to produce results–bureaucratic hazards have undermined many a big project in Fedland.

But even if you do a lot of listening at first, it is easy eventually to reach a plateau where you do less of it. Sometimes without realizing it! Time brings with it the accumulation of baggage–your choices and decisions trail behind you. If you feel you must vest yourself in them, defensiveness or just the natural need to say “we’re on the right path, let’s keep walking on” can keep you from listening to and looking at what is around you.

In the worst case scenarios, and yes, I’ve seen this from time to time during my 40 years in Fedland, you might even resort to “knocking down” others in order to “feel tall.” But it’s better to “sing straight, no tricks,” at least in my view. And my Twitter feed tells me there are a lot of people out there seeking good, thoughtful conversations.

I first heard about the NYT story on the Met’s Digital Officer via Twitter; someone I follow re-tweeted a quote. What caught my eye was the added comment saying “amen” to “a listening and conversation channel.” I’m always on the lookout for positive models for handling these issues so I clicked on the link.

Here again, I like Sreenivasan’s stated goal of valuing two-way communications:

“It isn’t just a marketing channel, it’s a listening and conversational channel as well. Some critics of social media complain that people spend more time taking photos and sharing the photos than appreciating the moment. I think that if visitors want to capture and share what they’re experiencing, that’s their prerogative. And they will seek out venues which encourage them to do so. We can encourage and support the ones who are excited about social and photography, without disturbing those who aren’t.”

I don’t know how things will play out for an official who’s only been on the job a couple of months. But I’m heartened by what sounds like authentic embrace of the institution’s core mission more so than just a focus on tools.

“I am trying my best to learn as much as I can as fast as I can. It’s a special place with so many ongoing projects that the scale of this institution is hard to fathom from the outside. I’ve had what I call a “30-year, one-way love affair” with the Met. Now that I am on the inside, the love has only increased, but there’s also a sense of awe at the privilege of helping tell its story.”

Sreenivasan is lucky that he has been able to combine longtime positive feelings for the institution with respect for its employees and for his responsibilities to help shape its operations during a time of great change. To me, the key word is respect!

I was born in New York City and although my family moved away when I was a child, I have many fond memories of visiting the Met during later visits to a vibrant, exciting city. So here’s hoping what the interview suggests Sreenivasan brings to the job–a key function in this day and age–is a winning combination for success at a cultural heritage institution!

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Posted in archival issues

Archives Month (Interrupted)

Posted on October 28, 2013 | Leave a comment

October–American Archives Month–is drawing to a close. It was interrupted for the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) by a 16 day shutdown of the federal government.

A thoughtful article in the special exhibits supplement to the arts section of the Sunday New York Times described the opening of a forthcoming “Records of Rights” exhibit in new space on the museum side of the National Archives. “The exhibition had been scheduled to open Nov. 8, but because of the government shutdown, the opening was delayed.”

The article points to some of the architectural elements in the new lobby plaza which leads to the soon-to-open Rubenstein Gallery. “A tromp l’oeil painting on the ceiling of the plaza will give the illusion of looking directly into the rotunda.” This is a long overdue and welcome renovation of the space, made possible by very generous private donations as well as appropriated funds.

As it happened, I read the article on the same day that I read about a grassroots “History Relevance Campaign” involving employees from the Smithsonian and a number of history organizations. As one supporter put it,

“The idea of a branding campaign for history has come up in most, if not all, of the discussions. History, like any other discipline, has a brand. In this context it is defined as the way people perceive the value of history. If this perception is negative, how do we change it? How do we demonstrate the value? At the moment STEM has a very strong brand. History does not. Or if it does, the history brand or image is diffuse and too often negative.”

So what struck me as I read the article about the National Archives was the thought that has gone in to the “Records of Rights” exhibit that will inaugurate the new gallery. What it took to make it happen. What its impact will be on visitors. Had it opened in October, the exhibit would have been a striking way to celebrate American Archives Month. Why? Because it illustrates the complex connections between citizens and their government. This isn’t about nationalism. It’s about the fascinating story of the elements that make up our nation.

The Big Dude, AOTUS David S. Ferriero, explained that the exhibit consists of three parts dealing with women’s rights, civil rights, and immigration.

“The exhibitions will include original documents from the archive vaults, facsimiles, videos and interactive technology, including a 15-foot digital display table that showcases hundreds of documents on issues ranging from workplace rights to the rights of Native Americans, including an 1894 petition from the Hopi Indians asking the government to affirm their land title. The database will also be publicly accessible online.

Archivists debated the value of exhibiting original documents versus digital facsimiles.

‘In some cases it’s better to see the digital copy,’ said Mr. Ferriero. ‘There’s crisper reproduction, for example. But I’ve spent a lot of time wandering around the rotunda and the public vaults and see how people experience the documents themselves. I am continually blown away by the emotion displayed. Grandparents bring grandchildren, new citizens being sworn in. They are very powerful documents.’”

Talk about making history relevant! The Big Dude is right about the emotion–in 2011 I attended a naturalization ceremony in the Rotunda at which Ferriero gave the opening remarks. As the child of displaced persons who came to the United States after their homeland lost its sovereignty after World War II, I found the ceremony and the setting to be incredibly moving. And as has David, I’ve seen the awe and strong feelings the displays of the Charters of Freedom and other records of United States’ history evoke in the visitors who come to NARA. I respect such reactions, greatly. Their authenticity is inspiring.

For two and a half weeks, NARA was unable to post new content on its website during the government shutdown. In recent days, it has posted at its Prologue blog for American Archives Months some Q&A with employees at several of the presidential libraries that it administers (Herbert Hoover, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Lyndon B. Johnson, William J. Clinton).

My favorite quote, one which may resonate with many archivists, is from Clinton Presidential Library archivist Kim Coryat: “it’s like achieving Introvert Nirvana on a daily basis.” I like that she said that sometimes you just want to bury yourself in your work, despite the Big Dude once having said if you don’t like working with people, don’t come to work at NARA!

Many archivists, including Ferriero himself, are admitted Introverts. I am too–but it doesn’t mean I don’t like people! Which is why I’ve enjoyed the many thoughtful conversations I’ve seen on Twitter and at blogs about public speaking, imposter syndrome, and other issues related to working with colleagues and researchers.

In the category in the Prologue series of which record would you save if you had to pick one, I very much liked Valoise Armstrong’s pick:

“. . . .the “In Case of Failure” message. This is a short hand-written memo President Eisenhower composed just prior to D-Day and the Normandy Invasion that was to be released if the invasion failed. After praising the efforts of all the troops, the last sentence reveals him to be the kind of leader who, instead of trying to shift the blame on his staff, stands up and takes responsibility: ‘If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt it is mine alone.’ That’s strength of character.”

NARA showcased another “in the event of failure” speech prepared for Richard Nixon, whose records I reviewed (tapes and files, both) for disclosure, in an exhibit in Archives 1 earlier this year. I attended the ribbon cutting ceremony on January 7, at which Ferriero and Executive for Legislative Archives, Presidential Libraries and Museum Services James Gardner spoke.

I observed in a blog post about the January event that “K C Johnson noted at a recent meeting of the Society for History in the Federal Government that the number of historians who use government records is small. But as the new exhibit at NARA shows, what is in those records provides vivid glimpses into the lives of others. Including those at the very top and those who work with them. Human beings, all.”

NARA is making up for lost time by putting up Archives Month posts at its blogs. There is a lot of work ahead in many areas. The impact of a shutdown on the morale of employees adapting to change not just through Transformation of agency culture but by “doing more with less” for budgetary reasons remains to be seen. As always, getting the people issues right–reaching “hearts and minds”–is important for leaders and managers in archivesland.

When I read John Kotter’s books on leadership while home on furlough, I thought about what was referred to once as “the quiet crisis” in public service. An article in the Washington Post over the weekend pointed to the impact of the shutdown on younger federal employees, some of whom are re-thinking whether they want to remain in civil service jobs.

“The government and private companies alike are vulnerable to the departure of younger employees because they often have high-tech skills that are much in demand and they are willing to jump at new opportunities. While a government job still remains attractive to many, the continuing turbulence of federal work has made the government a less competitive employer.”

Sussing out what motivates people always is complicated. Millennials no more deserve stereotyping or “paint by numbers” handling than Baby Boomers or members of “Gen X” do. The article quotes from a 50 year-older Fed who points to love of mission at his agency (the National Aeronautics and Space Administration).

“A scientist who studies the impact of space travel on human performance, [Lee] Stone is in his early 50s and is faced with paying for the college educations of his two children. “Obviously, I can’t take the kind of risks that young people can take,” he said.

But more important, Stone said, he is committed to the work of his agency.

“I would have to give up my life’s pursuit to allow humans to spend more time in space, and all the goals that my generation aspired to,” he said, adding that he was inspired by “the reality of Apollo, the fantasy of ‘Star Trek’ and the call to service of John F. Kennedy.”

Stone said he is worried about young people leaving NASA, because the research at his agency often spans decades.”

The article suggests his concerns may be valid but that how younger employees view federal service can be very nuanced.

“Just a few weeks ago, Ashley Bress, 28, packed up her apartment in Arlington, said goodbye to her roommate and took a flight out of Washington.

For the past three years, Bress has been developing food and nutrition policy for national emergencies at the U.S. Department of Agriculture. But she said recent budget cuts, furloughs and pay freezes, along with the lack of public respect for government jobs, ‘was just too much.’ Bress also worries about the $50,000 in student loan debt she incurred while getting a master’s degree at George Washington University.

‘I started out so excited to help policy and people across the country who were going through tragedies I had seen my whole life,’ said Bress, who lived through tornadoes and floods growing up in Iowa. ‘I always thought this would be a long and noble career.'”

Much depends on how agencies such as the National Archives handle these issues going forward. The development of a perception by some employees of a favored, protected, elite group within NARA’s Office of Innovation is just one blip in the bigger picture. The issue of elitism looms large for some employees and barely registers, if at all, for others.

That so many new and recent hires among young people are talented and technologically savvy does not mean they lack people skills earlier generations had or were required to develop. Or that none of them have a desire to connect in a meaningful way with their colleagues. To think or act that way in communicating with, managing, or representing them to others actually seems disrespectful to Millennials.

Bress’s reference to expectations for a “long and noble” career suggests that as an appeal, “come do awesome things in our awesome work unit” doesn’t give Millennials enough credit for being willing and able to operate successfully in a richly textured workplace. They have so much more to offer than that. And there is so much thoughtful conversation going on out there that demonstates that among information professionals on Twitter!

More and more, I think managing a changing workforce and effecting cultural transformations comes down to respect for human complexity. It is too early to tell which archival institutions are handling these issues most effectively and where NARA will rank among them during retrospective assessments of managing archives, libraries, and museum during a time of great change. Challenges? Sure. Opportunities? Yeah, that, too.

The “Records of Rights” exhibit reminds us of how difficult it is sometimes to get to a place where opportunities exist. As the article in the New York Times notes, “‘Bending Toward Justice’ tries to reconcile the realities of slavery and racism with the promise of freedom, regardless of skin color. It includes quotations from the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and questions about how the nation could justify slavery while declaring that all men are created equal.” Just the title of the section on Immigration captures the yearnings of so many, including my immigrant parents: “Yearning to Breathe Free.”

Although the exhibit did not open during American Archives Month, I’ll be thinking about it in that context when I see it. It includes a copy of the Magna Carta owned by David M. Rubenstein, the benefactor for whom the new gallery is named.

“Asked what impression he would like the gallery to leave people with, he replied: ‘I came from modest circumstances, and because of the freedoms we have in our country I was able to do certain things. In some countries these rights are not as well protected as I would like. Despite the dysfunction of the government from time to time, in our country we’ve made a lot of progress.’”

“Made a lot of progress.” So, too, NARA. Recruiting, retention, rewards systems, all play a part in how employees view their workplace. I hope NARA is able to overcome the impact on morale of the disruption of the government shutdown. As Archives Month draws to a close, I wish NARA well as it seeks to tap in to the best efforts of all those looking for a “long and noble career.” But also those willing to join the team in public service–for however long, that is going to vary!– in working on records appraisal, description, disclosure review, reference, conservation, digital preservation, and access, physical and virtual.

Together with their colleagues, they can build on what earlier generations did. As a member of the earlier generation, I am grateful for all now and in the future who are willing to undertake the challenges and make the most of the opportunities. As they said on classic Star Trek, may those following in our footsteps “Live Long and Prosper!”

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Posted in NARA

Learning to make it your own

Posted on October 26, 2013 | Leave a comment

Alexander Howard’s Twitter feed shows a person willing to stretch. Very refreshing. Yesterday I saw @digiphile link to a piece asking “Can government innovation rise above partisan politics?” It included a link from a conservative pundit who tweeted about a White House Innovation Fellows event, “The WH Innovation bureaucrat just babbled about ‘diagnostic, people-centered personalized notification centers’ #InnovateGov.”

That’s the sort of slam you might expect from the ideological opponent of a President. And yet. And yet the quoted phrase, if accurate, sounded like “babble” even to me, a non-ideologue and a longtime Fedland bureaucrat. I much prefer what Cass Sunstein advocates, simple, plain English that is inclusive, not exclusive due to reliance on in-group framing and jargon.

I also saw @digiphile link to “The Bigger Picture: Ten Lessons for Taking Open Government Further.” The author observed that

“We put a lot on the shoulders of individual government leaders to drive change. How do we build the systems so that the innovations built by a chief executive are not dismantled with their administration? What tools would help with transitions from one mayor or governor to another?”

That’s a theme I’ve touched on at my blog starting in September, when I first wrote about perceptions among some officials and staff of an elite group within the Office of Innovation in the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). How has that perception developed? Why? And how can NARA’s leadership and managers overcome–no, make that, change–it?

The Big Dude, aka AOTUS David S. Ferriero, has pointed to the use citizens without computer access make of equipment at local public libraries. I like Ferriero’s sensitivity to the fact that not everyone has the advantages people such as I and members of my professional circle have.

Earlier this week, I saw a thoughtful post by Andy Woodworth about the digital divide and why it is important to take it seriously.

“I was thinking about people who write stuff like ‘why do we need libraries when we have the internet’ and I thought how they would cope if they were placed in the position of people who are affected by the digital divide. It would be easier to have a ready made challenge in the same vein as the people who try to live off of food stamps for a week. Here’s a model family, here’s their income, here’s what they have around them, here are their needs, go for it. Rural, urban, suburban, the challenges are there. Let them try life as someone else to get the experience and perspective.”

This is a time of great change and many challenges in the world of information professionals. I felt great happiness when I reconnected with the National Archives in May 2011. As I’ve talked to various friends of all ranks at NARA about efforts to change its culture, I’ve seen a range of reactions. Some people with whom I have talked over the last few years have shown understanding of my support of David, others wariness. I’ve explored some of both reactions at my blog.

After reading John Kotter’s The Heart of Change, I started thinking about joy. Generations. Do they always collide? Not always, although they can at times. Sometimes they collaborate or co-exist. In the best circumstances, as I have found in the virtual world and IRL, their interactions bring great joy.

I’ve written here about the delight I feel when I visit that National Archives, for social events, for public programs, to conduct official business, to see friends. Some of that light reflects how dark the other side of my experiences, past experiences, have been. There definitely is a chiaroscuro effect there, as in a photo I snapped in Washington on Thursday!

Some of my delight in visiting NARA stems from my embrace of the very attractive Transformation vision articulated by David Ferriero and his leadership team. I was lighthearted in 2011 when I tweaked some of my friends for how they commented under Ferriero’s 2010 post about the agency’s reorganization to bring about change:

“Look at the messages posted largely by National Archives’ officials and staff under Ferriero’s reorganization announcement last October. A stream of “I’m in” and “count me in” comments. Such as “Count me in. I look forward to building upon our past as we transform NARA for the future.” (At least I didn’t see “human capital,” “assets,” “leveraging,” “low hanging fruit,” and my least favorite phrase in Fed jargon, “outreaching to.””

Official Washington applies its own criteria to such initiatives, I’ve watched how that works–and doesn’t work–during my 40 years in Federal service. So I apply some of those criteria, too, myself. But I’m looking at Transformation from other angles, too.

This weekend’s Washington Post includes in its arts section a feature on father and son conductors, Neeme and Kristjan Järvi, both of whom will be leading the National Symphony Orchestra in separate engagements in coming weeks. My mother, sister and I met the elder Järvi years ago in Washington. His background is Estonian, as is that of my family. He has another son, Paavo, who also is a conductor.

This weekend’s article in the Washington Post points to similarities and differences between Neeme and Kristjan Järvi, the attractively change embracing, “wilder, younger son”:

Neeme Jarvi, too, is a traditionalist, in the sense of building a career by leading an orchestra — notably Sweden’s Gothenburg Symphony, which he headed for 22 years. But he also has a wider embrace of repertoire than many classically trained artists. Growing up in the Soviet Union, Kristjan says, “led to his increased interest in American popular culture. Jazz was so incredible. He did the Soviet premiere of ‘Porgy and Bess.’ ”

Kristjan, by contrast, has been the wilder younger son, the one who embraces all genres of music, and who started out with the idea: “Wouldn’t it be great if all of this convention was kind of done away with and we could start all over again?”

“The instruments and notes we play are just tools in communications,” he says. “What we’re bringing across is an emotion. People lose sight of the fact that music is only a tool. At the end of the day, nobody really cares if it’s classical music or pop music — there is no genre unless it affects you.”

Yet his relatively unconventional, partly self-taught, technically freewheeling approach has brought him, at this juncture of his career, to a place that looks not dissimilar to a traditional conductor’s post: the music directorship of the MDR orchestra, the leadership of the Baltic Youth Orchestra, which he founded, and guest appearances with orchestras such as the NSO.

The secret to success in a classical career, as well as success with a famous father, may be that finding a new path doesn’t mean overturning tradition, but learning to make it your own while embracing the things about it that you love. Kristjan seems to have been inspired by his father rather than dwarfed by him. “He is one of the reasons why I have the confidence to do what I did and not really care what other people thought,” he says.“

But in terms of our style,” he adds, “there’s definitely some similarities, just technically, [and] physically. He’s bigger, I’m a little bit smaller, but we move the same way I think. I think his sense of groove and timing and that stuff is just amazing. . . . You can see that this guy is like a sorcerer. . . . He does very little and achieves so much.

“I think one thing that is similar with the two of us,” he continues, is that “we both share a certain abandon, in the joy of music-making. Music for both of us isn’t a cerebral thing, it’s like a spiritual physical thing . . . to bring people really into a world that they can achieve nowhere else, and that happens only at that moment.”

Perhaps that is the key to making Transformation happen at NARA, too. “Learning to make it your own.” You can’t take ownership of cultural changes very easily if you’re watching others you perceive to be favored and elite. You have to come to change on your own, willingly, not because you’re told you have to join the chorus. The joy that Kotter describes in successful change comes from feeling as well as intellectual commitment.

Is joy incompatible with change initiatives in Washington? Not necessarily. True, there often is a ponderous, dutiful sense to what I call the Innovation Industry in Fedland, an underlying anxiety about hitting the marks, that undermines some of the freshness and creativity it is trying to sell. Some of that comes from over reliance on bureaucratic “babble.” Some from presidential advisors and officials in the Office of Management and Budget working on objectives that have not been aligned as well as they might have been. And some from the Washington elements I’ve described here at my blog for nearly three years now.

So everybody knows that I cherish NARA’s mission. And that I like, respect, and admire the Big Dude since getting to know Ferriero in 2011. I took my own path to get here. I didn’t join a chorus, as Ferriero’s subordinates did when they posted under AOTUS’s “Open to Change” post on October 26, 2010. I read that post, read through the comments, considered the uniformity in response, and thought about Transformation. And after I got to know David and concluded he is “the real deal,” decided to tag along on the side, in my own way.

I hope that NARA is able to break down the surprising barriers that some officials and employees see within it now. You can say, “Why bother? Things are pre-determined, it is not a matter of learning lessons, those barriers are meant to be there. So what you and others say doesn’t matter.” Or you can argue that the members of the elite group perceived by some to have Ferriero’s favor are the lucky ones in the agency.

Whether there is a “fair haired” group or not–perspectives vary–I’m not so sure its members actually are fortunate. True success cannot depend on favor or even on perceptions, warranted or not, of favor.

The lucky at NARA are everyone regardless of function or organizational placement who believes, as Kristjan Järvi does, that “finding a new path doesn’t mean overturning tradition, but learning to make it your own while embracing the things about it that you love.” They are the ones who can create the joy while walking together on a new path that sustainable Transformation requires. And that is the kind of walk I would so enjoy myself.

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Posted in NARA, Workplace issues

Challenging

Posted on October 24, 2013 | Leave a comment

In recent months, I’ve turned from the topics that led me to launch my blog to look at insularity, elitism, silos, barriers. It is easy for people to build walls around themselves, to retreat into gated communities. Talking community is easy. It is challenging to walk the talk.

No two people are alike. Not even twins! My late sister, Eva, and I had differences as well as similarities, despite looking like “peas in a pod” at times.

People used to ask me, “what’s it like to be a twin?” I laughingly replied, “What’s it like not to be one?” In a way, I know now.

From the start I had someone in my life with whom I always felt complete “safe haven” even when we disagreed–and yes, we argued at times! That colors how I write about communications and communities. And why I focus so much on empathy. I wanted Eva to succeed, always. I still remember my feelings as I listened to her give book reports in school and cheered her on in my mind (“Do well! Do well!”).

I like that the Big Dude, aka AOTUS David S. Ferriero, has pointed to a graphic that reads, “A truly great library contains something in it to offend everyone.” Sanyin Siang is right — many people seek the like online rather than the unlike. And listening to the voices of The Other can be a challenging. You can do it with friends IRL more easily than with people in the virtual world whom you encounter. Any number of things can get in the way, we’re all vulnerable, no matter what we say about inclusion and community and tolerance.

Last week, information studies PhD candidate @ameliaabreau caught my eye when she tweeted a link for her essay, “Against the romance of community: What we need to talk about when we talk about communities.” I read it around the same time I read @anarchivist’s post on “Cha(lle)nging the dynamics of privilege in archives and technology.” This week, I read what @K_Bubbs wrote about her one year anniversary of employment for the agency for which Eva and I both worked, the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA).

As I thought about safe spaces, a direct or indirect theme of all three of the posts, I wondered, to what extent do people read thoughtful posts written by The Other? And to what extent do they prefer instead to stick to what provides comfort?

It is all too easy to strip others of their humanity, to ask for discernment for our group but to reach for templates to apply to others. When we write, do we make it easy to invite The Other in to our thoughts, our worlds? Or do we make choices, perhaps unconsciously, in language, tone, framing, that signal we are writing for The Like and not for The Unlike?

History professor Timothy Burke, whose long-form blogging style matches mine, looked at some of that in 2009 (“Mr. Obama’s Neighborhood”). He started out describing his experiences in a digital story telling class in which he was one of the few men.

“The hard thing is figuring out when it’s ok that a given occasion or venue or institution prefer one or the other kind of mode as a default or norm, and when it’s important instead to consciously make room at the table for multiple styles or modes of speech and representation. At a storytelling workshop, for example, it may be that to insist on the legitimacy of a much more reticent male voice is to suddenly make more emotional and personal stories feel like an exception rather than expectation, to put everyone on their guard. On the other hand, what if that is honestly the way that someone wants to approach the exercise?

One of the things I really dislike both about George Lakoff-style talk of “framing” and Deborah Tannen-style analysis of gendered discourse is that both approaches view the content of conversation or debate as inauthentic and irrelevant while also proposing that discourse is a zero-sum game of power, that one frame dominates any others, that you’re either at the margins or the center.

But sometimes, sometimes, they’re right. Some kinds of talk preclude other kinds of talk. Some discursive gambits dominate and silence. In more positive terms, sometimes only one kind of talk is productive or helpful or appropriate.”

As he moved to look at the political sphere, Burke looked at how you can

“….cultivate a taste for the unlike, force yourself to speak in unfamiliar and uncomfortable tongues, travel across ways of seeing and talking as one might travel across geographies. This commitment is not a safe, happy kind of venture of unity-in-difference, not a boat ride through “It’s a Small World”. Listening to the unlike, speaking the unfamiliar, can be draining, painful, frustrating. And at the end of any journey, you’re perfectly entitled to conclude that you like your established ways of talking best, that there’s something wrong with a stranger’s world and voice. But I think the person with the taste for the unlike can hear better the difference between a public voice that comes from somewhere real and a cynical attempt at framing that comes from some rag-and-bone shop think tank.”

One of the reasons I avoid using the term privilege is that it is relative. Most of the people I follow on Twitter live in the First World. And they are advantaged in historical terms compared to what others endured in the past. And still endure, outside my Twitter circle, elsewhere under conditions less advantaged than most of my professional associates know.

But I understand why privilege comes up in conversations about professional issues! And I can see why some of the advice older professionals offer does not work. And why it comes across as tone deaf at times. Some of it is cringeworthy. I say that despite understanding the good intentions. Educational, social, economic and workplace conditions are very different from what they were for those of us who entered the workplace 40 years ago.

Even for those who choose public service, as I did, there are far fewer job openings than in the past. Anyone who looks for job openings posted by the National Archives and Records Administration for “non-status” candidates can see that. I touched on the freeze exemption issues — the process is not complicated but some of the considerations NARA applies can be — in posts I put up in September. My intent in writing “Success as a Pathfinder in Archivesland” was to try to breach barriers that some people at NARA point to and which I, too, can see.

There also are differences in benefits, especially in the retirement system now in place as opposed to when I started in the 1970s. The longtime Fed who worked his or her entire career at one or two agencies increasingly is a figure of the past. I’ve been talking recently about the issue of workplace “loyalty” with a number of my Fedland friends.

I will always be glad I chose Federal service but my reactions to NARA and to Washington are complicated. There is a part of me that wishes I had been able to make my way through a “normal” career path at the National Archives, the agency whose employ I never wanted to leave. Leaving it was painful for me. What would my life have been like had I made other choices? To “go along to get along,” to hopscotch from unit to unit in the National Archives, looking for promotion opportunities, to advance to my current rank there rather than at the other agency to which I moved from NARA in 1990.

I don’t want people to have to make some of the choices I felt I had to make as an archivist who first uncovered, then tried to make public, then secret “abuses of governmental power” on Nixon’s tapes. That my archival cohort was beaten up in Wasington is one reason I started studying leadership and management and communications in the early 1990s. But in the end, we ourselves make the choices we do. So we have to be prepared to live with the consequences. And I mostly have and do.

Coming to NARA is an intensely joyful experience for me these days, since I reconnected with it in 2011, one in which I both am a part of a community but also am not. In some ways, some of my professional experiences feel so singular, I think I’m a community of one! Yes, I can laugh at that.

I greatly enjoyed being back at Archives 1 yesterday evening for a reception at which I chatted with AOTUS David S. Ferriero, and my guest, my longtime friend and former NARA colleague Tim Mulligan. David showed his characteristic sense of humor in some of the stories he told us as we talked during the reception!

For 16 days during the government shutdown, the National Archives buildings in Washington and College Park were closed, Ferriero being one of just a few people authorized to enter. (I applaud NARA for the transparency it showed in posting the agency contingency plan on its website as it went in to shutdown October 1.) On the day the government reopened on October 17, David went out to greet visitors to the museum side of NARA. I can understand why he said, “It’s really nice to see people roaming the halls again.”

During the reception, I chatted with a number of guests about history, archival work, and what it is like to see the Charters of Freedom on display in the Rotunda. The panel that followed in the McGowan Theater was about breaking the color line in college sports during the 1960s. Among the speakers were James Harris, R. C. Gamble, and Michael Hurd. They talked about Grambling and South Caroline State. Samuel G. Freedman, author of Breaking the Line: The Season in Black College Football That Transformed the Sport and Changed the Course of Civil Rights, was the moderator.

It was poignant to hear Harris, Gamble, and Hurd talk about football programs at historically black universities and colleges during the days of segregation and the civil rights era. They spoke with feeling about just wanting a chance. And about determination to make the most of opportunities as they opened up for them. Harris became the first black quarterback to start a season in the pros.

Most of the men who played football at black colleges during the 1950s and early 1960s got their college degrees. They understood their options were limited, not due to lack of talent in the sport but to lack of opportunity. Many went back home to become teachers, school principals, amateur program coaches. Playing as a pro, being a star quarterback, in the NFL (or in the American Football League) was not an option until the civil rights era.

Tim Mulligan, who began his federal career in the 1970s as I did, brought along a copy of a pro football magazine from 1975 which featured a story on Harris while he was playing for the Los Angeles Rams. Tim showed it to me as I sat on the aisle in the second row of the McGowan Theater after the reception. The article caught Samuel Freedman’s eye as he walked down the steps to the Green Room. Freedman asked Tim, “where did you get that?” I laughingly replied, “He kept it. He’s an archivist!” After the program, Tim showed the magazine to Harris, who graciously signed his autograph.

I feel passionate about NARA’s mission despite the zigs and zags my own career ended up taking after I got my first civil service job as a summer employee in 1971. That I’ve taken to wearing my old National Archives i.d. badge from 1977 (you see it on the photo from last night) is just a small clue to how close I feel to the agency!

Unlike some of the young men who testified during the Watergate hearings, I never would tell someone, “Don’t come to Washington.” We need talented, dedicated people to join us, to replace us in Fedland. But recruiting, providing opportunities for our successors as archivists, information professionals, federal historians, is incredibly challenging right now during sequestration and budgetary uncertainty at agencies such as NARA.

And I worry at times about information asymmetry. Sure, NARA crafts and releases its own communications output. But I’d like to see more smart, knowledgeable people talking out in the open about the agency and its work the way they do in some forums about academic librarianship and archival work outside Fedland. To break through some of the misconceptions, stereotypes, that can affect how people see NARA and other federal agencies.

So it turns out that I’ve been shaped as much by my Washington experiences as by having lived for the first 51 years of my life, until Eva’s death in 2002, as a twin. And Tim Burke is right when he says,

“If you demand a wider, more inclusive approach to institutional discourse, whether in national politics or in university life, then you have to demonstrate that you yourself are committed to inclusion. Which means, in any context, practicing that same taste for the unlike. If all you can praise is work which conforms to your own particular tastes, ideologies, and preferences, you’re not trying to inaugurate the institutional or political future which you ardently demand.”

Rather than fetishizing community, which I agree with Amelia Abreau that we should not do, we need to learn to recognize, really recognize with discernment, our differences and our points of commonality with others. We are all together but alone. Alone, together.

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Posted in archival issues, Workplace issues

Ch-ch-ch-change on paper, IRL

Posted on October 19, 2013 | Leave a comment

Last week I read two books by John Kotter, Leading Change and The Heart of Change. The Big Dude, aka AOTUS David S. Ferriero, has mentioned Kotter as an influential management expert on transforming organizations. David and a panel from the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) talked about the agency’s change initiatives at the Society of American Archivists conference in August 2012.

Kotter describes an eight step change process in Leading Change. The steps generally are sound but require customization. Some are easier to apply in the private sector than in the public sector.

Management books are written for executives and managers. They overlook at times that the language of change management can be more off-putting than the sought for change itself. Do the conditions under which we read books affect how we react to them? I think so, at least at times.

I started reading Leading Change while on furlough during a shutdown of the federal government. I couldn’t go to work. I couldn’t go to the National Archives to see exhibits, hear lectures, do research. I couldn’t shop in its MyArchives Shop (left). I stayed close to home for two and a half weeks.

It felt strange to do laundry while not on vacation but to have no dress shirts in the wash, only t-shirts. I’ve bought so many t-shirts from the NARA shop over the last couple of years. They are my link to the agency at which I once worked and whose mission I cherish. I have some in multiple versions, including the Emancipation Proclamation shirt on display here.

You can see from the delight I show in the photo how much I enjoy visiting NARA these days. And that’s one reason why I decided to read some of Kotter’s books. I want to understand better the ongoing efforts to transform the culture of the National Archives. The other is that I believe NARA needs cultural transformation and I strongly support Ferriero’s efforts to bring that about. Yet I’ve heard feedback from people within the agency that suggests not everything is working as well as it should be.

Leadership and management of federal agencies differs from running a business. Roy Ash, former President of Litton Industries and director of the Office of Management and Budget during the Nixon administration, observed in an oral history interview we did with him at NARA

“After leaving government, I went out and talked to business groups. . . . many of whom thought, and still think, ‘Why doesn’t the Government run like business?” . . . I said, ‘Imagine your board of directors comprising your customers, your suppliers, your employees, and your competitors. Now, how are you going to run your business?’

Even if I hadn’t read Kotter’s books this past week, I would have thought in a Washington framework about the management principles he describes. This past spring, as individual federal departments and agencies faced more budgetary belt tightening, National Public Radio featured a segment in which some employees (one the president of AFGE Council 260 at NARA) spoke about morale in Fedland.

After the shutdown began on October 1 I saw places on the Internet where comments by random people illustrated the extent to which federal bureaucrats are dissed. One commenter observed while hundreds of thousands of Feds were furloughed (initially without pay), “I would be ashamed to have a job where I am considered non-essential.” A run-of-the-mill observation. A knee jerk putdown of federal workers. The application of templates.

There have been a few non-political studies of federal workers’ morale since the late 1980s. They have looked at viability, productivity, recruiting, succession planning. Some have addressed the impact of rhetoric of the type I just quoted. As the Volcker Commission pointed out in its 1989 report on the “quiet crisis” in the civil service, political demagoguery about “bureaucrats” has taken a toll.

Because Kotter largely focuses on examples drawn from industry, he doesn’t address being a target as a baseline element in his books. Yet federal leaders and managers are dealing with a workforce whose members often feel dissed not for how they perform but for other reasons. This affects application of some of the principles Kotter spells out for transformation. Leaders and managers seeking to change organizations in Fedland introduce churn in to an environment already suffused with low level anxiety. A sense of helplessness sometimes ebbs and flows due to decisions made outside the workplace. The senior leadership team is affected by some of those outside decisions as much as middle management and line employees.

That doesn’t mean Kotter does not offer sound, common sense advice about establishing a sense of urgency, creating and communicating a vision and strategy and putting together a guiding coalition. However, some of what he writes sounds linear to me.

In my experience over 40 years in Washington, initiatives play out in zigs and zags. Sometimes this is due to external forces. Sometimes due to decisions about personnel. I’ve seen drastic changes, for the better or for worse, by simple changes of one or two key people. People leave or are replaced. Who holds a position matters. Not just at the outset, when there often is a clean sweep or near clean sweep of the type Kotter describes. But later, too.

So I have questions such as what happens when leaders have to consider some of the elements Roy Ash listed? What causes perceptions of favoritisim and elitism? How can that be avoided or mitigated? Kotter describes what it is like to try to merge two different organizational cultures (he calls them the Greens and the Blues). But he uses the example of a company that increased in size due to a merger with another. This is a different type of integration effort than what an agency such as the National Archives is undergoing.

NARA faced serious issues with silos and fiefdoms when David took charge of it in November 2009. Some of the barriers have been reduced during his Transformation effort. But other new ones have gone up, surprisingly to me, given the fact that Ferriero himself is not an elitist. I addressed some of them in a series of posts beginning with “Success as a Pathfinder in Archivesland.”

Do perceptions matter? Yes. Kotter points to the role of feelings rather than thinking in change initiatives. He correctly points in The Heart of Change to how “emotional reaction…provides the energy that propels people to push along the change process, no matter how great the difficulties.” He explains

“They succeed, regardless of the stage in the overall process, because their most central activity does not center of formal data gathering, analysis, report writing, and presentations–the sorts of actions typically aimed at changing thinking in order to change behavior. Instead, they compellingly show people what the problems are and how to resolve the problems. They provoke responses that reduce feelings that slow and stifle needed change, and they enhance feelings that motivate useful action.”

Kotter warns against taking an approach that relies too much on metrics. Yet federal agencies and departments must comply with the requirements of the Government Performance and Results Act which is all about the numbers. Many Fedland issues are hard to resolve because the political side leads to emotivism–such as “you’re not essential”–while the governing side demands numbers. Missing between the emotivism and the metrics are the very real human beings who do the work. There are far too few safe haven places–almost none in public–to have adult, deep conversations about managing federal workers.

I agree with Kotter that feeling and seeing change are important. He hypothesizes that if you get the principles right, positive feelings increase and help the enterprise. But this is one of the areas where his advice seems linear. Leadership, vision, guiding coalition, perseverance eventually pay off in the examples he cites.

He does not address what happens when the thinking side of an organization filled with people drawn to facts (history majors or data driven analysts) is open to change because they accept provisionally that a culture needs changing. And employees are persuadable through seeing results that affect their work lives. What do you do if they start to tune out not because some of the results don’t have intellectual resonance but because other transformation actions produce negative feelings that become barriers and distractions? Leadership then has to confront the feelings that kicked in and why. Kotter does not explain how such course corrections can be made.

Kotter’s overall advice is good, however. Leadership is critically important, even more so than management, although I would argue that a visionary leader can’t succeed easily with an uneven managerial team. Personnel actions are more complicated in the public than in the private sector, however.

Short term wins have their place. I agree with Kotter that you want to show that the change effort is authentic. If you can’t demonstrate to employees some impact on their work lives, they may tune out. But wins generally are difficult to market in the federal environment where external pressures have led too many organizations to oversell past initiatives. External elements put additional pressure on the team to produce short term wins the leader and executives can cite.

I like the fact that in The Heart of Change Kotter points to the importance of truth telling middle managers in successful transformation efforts. He gives examples of people who cut through the malarkey, tell it like it is, and kickstart honest conversations about what is going on in an organization. This is important. If there aren’t people in the middle management ranks willing and able to do that, by which I mean ones not taken out by “shooting the messenger,” it adds to pressure on the senior leadership.

Yes. This is counter intuitive.

Controlling the message, cheer leading the leader’s vision, often seem like the safer path in Fedland. Raising questions can be mistaken for resistance. But sometimes, it is just what is needed to break logjams. Kotter is wise to point that out in several examples he cites in The Heart of Change.

Kotter writes that “The emotions that undermine change include anger, false pride, pessimism, arrogance, cynicism, panic, exhaustion, insecurity, and anxiety. The facilitating emotions include faith, trust, optimism, urgency, reality-based pride, passion, excitement, hope, and enthusiasm.”

Yet even with this passage, leaders and members of a guiding coalition need to be careful. It is easy to attribute the undermining emotions to people who are not buying in to change–and to excuse themselves from the same emotions.

Kotter speaks about the importance of two way communications but does not get in to issues of rhetoric. He uses traditional terms, such as cynics and footdraggers, for people undergoing change. As someone whose pay and responsibilities are at the management level but who still remembers what it was like to be on the line, I read these books from multiple perspectives. I believe that the language of change management needs to be neutral. Terms such resisters are too reductivist and negative; they unnecessarily write off people.

Simple is better, yes. But sometimes a phrase works well instead of a word. If executives are sitting around talking about resisters, it unintentionally may affect the mindset at the top. Why take the chance that executives may walk out of a meeting and give off vibes of contempt for employees? I believe this is something that can be realigned by framing. Better to reverse the concept of resistance and speak instead of “those we have not reached yet.” Or “those who have not bought in to change yet.” Those are “leave the door open” terms that acknowledge resistance without labeling negatively those who have not (yet?) said, “I’m in.”

David Ferriero wrote at his blog in “No Small Change” six months in to his tenure as AOTUS that

“In my first few months on the job, I’ve seen some resistance to change, but that has been outmatched by what I see as a wellspring of enthusiasm for changes to our agency. One aspect of my job is to uncover and unleash talent across the agency. I am happy to say that I’ve already seen the passion of our staff and I know we can change our course and exceed expectations.”

The Big Dude concluded his first blog post by writing, “I expect the principles of transparency, participation, and collaboration to change the way we do things, the way we think about things, and the way we deliver services to the public.”

Now that I have read two of Kotter’s books, I would say that NARA is on the right path in its Transformation effort. Yet many staff believe with good reason that while some things have gone well, others need improvement or actually have gone awry.

A “pause button” halted NARA’s efforts, as those of many government agencies, for two and a half weeks recently. What will happen now that the Fedland “play” button has started up operations again?

The answer depends on what NARA does with the feedback on Transformation that it has been receiving. From external stakeholders and most importantly, from internal stakeholders.

Aha, here’s the phrase I was looking for in Kotter’s books but found instead thinking back over what David Ferriero himself has said and written. This is the age of crowd sourcing, right? So I’ll collaborate in the process. Kotter spells out eight steps for successful change. I’ll add a ninth one from listening to the Big Dude. Embrace and apply continual learning!

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Posted in NARA, Workplace issues

Viewpoint

Posted on October 14, 2013 | Leave a comment

The Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR) put up a survey for researchers on September 30. I read through the questions yesterday. I did a double take when I read the reason for the survey provided in an entry signed by Richard H. Immerman, chair, SHAFR Committee on Historical Documentation:

“The National Archives and Records Administration is faced with the most severe challenges in its history. The State Department Historical Advisory Committee has sounded the alarm. NARA, wrote the HAC in its recently annual report, “currently lacks a plan, the backlog is growing, it is woefully understaffed, and its morale is the lowest of any government department or agency. NARA’s leadership must act now.”

The survey is aimed at stakeholders of the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) and will be open until December 1, 2013. SHAFR seeks responses from people who have done research at NARA and those who might someday do so. The National Archives welcomes public feedback; engagement is a key part of ongoing cultural change at the agency.

I’ve long followed issues related to State Department historians’ access to records held by NARA. The Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) series and State’s Office of the Historian (HO) both have received a lot of attention in the researcher community in recent years.

K C Johnson, whom I enjoyed meeting and chatting with when he spoke at a federal historians event last fall, wrote in 2008 at the History News Network (HNN) about morale in the State Department’s Office of the Historian. Jeremy Young weighed in at Progressive Historians. Linking to my comment at HNN, he said in his post that he disagreed with some of the points I had made under K C’s HNN article.

Jeremy and I already were friends in the virtual world. I developed a great deal of admiration (and respect) for him years ago. We had had many great online convos at a couple of websites by 2008. In the State HO matter, we resolved some issues and agreed to disagree on others after I explained at Progressive Historians that

“I wrote under K C Johnson’s posting on the FRUS matter that ‘However, these things make me a little uneasy. Having been involved in internal disputes over Nixon’s records myself, I know that airing out disputes in public can be a tricky way of resolving issues.’ I meant that it’s hard to get all the details of a story when some players are outside and some are inside. The ones outside may have much greater freedom of speech. It’s hard to tell whether some people on the inside are rooting for them, but feel unable to speak up, or whether those outside have little or no support.”

Others chimed in on the State Department history office matter. I followed their comments (there were 35 in all) with interest after having my say in 3 Maarja-style (smile) comments early on. I learned a great deal from interacting with Jeremy and seeing how he handled those who agreed and disagreed with him. I’ve never felt as safe posting comments anywhere as I did at the now defunct group blog he ran while still working on his history degrees. (Jeremy now is Dr. Young!) “It will show that we are human” is just one post in which I’ve looked at Jeremy’s insightful writing, at his later blog, and at Progressive Historians.

The situation at the Department of State’s Office of the Historian has changed since 2008, as an advisory committee has noted. After seeing SHAFR’s September 30, 2013 survey page refer to low morale at NARA, I looked for a copy of the Historical Advisory Committee (HAC) Annual Report referenced there. Richard H. Immerman is chair of HAC, members are listed here. Former Acting Archivist of the United States Trudy H. Peterson represents the Society of American Archivists on HAC. She is the only member whom I know in person.

I was glad to see the June 2013 report refer to improved morale in the Office of the Historian. But this conclusion to the AR?

“The HAC attributes the sea change in HO’s production, and the salutary
effect of that change on the office’s morale, to superb leadership and a
rigorously conceived plan to achieve well defined goals. NARA requires the
same if it is to turn the tide and begin to progress toward meeting its
statutory responsibilities. It currently lacks a plan, the backlog is
growing, it is woefully understaffed, and its morale is the lowest of any
government department or agency. NARA’s leadership must act now. The fiscal environment is not improving, and the volume of federal records to review, transfer, and process is exploding.”

A “wait, wha–?” moment for me. Followed by several, “hmmms.”

I was startled that the annual report framed its recommendations and conclusions in such a comparative manner. State’s Office of the Historian is a small component in a large department. NARA is a federal agency with a complicated mission, many different stakeholders, and complex obligations. Beyond that, recommendation by comparison requires great sensitivity and care if it is to work, at all.

I found myself thinking, “is this framing fair to NARA?” Then I went back and re-read the SHAFR survey questions.

Question number 9 asks, “Which should be a higher priority: digitizing archival records or accelerating the review and release of records to the public?” Another (number 19) asks researchers ~~to rank to what~~ to choose among initiatives to which NARA should devote what HAC correctly describes as “limited resources.” Declassification and digitization are included among the various priorities ~~to be ranked~~.

Some respondents will have experience working within the government. Others will not. People can ~~rank~~ choose priorities according to their wants and needs. Or according to their broader understanding of NARA’s mission obligations. Or from a carefully considered and calibrated place between the two.

What about me, what perspective do I bring to these issues?

I’m a hybrid outsider-insider, a former employee of the National Archives who is looped in on many issues through conversations with friends who still work there. I have a bias towards NARA from having worked there and cherishing its mission. That is to say, I support its mission and want it to succeed. (Is that surprising, given my past experiences as a NARA team leader in charge of disclosure review of the Nixon tapes while the former President still was alive? Perhaps. But my experiences never turned me against NARA and never will.)

And I’m a public supporter of the present Archivist of the United States. I support his Transformation initiatives. That does not mean I don’t grapple with how NARA should carry out its mission. In reading John Kotter’s Leading Change, I really liked this observation: “…most human beings, especially well-educated ones, buy in to something after they have a chance to wrestle with it. Wrestling means asking questions, challenging, arguing.”

This wrestling is part of what the Big Dude, aka AOTUS David S. Ferriero, has referred to as the “churn” that surrounds the National Archives’ Transformation effort. But a rise in scores on NARA’s Employee Viewpoint Survey (EVS) does not depend so much on how many employees accept David’s vision. It is how his executives and managers handle the way their smart, knowledgeable, dedicated subordinates wrestle with the issues — including digitization! — that will affect morale as much as buy in itself. In fact, the latter depends on the former, or so it seems to me.

I’ve been wrestling, too. But not with what to say about the Big Dude and his vision. It’s because I know and trust him and believe that David Ferriero is “the real deal” that I’ve put up the series of posts I have in recent weeks. Starting with one which might have seemed subversive but was not. Posts about reported fear within some parts of NARA about raising questions about its Office of Innovation, which has charge of digital strategies, among other responsibilities.

Because David has made clear that digitization (“making access happen”) is a key element in his Transformation initiative at NARA, reduction of reported fear of talking about that is all the more important. An outcome based on “Ferriero likes it” is less sustainable than one that evolves the hard way, from wrestling through the questions surrounding it! That does not mean the digitization goal is wrong. I actually support it. But questions about it need to be aired out within NARA.

Transformation has several drivers, some internal to NARA, some external. I understand why SHAFR seeks to survey diplomatic historians. But why morale is low at NARA should not have been part of the framework. Here’s why I think it should have been left out as a factor, in the annual report and in announcing the survey.

NARA has many Open Government obligations. In a Q&A at the Best Practices Exchange in September 2010, Ferriero mentioned an employee who had told him he had “dissed” archivists. Not everyone would be so candid! Ferriero’s rollout of the Citizen Archivist initiative showed how rocky it can be to find new ways to do things. Yes, several of us debated some of the issues from the outset. And there was internal debate, as well. As David noted elsewhere, some employees argued that AOTUS was giving away the keys to the wrong people. Ferriero stuck with it and he was right to do so.

It took me a while to connect the dots. I don’t see citizen engagement as a case of giving away the keys. But that I write as much as I do about showing respect for employees is part of what I have concluded about the Obama administration’s citizen engagement requirements for federal departments and agencies.

When you turn outside, the vibe inside becomes even more important than it is in a more closed culture, such as that of the Old NARA. David’s July 2011 presentation to the Triangle Research and Library Network showed great sensitivity to that. Ferriero discussed how customers don’t come first (important as they are), employees do. I’ve liked seeing such thoughts and insights as he has presented Transformation issues over time.

I applaud SHAFR and HAC and other groups for seeking to provide advice to NARA. But I am concerned about information asymmetry. NARA lacks truly “safe haven” places to discuss publicly in Washington the complex obligations that it is balancing. How to increase situational awareness and enable constructive engagement is a challenge for the National Archives, as for me, also.

I find it unfortunate that HAC chose to praise the commendable rise in morale in State’s Office of the Historian while pointing to low morale at NARA. Some of the elements that affect NARA’s EVS scores, such as the lack of promotion opportunities for employees in some of the regional records centers, are challenging for Ferriero and the management team to fix. I would argue that either you open the NARA morale issue up for discussion in its entirety–which requires situational awareness that is impossible to ensure. Or you do not drop it in to discussions of scholars’ needs.

NARA values feedback of all kinds. The SHAFR survey will be useful in what it shows about the needs of diplomatic historians and other researchers who take the time to fill it out. But NARA would benefit from much broader conversations.

In 2001, I failed in starting such conversations on the H-Diplo Listserv. After Jeffrey Kimball (with whom I am on good terms in the virtual world) posted about access to State Department Lot Files, I posted to the list:

“Faced with increasing external mandates, NARA cannot wave a magic wand and easily re-allocate resources. Nor can it escape . . . concern in the wake of the Wen Ho Lee controversy about Clinton-era ‘Openness Initiatives.’ In its strategic plan released in 1997, NARA noted: ‘Our resources are strained further by outside requirements. All of us at NARA want to accelerate public release of Kennedy assassination documents, Nixon Administration tapes, and records subject to declassification orders. We want to be advocates for the public interest in record material in general. But each new external mandate spreads thinner a staff that already has been reduced by Federal budget cutting.’”

I observed, “To be useful, any criticism of NARA must take into account all the sources of pressure on the agency and look for ways to protect it, not tear down the agency.” Another researcher responded to me on H-Diplo, “To argue that scholars have to understand or recognize NARA’s position is the bureaucrat’s response to avoid taking action. It is NARA that needs to understand that its bureaucratic foot dragging is the problem.” Moreover, he wrote that “There is no need to gain insight into NARA’s problems, it is the solution to the scholars’ problems that require attention. The need is for NARA to act and make its records available without bureaucratic quibbling.”

I still am where I was, during a different presidential administration, in 2001. How and why NARA does what it does may not always be easy to air out. And impossible to do in full. But the most useful feedback shows good situational awareness.

I’ve often asked on Social Media (and on Listservs where I used to chat) why more former NARA employees do not provide insights in public in to its operations and challenges. And to engage stakeholders in discussions of those challenges. I’d like those conversation to take place out in the open with direct examination of the issues. (Am I asking for trouble? Nah. Don’t think so.)

So. No survey here at Nixonara. Just a question: how can we make such conversations happen?

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The complex exploration of building trust

Posted on October 12, 2013 | Leave a comment

In a post on October 4 on “Long established legacies of intimidation,” I used the term “architect of trust.” I had seen it in a clipping I read in 1998 and saved in a file on organizational cultures. This morning I Googled the term “architect of trust” and came up with some hits. Adding in the term “government” along with “architect of trust” produced very few hits, none addressing issues about which I’ve been thinking in recent months.

Why was I on Google when I had a book to read–John Kotter’s Leading Change, which I bought and started reading at the end of the week? I’ve been thinking about the eight errors in change initiatives Kotter lists in the opening of the book. And why reading them led me to say, “yes, I see why you say that, but what about….?” I don’t thnk I’ll blog my reading incrementally, I’ll wait until I’ve finished reading the book to share my reactions to it.

My last post (“Safety and Shelter”) looked at issues of trust. I described how I was reluctant to start a blog but did so in 2010. Did so twice as it turns out, first anonymously at Archives Matter(s) in April, then in December at Nixonara. The reasons why I started Nixonara in 2010 are complex. I only have revealed in some of my past posts the one part I then thought was safe to explain to my readers. As in all communications, trust was a factor in what I wrote about my decision to start blogging.

In 2010, when I expressed some concern about my then just begun plunge into blogging, Kate Theimer tweeted to me a link to a librarian’s blog. Bobbi Newman offered “The Four Most Valuable Lessons I learned in 2010” at Librarian by Day. I bookmarked the link Kate tweeted to me and have re-read it from time to time. She talks about disagreement, about conflict, about hateration. But what really stays with me is what she says about humanity.

Some of my readers have told me over the years that I’m very open about issues they would feel uncomfortable exploring. Part of Newman’s advice is “to admit you’re human.” But how I chose to write here in the past goes beyond that. I’ve been thinking about that and what to do in the future in recent days. I don’t have an answer, yet.

I felt incredibly dehumanized by what had happened to my archival cohort — the federal archivists who first did disclosure review on Richard Nixon’s White House tapes –over 20 years ago. To understand that you and your boss and colleagues were “in the way” of outcomes someone more powerful than you needed and wanted provided me searing lessons in vulnerability. I would be interested in people issues, communications, management, leadership, and trust even without those experiences. But they definitely form the basis for my exploring the themes I do at Nixonara. As regular readers know, I often refer to management as “having people in your care.”

Yesterday, I re-read “The Shaping of a Life (‘I Believe’),” the double blog-posted essay from April 2011 in which I revealed I was the anonymous author of Archivesmatter(s). I remembered that I had written, “What’s the best protection? A moral compass. But oh, God, too often so, so hard to find in Washington.” And quoted lyrics from “I Believe,” a song by one of my favorite 1980s bands, one I listened to often then. But I had forgotten how much distrust of the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) I expressed in the post. That shows how I am in a very different place now.

Less than two weeks after I wrote that post, I began rebuilding trust in my former employing agency. The Big Dude, aka AOTUS David S. Ferriero, was and is responsible for that. As I noted on May 12, 2011 at my blog:

“Ferriero must have seen that I’m a wounded, previously abused person — but not a crippled or cynical one. I’m like a shelter dog who has been beaten and mistreated but still wags his or her tail and shows joy at any sign of human kindness because s/he just refuses to give up on us human beings. . . . Because my core self is what it is, something immutable, in its good and its bad qualities. Anyone who served in the Navy during the Vietnam war and learned the right life lessons from that and later experiences, as Ferriero apparently has, would be able to distinguish between the hopeless and the rescues. Glad the Big Dude saw me as a rescue. Not everyone has, I often thought my cohort just was seen as collateral damage by some in the government. Indeed, I would say such perception is very un-Washington, which is what makes the Big Dude my kind of guy now.”

What Ferriero did in reaching out and enabling me to reconnect with the National Archives was an example of high impact action. It began my effort to regain trust in NARA. Some of that process has involved getting to know David in person, some reading what he says. I especially liked the fact that he wrote about a speech by then outgoing Secretary of Defense Robert Gates.

I’ve blogged about Gates’s speech myself, several times, actually. In “Use Your Authority Over Others Constructively,” I focused on a passage that David didn’t quote in hs blog post about Gates. (Ferriero writes more concisely than I, smile. He knows how to convey a lot in just a few words!). When I read the text of Gates’s speech at the Naval Academy, I was struck most of all by this piece of advice:

“The qualities of leadership I have described this morning do not suddenly emerge fully developed overnight or as a revelation after you have assumed important responsibilities. These qualities have their roots in the small decisions you have made here at the Academy and will make early in your career and must be strengthened all along the way to allow you to resist the temptation of self before service.”

This to me is one of the most important elements not just in leadership but in trust building. You can’t build trust by fiat. You can’t do it by endorsement. You can’t do it by press release or self promotion. It starts with the earliest exposure people have to you, well before you realize what you may encounter or need later from anyone. The key lies in how you start. If you don’t get the foundation right, the color of paint chosen for the exterior trim won’t matter.

In some of my early blog posts, I looked at cultural clashes among other elements that affect communications and understanding. In “The Hunt for Red October (‘All Back Full’),” I described how I made a breakthrough in 2008 with then Nixon Foundation director John H. Taylor at The New Nixon blog. That was one of the hardest choices I’ve made in recent years because of what might have happened if it didn’twork. It frightened me to post a comment under a blog post by Taylor, someone who once had called my archival cohort “Hardy Boys” and “junior prosecutors.” And who had served as a chief of staff to Richard Nixon in retirement. But something told me to go ahead and try.

I decided to post a comment based on my take on Taylor’s blogging vibe in 2008. Setting aside what he had said in earlier times, I studied his writing to see if there were signs of development. I look for embrace of continual learning in people. I saw that in Taylor both in how he wrote his blog posts and how he interacted with those who raised questions or praised or criticized what he had to say.

I took the measure of the man at his blog and I posted. How he replied was pitch perfect and told me I had made the right choice in throwing away caution and trusting I could get away with what I did. I was amazed when he later explained his reaction to me. (He gave me permission in 2011 to share that in the “all back full” post to which I linked above.) It was an astonishing example of using Web 2.0 to overcome old barriers.

The New Nixon changed when Taylor left after January 2009 to become a full-time Episcopal priest. The other bloggers did not engage with readers much. One deleted comments initially allowed through the moderation queue. Eventually, the blog stopped taking comments.

I already had stopped being a regular reader. The mix of political rhetoric and posts about Nixon history did not work for me. The balance actually improved over time–not necessarily due to my urging, there’s no way to show cause and effect. I stopped offering advice–I decided that I wasn’t the person most likely to influence Nixon Foundation officials.

I noted the changes that occurred in 2011 and 2012 as I looked in on the Nixon Foundation’s blog from time to time. But what was done was done, by then.

And I understood there were cultural differences of the type I mentioned in one of my earliest blog posts here, “Let’s Start with Some Nixonara Myth Busting.”

My outreach to John H. Taylor led to outreach to and by David Ferriero. In 2010, I posted about having a “spark of hope” under a post Ferriero wrote about “Leading an Open Archives.” I very much liked what he quoted from Charlene Li about embracing negative as well as positive feedback. I find so much of what is done in Washington and how it is done dispiriting. Ferriero’s post truly was a breath of fresh air for me in September 2010.

The comment I posted at AOTUS blog on “Leading an Open Archives” referred to a message I had posted on the Archives & Archivists Listserv earlier in September 2010.

David Ferriero ended up sending me a message via the Lyris Manager for the Listserv on September 26, 2010. I included it (not for the first time) in my last blog post on “Safety and Shelter.”

As an aside, I had to unsubscribe Friday night from the Listserv. I needed to change the subscription from my primary email account, which I’ve tried to keep private, to my public account. I couldn’t do so for technical reasons. So I remain unsubscribed.

Ferriero has mentioned John Kotter as an authority on leading change efforts. But I just wrote above that while some of what Kotter writes resonates for me as I read Leading Change, I’m left hungry, still. I haven’t gotten far enough in the book to know how he writes about trust. But I stepped out for an intellectual–well, more a psychological–snack! That’s why I ended up Googling “architect of trust” today.

I trust the Big Dude, he has great capacity. And much credibility with me. Yeah, I see Ferriero as sui generis. David and I don’t always see things the same way. But I absolutely believe I can see some issues differently while agreeing with him on others. That’s why I wrote at the end of “Safety and Shelter” that I write about the agency Ferriero leads “from an uncommon place, caring about NARA but doing so with confidence, trust, even serenity.

So what caught my eye in Googling for a snack today? I found a presentation called “Architects of Trust: Building Trust in the Workplace.” Some wise observations there on types of trust, why trust erodes, how change affects trust, and how to work towards solutions. I applauded this admission: “Organizational change entails a risk of generating real or perceived misalignment between a manager’s words and deeds.” Authenticity is so important but harder to build up–no, actually harder to display because safe zones are so few–in the Washington environment than elsewhere.

And I loved, loved, loved this passage: “Resistance is normal and healthy–listen. Don’t ignore the signs–it won’t go away.”

Because I’m so jaded and attuned to Washingtonian baloney, I especially liked this part: “easier to spend two days learning new project management software, or two weeks adopting a new strategic thinking model than to undertake the complex exploration of building trust and connection with other human beings.” Mind you, some of the baloney comes from having to jump through hoops; change agents don’t have complete free agency in the federal environment!

There’s advice in the presentation on rebuilding trust once it is lost. That is incredibly difficult to do for individuals and organizations, both.

And a section on “Trust Building Actions” that focuses on Communication:

Solve problems through direct communication. Be explicit. If compromise is productive, do it in communication, not in your mind alone

Ask non-assumptive questions. Inquiry not advocacy.

Practice deep listening – suspend judgement

Look for the positive – acknowledge the intent first

Validate success or new effort. Share credit generously.

Many of these issues are ones I used to discuss with my late sister, a supervisory archivist and team leader at NARA. More and more I think David Ferriero is right. Leadership can only be taught to a certain extent. But you can recognize pretty quickly who has the potential and internal capacity and who does not.

Leading change. I’ll be writing about that more after I finish reading Kotter’s book. Ferriero’s vision isn’t diminished by the fact that I started reading a book he has pointed to in public. And that I set it aside briefly early in to it and then went off-road to forage for more food.

It isn’t April 2011 any more. And when I say “I believe,” it no longer refers to an angst filled song about pain. I smile at some of that angst and distrust now, I’m so glad David reached out in May 2011 and I started recalibrating how I view NARA. I listened to the song again yesterday. My favorite version is the “soulful” second version, which concludes with the words, “It’s too late now, baby, yeah.”

I never think about taking down some of my early posts here, when I was so uncertain about NARA. Or even the ones where I made mistaken assumptions which later posts corrected or realigned.

That does not mean I’m certain NARA is in the right place on everything now. As the presentation on Architects of Trust notes, “Complex organizations make it hard to deliver consistent service and conduct.” I believe that such complexity is not just structural. Some of the challenges stem from internal and external elements and stakeholders, both. And (rarely admitted in Washington), the lack of safe haven to discuss them honestly and realistically.

Would that wise and insightful panelists of the type who work on the Public Interest Declassification Board could tackle some other issues! So many issues have fear at their core. So can discussion of them. When there is no safe zone to talk, solution seeking becomes limited. If there was a trust moment in the report the PIDB issued last year, it was when I read the part on safe harbor. To me, that is an essential element necessary if we are to resolve difficult problems.

When my friend, the late Earl “Mac” McDonald, took this photo of Ferriero speaking at NARA last December, I was tweeting the Big Dude’s remarks from my seat on the aisle. I often think about this passage by Caryle that David quoted in his remarks at the PIDB meeting: “Permanence, perseverance and persistence in spite of all obstacles, discouragement, and impossibilities: It is this, that in all things distinguishes the strong soul from the weak.”

I never assume I know everything about actions NARA is taking although I’m looped in on many issues. My blog only reflects some of my interests in Fedland. There are issues I choose not to discuss at my blog. Some I’m still thinking over. Others I simply am watching. Some I just am not ready to write about yet. These things change, I’m constantly recalibrating how I approach my blogging.

But delete any of my old posts? Why would I? Blogging is a chronicle of life, of pain, fear, joy and the building of trust. And life is an adventure, isn’t it?

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Posted in NARA, People issues, Workplace issues

Monthly Archives: October 2013

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The complex exploration of building trust

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