Competency M

Every setting I have worked in has come with the same problem. The information function is almost never the organization’s core business, which means its value has to be argued rather than assumed.

I spent the last few weeks writing about professional leadership and communication for my MLIS portfolio, and I kept arriving at the same pair of moves. Something gets raised that was not already on the agenda. Then it gets explained in terms the audience already values. Neither move is sufficient alone. A preservation argument made to people responsible for a budget will fail. So will a good idea nobody ever hears.

The three pieces of work I chose look unrelated. An evaluation of a grant-funded literacy program, a proposal to two executives, and a metadata project. They turned out to be the same problem in different clothing.