Sustaining the Spark: Building Adaptive and Innovative Organizational Culture

Libraries have always been at the forefront of technological and values-driven innovation, from pioneering access to digital resources to championing equity and open knowledge. Yet sustaining innovation remains one of our greatest challenges. Too often, new ideas are celebrated but not fully embedded, leaving innovation unevenly distributed across our organizations.

Join Masud Khokhar as he argues that lasting innovation depends on embedding a culture of continuous improvement into the fabric of our libraries, making it part of how all staff think, work, and collaborate. Drawing on case studies from the University of Leeds Libraries and the White Rose Libraries partnership, it will explore how to embrace dynamic thinking and radical collaboration to create functional and cultural systems that support sustained innovation. By aligning people, processes, and partnerships, libraries can ensure that innovation is not just a spark of the new and shiny, but a durable, transformative practice at the heart of our collective future.

Innovation Delusion: The Folly of Innovation-Speak and the Need for Actual Innovation

Organizations and our culture at large are full of talk about "innovation" but much of it is superficial, much of it is obsessed with the shiny and new but unrealistic and unsustainable, and much of it distracts us from critical but unsexy aspects of our mission, like maintenance, care, and just getting the job done. One helpful tool for thinking about this problem and doing better work is to recognize a distinction between "innovation-speak," which are ways of thinking and talking that have developed over the last half century, and "actual innovation," which is the introduction of new things and processes into society.

Join Lee Vinsel as he delves into this phenomenon. Together, we'll find that often innovation-speak and actual innovation have almost nothing to do with each other, which opens up new, more grounded, more earthy and realistic conversations about the positive changes our organizations need.