Your Lack of Organizational Design Is Showing

Research & Insights · Melissa Legacy, Paper Street Solutions

Originally published on LinkedIn, October 26, 2026.

What if the greatest obstacle to the future of libraries is our inability to reorganize ourselves?

I've been spending time with IFLA's recent work on library futures, particularly its 2026 Weak Signals Report. It has me thinking about something I've encountered many times throughout my career in library leadership.

We spend a great deal of time discussing what libraries need to become. We talk about emerging technologies, changing community expectations, evolving professional competencies, and new approaches to service delivery. Increasingly, we're also engaging in foresight work to understand what might be coming.

What we spend much less time examining is whether our organizations are actually structured to support any of it.

I've worked in large urban, regional, and smaller single-branch public library systems. While the scale and complexity of these organizations varied, many of the structural challenges were exactly the same.

Traditional reporting relationships, departmental boundaries, established job classifications, and deeply embedded assumptions about how work should be organized often shaped what was possible, regardless of what the strategic plan said.

I don't think we question these arrangements enough.

When the structure doesn't support the strategy

In one organization, we had a department doing really innovative work in community engagement. They were building relationships, listening to residents, and identifying opportunities to develop programs and services that reflected what the community wanted.

The challenge came when that work needed to be activated.

Responsibility for implementation sat with another department, and the response to new projects and services was some variation of "we don't need more work."

It was frustrating for both teams. One was doing exactly what it had been asked to do and was meeting strategic priorities by understanding community need and identifying opportunities. The other was responsible for delivering services within an already demanding operational environment.

What struck me was that both teams were working toward the same organizational goal, yet the structure placed them in tension with one another.

The problem wasn't necessarily a lack of commitment or willingness to innovate. The organization had unintentionally organized the work in a way that separated identifying community needs from the capacity and responsibility to respond to them. What was missing was the shared capacity, accountability, and processes needed to connect the two departments.

Both teams were doing the work they were designed to do. It was the organizational structure that made achieving their shared goal more difficult.

The organization had designed a structure in which one team's success could become another team's operational burden.

That experience reinforced something I came to believe about organizational change. We often assume that if the strategy is clear, the right people are in place, and everyone understands the direction, then implementation should follow.

Organizational structures have a way of determining what actually happens. There is a line widely used in healthcare improvement, and often heard in foresight circles, commonly attributed to Dr. Paul Batalden: "Every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets."

A library can identify community engagement as a priority while maintaining staffing models that leave little capacity for work outside established service areas. It can encourage innovation while requiring decisions to move through multiple layers of approval.

These aren't necessarily failures of leadership or individual performance. They're often consequences of organizational systems that have evolved over decades, shaped by funding, governance, labour relations, professional tradition, and operational necessity.

There are legitimate reasons these structures exist, and in some cases they work just fine. The question is whether they remain appropriate for the work we're asking libraries to do into the future.

Recognizing change isn't the same as being ready for it

IFLA's Weak Signals Report includes developments related to changing perceptions of leadership, staffing, technology, and the expanding role of libraries in their communities.

These are important signals to examine, particularly when we consider how differently libraries operate across regions and institutional contexts. Identifying an emerging change tells us relatively little about an organization's ability to respond to it.

A library might recognize that its future requires more multidisciplinary work, greater collaboration across service areas, or different forms of professional expertise. That doesn't mean its staffing model, management practices, or resource allocation processes can accommodate those changes.

I've increasingly been approached by library leaders asking what organizational structures they should be considering to become more strategically ready.

It's a difficult question because there isn't a universal answer. What works in a large urban system may be impossible for a small municipal library. Governance, funding, workforce arrangements, community, and organizational history all factor in.

I'm also not convinced that starting with an org chart is particularly useful. Likewise, job descriptions are not a good starting place. In many organizations, they reflect established classifications and responsibilities more than the way work actually happens.

Before deciding what a future structure should look like, we need to understand what the organization must be capable of doing, what currently prevents it from doing those things, and which existing arrangements are worth preserving.

Are we preparing professionals for organizations that cannot support them?

There is considerable discussion about the competencies library professionals will need in the future. Commonly mentioned are digital literacy, adaptability, systems thinking, collaboration, and the ability to respond to increasingly complex community needs.

These are worthwhile areas of focus, but professional development alone cannot resolve structural limitations.

If we develop people with new capabilities while leaving the systems around them unchanged, we risk creating a workforce that is better prepared for the future than the organizations employing it. This is especially relevant when we consider how professional roles are defined, how authority is distributed, and how libraries distinguish between types of expertise.

The future of librarianship isn't only about what professionals need to know; it's also about the conditions under which they are expected to work. I think organizational design deserves a much more prominent place in that discussion.

The gap between foresight and readiness

My interest in this problem has shaped my work developing the Strategic Readiness Maturity Model (SRMM).

The distinction I'm interested in is between an organization's ability to recognize change and its capacity to do something meaningful in response.

An organization can have a sophisticated strategic plan, capable leadership, and a strong understanding of emerging trends while still remaining constrained by its internal structures and operating practices.

It can also perform very well against current expectations without being particularly well positioned for future demands.

This is why I've become interested in bringing futures research and organizational readiness assessment into closer orbit. IFLA's Weak Signals Report provides a useful starting point. It encourages us to question assumptions about what libraries and librarianship might become.

What do these signals suggest about how library work might need to change? Which existing structures would support those changes? Which might constrain them? How would we know whether an organization is ready to adapt?

Those questions are worth examining before the pressure to change becomes immediate.

Organizational design belongs in the futures conversation

I'm not saying restructuring is the magic answer to all organizational issues. I've seen enough organizational change to know that moving boxes around an org chart doesn't necessarily improve anything. I also don't think traditional library structures are inherently ineffective. I do think we need to be more willing to examine the assumptions behind them.

Too often, staffing structures are reconsidered in response to budget pressures, vacancies, leadership transitions, or operational problems. Organizational design becomes a reactive exercise rather than a deliberate part of preparing for the future.

If we're serious about strategic foresight, we should be considering how work is organized, where decisions are made, how expertise is used, and whether the structures we've inherited are capable of supporting the priorities we are setting.

We should also be willing to acknowledge when the problem isn't lack of vision, commitment, or competence. Sometimes the organization itself isn't ready for what it's being asked to become.

This isn't only a library story. I see the same pattern across public sector, non-profit, and mission-driven organizations: a clear sense of where they need to go, held back by structures built for where they've been.

Perhaps the greatest obstacle to the future of libraries isn't our inability to anticipate change, but our reluctance to reconsider how we've organized ourselves to respond to it.

If this pattern feels familiar in your organization, I'd welcome the conversation. melissa@paperstreetsolutions.ca