How to Make an Effective Decision

I've been thinking a lot about decision-making recently, both at home and at work. I tend to be the kind of person who takes concrete data, looks at it, assimilates it, and then adds that into my intuitive feeling about a situation to come to a decision.

When I was in marketing, we developed a data collection system to determine how many suckers were falling for our sales pitches. It proved that we were more than earning our keep, and that negative messages ("Bad guys are gonna getcha!") sold more security-system add ons than positive messages ("A fire system calls the fire department even if you can't!").

When I was in the public library, it was the rubric I developed to assign collection development money based on population, circulation, branch status designation, and independent streams of income (e.g., the Geneology branch had their own funds from the historical societies). It was easy to say, "So-and-so Branch gets more money because of these thirty-three cogent reasons."

When I was with the RML, we used a rigorous planning process based on the Kellogg Foundation Logic Model Guide. Although this process wasn't as heavily numbers-oriented as my previous two examples, it nonetheless provided a structured framework to determine progress towards a goal or goals. Those goals were tied into overarching visions or impact statements, and so it was pretty easy to see how the day-to-day work fed into the success of our venture.

Right now, none of my activities seem to have this same kind of accountability. To beat what might be a dead horse by now, how can I know what activities have a true impact if there's no way to measure it? I can serve my little sliver of the patron pie, but is that really improving the library's status? The question of whether I deserve to keep my job becomes moot if the decision is made that the library itself can be redefined into something that doesn't need librarians.

I don't necessarily see this happening, but I really feel the lack of a mission, the lack of a unified goal. If we're not working towards something, are we working ourselves out of employment?