 I hadn't had an opportunity to really appreciate the extent to which librarians at universities are kind of both aware of the whole university, the post-secondary context, in ways that I think that maybe some of my other academic colleagues are not. Librarians who seem to understand themselves as participating in a system. So a system of libraries, a system of universities, a system of a sector, I mean they understand that they're involved in systems. And so they may be critical about the decisions, but they don't let that get in the way of, you know, moving on. Because the process has moved sort of so carefully from region to region to region and then bringing these different kinds of people together so that you have, on the one hand, every individual group comes up with something and then the groups are connected. So there's a bit of a, I don't know what you call this, probably a word for a spiral or something. It means that I think the research librarians themselves and the association will have a lot of confidence that the framework has been informed by a lot of participants within the community and that it then is distilled in the kind of a common language that when used, you know, begins to kind of gain traction itself just because of repetition. And it gives people, I think it gives people a lot of confidence when they can say, this is what I believe, and I'm not speaking for the organization, but I know that, you know, like I can draw upon this language and this commitment that the organization has made to these strategic directions and these are good for us because. So I think it's a good tool for strengthening positions locally, but also enhancing people's capacity to create a language that is going to resonate like a little echo or not not an echo, more like maybe skipping a stone on a pond that there would be ripples and the ripples themselves add up so that when somebody hears this, they go, oh yeah, I've heard that before. So it must be, you know, gives it more gravitas. Well, I've participated in sort of two parts of the process so far. The first part was the kind of open session with Anne at the ARL meeting. I'm sorry. And, you know, I think, like a lot of my colleagues at the time, my reaction was, well, this is kind of interesting, but I don't know. She's kind of from a different, coming from a different world and I don't know how much she really gets our world and blah, blah, blah. So then I went to the design, well, it's not actually a design workshop. I guess it was the meeting that was at USC with Elliott and with Anne. And I actually left that meeting thinking, okay, this is really interesting. The process was interesting. Elliott's engagement was really nice to see. I mean, he's truly engaged in the process. Anne is the kind of person who can kind of elicit a lot of commentary from you without injecting herself much as a commentator into the process, which I think is really good. So we ended up actually having a really interesting conversation. And so I left that session thinking, okay, this is really interesting. And it'll be interesting to see in, I guess, six, eight months time what the result is. I was actually really struck and I'm sure she had expected this. The visions, I want to say, maybe there were six of them or something like that, that the groups articulated were actually very overlapping, which I thought was kind of interesting. So clearly, at least those people in that room, and it was a mix of ARL directors, directors who are not from ARL libraries, AULs from ARL libraries and non ARL libraries, some museum people, really abroad, some special libraries people. And we all kind of came up with the same vision. It was actually very interesting. One of the best aspects of an exercise like this is not to come up with a plan necessarily, but to provide a foil for continued conversation. Because I'm not confident that we're going to have a definitive plan. And I've also been a big fan of, I believe it's a statement that's attributed to Eisenhower, that though something like plans are nothing, but planning is everything. And the idea there, of course, particularly in today's world where things move so quickly is that having a plan is good just for a brief period of time. I have spent a lot of my professional career working in technology areas. And the planning horizon, the number of years or months over which you can feel very confident that you can predict what's going to happen. I've watched Trink from five years to two years to probably about two months now. So that speaks to the value of having a plan. You're going to have to replan every two months. But the act of planning is important. It causes people to think together. It causes them to articulate what they believe is important, causes them to explore new ideas and new ways of thinking. And it's good to have a starting point. Anyone that's ever written anything knows it's very hard to produce the first draft, but it's much easier to be an editor. And I think that we're in the act right now attempting to produce a first draft of something that will articulate a set of values and challenges and ideas and directions. And maybe at the end of this, no one will be able to say, aha, we've discovered exactly what we should do for the next 100 years. But there will be something that people can debate. And folks can say what they like about it and what they don't like about it. And that all by itself will be very, very valuable. There were seven elements that I would mention in this call that I've learned from collaboration. One, of course, is that the collaborators need to trust each other. And stronger the trust fabric or the trust environment, the more effective the collaboration will be, the faster and more agile it will be. If trust doesn't exist natively, then one needs to do things to build trust. And there's all sorts of techniques, contracting techniques and governance techniques, but trust is important. Constancy of core purposes will come back to that value again. It's easy for collaborations to get derailed, to go off on tangents, or to waste effort and waste time. And nowadays time is increasingly of the essence with a lot of these projects. So it's important for the project to be well managed, well executed. So it stays on track, achieves what it's supposed to achieve. And part of the trust fabric among the collaborators has to include the ability for one or more collaborators to tell another one that they're just on the wrong track. They're not thinking properly and we need to get back on track. The third one I'd mention is a concept of fairness. And fairness doesn't mean equity. It doesn't mean everyone needs to be treated the same in the collaboration, but everyone should be treated it with a sense of fairness. Solid design principles and execution, I guess I mentioned that already. Again, collaborations require an effort premium. And what I mean by that is it's much easier to do something all by yourself than it is to work with someone else to achieve the same thing. You have to communicate more, you have to think ahead a little bit more when you're working with others. And that's an effort premium that goes into collaborating that's hard. So anything else that makes the collaboration even harder will wear out the patience of the collaborators more rapidly. So keeping it, having good management, good project management in the collaboration is very important because it keeps everyone, keeps everyone's energy level up, it keeps everyone's expectations for a positive outcome up. Another thing that my former CIC, CIO colleagues and I told each other at a certain period of time, this is maybe almost 15 years ago now, but we said, look, we're not going to compete with each other. We're not going to try to outdo each other because quite frankly that's a waste of our local institutional resources. We began to talk about the purpose of our work together as being to build capacity. And then if we build greater and greater capacity and build capacity together that we could not have built by ourselves, then our faculty, our students back home at our home institutions, they could compete like crazy with each other. And they do better at that. In fact, they all do better at that because the capacity to do work had been increased. So I think in a lot of these cases, and this will be true about research libraries. Research libraries love the ARL rankings. They love to know who's better than the others. And in a solid collaboration, I think preserves the capacity for the collaborators to compete, but to compete in the right space and collaborate in the right space. The second to last thing I'll mention is coalitions of the willing. So a lot of times collaborations rise out of ready-made communities like the ARL membership. And maybe you have, just use round numbers, 100 members. Well, that doesn't mean that you have to wait to get the agreement and consent of all 100 members in order to tackle a project. There's the notion of a coalition of the willing that if you've got a critical mass that can make a project successful, you can launch it, you can get it off the ground, get it moving. Sometimes that's all it takes to begin to aggregate more collaborators. When people sitting on the fence might be concerned about getting involved in something that may not go anywhere. But once they see it going someplace, it also makes it easier for them to join. And also by that time, the purposes, the goals, objectives have all been clarified and articulated better. And they're easier to understand so then other collaborators can join. So the idea of not having to bring the entire community along can be a powerful one. It is one that has some risk, of course, because you can have a minority, I suppose, of any community have a harebrained idea and want to go off with it. But that's where maybe one I didn't have on my list of openness is important. These things shouldn't be done in secret societies. If they're open, then others can judge their validity of the effort and decide whether they should join in. And then the final one on my list, and I'm sure there's dozens more. But one of the other lessons I've learned is it's important in the coalition to have institutional commitment to collaborate as opposed to just the commitment of a single person. So I've watched some higher ed collaborations in particular where you have one of the collaborators is an institution with great reputation and great resources and they're really helping out. And then all of a sudden one person, the one central figure from that organization retires or changes jobs, and all of a sudden that institution is gone from the collaboration. And that happens when there's the collaboration is being driven through the commitment of that individual who may have the internal power and authority to make certain things occur. But if they haven't engaged the commitment of other leaders in the same organization, then the institution itself is not committed. So I've learned that it's important that collaborators challenge each other to be sure that their institutions are the ones that are collaborating. And it's not just the one person that's got a strong personal belief that this is a good thing and we want to make it happen because you just don't know what will happen with that individual. Their commitment may be strong for as long as they can make it. But again, if they change jobs or do the kinds of things that happen normally in life, then suddenly all of the resources that they represent might vaporize. And that can be very disruptive in collaborations because collaborations are often built again to achieve critical scale. But then you don't try to go much bigger than that at first because the larger the number of players the harder it is to manage the field of play. So a lot of times collaborators try to constrain the total scope of collaboration, but then that introduces a degree of fragility into the collaborative effort.