The Good Projects

(and What Librarians Can Learn from Them)

Sep 11, 2024

a multicolored tile wall with a pattern of small squares — Photo by Andrew Ridley on Unsplash

“ . . . . the reality-based community is fundamentally a professional network, and its members are overwhelmingly professionals seeking to persuade other professionals.” *

--Jonathan Rauch, The Constitution of Knowledge

The last twenty years have seen the rise of a number of interdisciplinary, multi-professional, large scale projects intended to focus on professional values and improvements in truth-seeking, to improve society or the capacities of individual scholars and professionals to understand complexities of ethical behavior in adhering to professional norms—and to learn this behavior through the practices of intellectual virtues such as humility, carefulness, and epistemic responsibility. These projects originated from an impatience with dogmatism or ideological conformity and a search for models for improving professional behavior by learning how the best experts learn over time, and how aspiring professionals and citizens themselves might cultivate better habits of mind in thinking about highly uncertain political, social, or cultural challenges. In the highly polarized environment we now live in, with enormous distrust of established institutions and experts of all types, these projects provide a mirror for collective self-reflection and epistemic improvement for the library profession.

The inward-looking discussions and parochialism of the library field—with predictable conference themes and too-narrow LIS scholarship marking the course of decades, with little dissent or “heterodox” thinking occurring—suggest that looking outward to the “Good Projects” which I present here may give us examples of scholarship and collective self-examination that will elevate discussions and debate about complicated topics within our field—and outside of it. What does it mean to be a library professional in a landscape where artificial intelligence itself threatens professional agency, according to some, or is considered a much-hyped but supercharged technology onslaught, by others? How can we behave ethically with constituents among varied publics with enormously divergent worldviews, demanding that their views be ratified or confirmed by our choices about library collections, services, and programming? How do we think about societal changes on a broader level, in demographics, information behaviors, technological changes, and our own generational changes, that will shape the future of the field? What habits of mind will we need to cultivate collectively in order to create a new library professionalism?

I do not presume to have ready answers to these questions. However, questions like these can best be considered from both deep knowledge of the field and its core values, standards, and practices, but also from the vantage point of broader “experiments in thought” conducted over years by experts in other disciplines—and from a general interdisciplinary viewpoint. That perspective grows out of an empirical approach to examining professionalism and the epistemic habits that renew and sustain it into the future, using canons of evidence and intellectual virtues together.

My suggestions of exemplar “Good Projects” to study for own renewal is necessarily selective. Many expert-driven, citizen-participating associations have multiplied in recent decades with the greater access to information through the Internet, participation in “citizen science” projects, and much more highly differentiated media landscape that is available to the public. These associations point toward better examples of empirical verification, trust-building, and community formation that can be accomplished across political or cultural divides rather than political parties or ideologically captured professional associations within our field, or in other professions. In general, these “Good Projects” illustrate the needed habits of mind within the system of “checks and balances” described in Jonathan Rauch’s The Constitution of Knowledge—a way of collective improvement within, and across, epistemic institutions.

Exemplars

The Good Work / Good Project

The Good Work Project (now simply called the “Good Project”) grew out of the multi-year investigation by Howard Gardner, William Damon, and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi into the values and ethics of mid-career professionals in nine fields: journalism, genetics, theatre, higher education, philanthropy, law, medicine, business, and pre-collegiate education. Launched in 1995, the Good Work Project conducted interviews of professionals in all these fields, but selected journalism and genetics as prime examples of contrary tendencies. One, of an aligned field such as genetics, where all professionals were in agreement about what constituted “good work,” what their core values and operating principles were, and how they contribute to the greater good of society. In contrast, the investigators found that journalists interviewed were not “aligned,” were in disagreement about core values and principles, and were uncertain about their contributions to the greater good. That this research was conducted in the late 1990s suggests much about that time, with proliferating media choices, and a supercharged political environment even then, which has metastasized enormously in the last 25 years. Along with their findings from interviews in those two fields and the seven others, the investigators found that professionals cohere around three core values:

Excellence (work done with high proficiency);
Engagement (work done that is psychically rewarding over the long term); and
Ethics (work done for the wellbeing of others by reflecting on tensions in ethically complex situations).

The three “E’s of the original Good Work Project, based on interviews with 1200 professionals, are now part of the curriculum and professional development materials offered by Harvard Graduate School of Education’s Project Zero. The three “E’s” are conceptualized as part of a threaded matrix, with each thread supporting the other in a larger fabric of professional practice.

The resonances for librarianship are clear. While the library field has always aspired to excellence in service, and ethical practices as described in the ALA Code of Ethics, more recent divergences in the field about what is “core” to librarianship, and how to reconcile tensions between intellectual freedom and the currently valorized social justice have made questions about the three “E’s” of the Good Work project more pressing. Actual practices in the profession also often make Engagement more challenging. In many cases, the status of librarians as not full partners in the academy, or the image as administrative “servants” within communities, makes the threaded matrix of Excellence, Engagement, and Ethics sometimes challenging to realize. In particular, the lack of epistemologically sound professional practices, or currently surging activist-and-ideologically-inflected ones, creates a similar situation to that of journalists that the Good Work researchers found even in the late 1990s: that of a divergent, questioning, and uncertain field. This may explain why librarians who often compare their work to that of journalists as being in the “information business” may not understand the full import of that comparison.

Questions for Librarians

Questions that arise for professional agency for librarians, when considering the original Good Work Project’s findings, could include:

How can LIS education and training be strengthened to focus more on disciplines that address ethics (philosophy), cognition and critical thinking (cognitive psychology), human flourishing (child and adult development theory; student development literature in higher education), data science and statistics; and community analysis (sociology). How can librarians be better trained in these specialties to participate in better collaborations with colleagues on campus, or in communities?
How can repositories of replicable research findings, more meta-analyses and evidence-based syntheses, be created for all library practices, to elevate the sense of professionalism rather than small case-study approaches often found in the LIS literature? Evidence-Based Librarianship and Information Practice provides one example of what is possible, but we need a platform of evidence-base practices organized by topic or practice, such as that found in the K-12 arena’s one reliable platform, the Institute for Education Science’s What Works Clearinghouse, with its meta-analyses and practice guides. In higher education, the Open Science Project and the newer Adversarial Collaboration Project, as discussed in other articles on this substack, offer opportunities to rethink LIS scholarship, connections between it and other professional work, and to test ideas rather than offering ideologically-driven proclamations and small case studies.
How can the library field sustain rewarding work for those who find its internal frictions and lack of clarity about purpose, with divergent ideas about organizational mission and professional role? The proliferation of these discussions in recent years within major professional associations (or more often, quietly, outside them), is a signal that there are deeper professional agency and morale issues with individual librarians and also within organizations (Kendrick, 2017). What would a renewed sense of Engagement look like in climate of uncertainty about the chaotic information ecosystem, a polarized citizenry, morale issues about uncertain library missions, and a loss of clear landmarks for professional success?
How can the library field elevate ethics in professional practice with artificial intelligence/AI agents and apps presenting many ethical dilemmas in teaching, publishing, client or patron interaction?

The most salient finding from the Good Work Projects is that Excellence, Engagement, and Ethics are interwoven into a “matrix” of high professional practice and accomplishment, with each core value reinforcing the others. In our field, we would do well to turn back to this research project of twenty years ago to reflect on the future of our own field.

The Good Judgment Project

Over a period of many years, Philip Tetlock and Barbara Mellers at the University of Pennsylvania have engaged in inquiry into the mental and characterological habits of experts in forecasting—of prediction—in foreign policy, economic outlooks, social trends, and intelligence forecasts for companies and nonprofit organizations. Tetlock and Gardner’s bestselling Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction, presents research about the habits of experts and generalists alike as they attempted to predict global events. Their research revealed that even nonspecialists can predict the outcome of very complicated crises and uncertain situations in the international arena: wars, economic collapses, new industries and commercial exchanges--and in some cases, perform better at prediction than experts. But interviews with those ordinary people, over multiple “forecasting tournaments,” revealed certain habits of mind.

It wasn’t just a matter of the current vogue of DYOR (Do Your Own Research) followed by offering half-baked and uninformed assessments riddled with overconfidence and errors in reasoning based on inappropriate data and leaps into the unknown. These superforecasters displayed certain traits repeatedly. These are best distilled into Tetlock’s “Ten Commandments for Aspiring Forecasters” (Tetlock and Gardner, 277-285):

Triage: find the “sweet spot” between political or social conditions that are very simple, and those that are totally opaque.
Break seemingly intractable large problems into tractable sub-problems
Strike the right balance between the inside and outside views (e.g., expert forecasters have the habit of classifying complex questions or problems, and comparing them to others of that type, and also learn to balance between underestimates and overestimates of time needed to complete a project)
Strike the right balance between under- and overreacting to evidence. Experts in prediction learn to “update” quickly based on emerging data, and to calibrate their predictions with incoming evidence as it accumulates.
Look for the clashing causal forces at work in each problem. This ability involves questioning assumptions and looking for opposing or alternative explanations rather than adhering to just one set of evidence or one explanation.
Strive to distinguish as many degrees of doubt as the problem permits, but no more. Expert forecasters learn to calibrate uncertainty in a finer-grained way and use probabilistic reasoning, but match that ability with the complexity of the challenge presented. Making a prediction about the future of China’s artificial intelligence capabilities is enormously more difficult than forecasting the outcome of the Triple Crown horse races (even though betting odds based on expert judgements there matter); expert forecasters adjust, as with a radio dial, the level of granularity about doubt and the need for additional evidence.
Strike the right balance between over- and under-confidence. This is an affective trade-off in expert forecasters: knowing when to make a determined prediction with confidence even with remaining uncertainties, and when to delay further and risk loss of confidence from colleagues and clients.
Look for errors behind your mistakes but beware of rearview mirror hindsight bias. Expert forecasters attempt to do “after action” reviews to see what the might have missed or if they were completely wrong, attempt to understand their errors and the biases that crept into their predictions.
Bring out the best in others and let others bring out the best in you. This ability involves working on predictions together, in a team. Abilities such as perspective-taking; precision questioning; and constructive disagreement matter when groups attempt to make decisions together.
Master the error-balancing bicycle. Learning to predict with greater accuracy requires frequent, deliberative practice, with feedback, and growing self-knowledge.

(Note: italicized items are the authors’ words; all other text is my paraphrase)

The habits of mind revealed in Tetlock’s research suggest another layer of professionalism that extends the findings of the “Good Work” project. This is the layer of nuanced judgment in very uncertain, complex, multi-factor situations, of using probabilistic reasoning to make decisions with better habits of mind, both individually, and in groups. Tetlock’s research shows the accessibility of this approach even to non-experts who discipline their minds and cultivate certain virtues.

His co-authored Harvard Business Review article from 2016 (Schoemaker and Tetlock) enumerates these traits in a different vantage point, for business executives and others who aspire to encourage their staffs to learn together in thinking about the future. In general, the traits of superforecasters are: open-mindedness; curiosity and an “inquiry” mindset; humility and lack of dogmatism; carefulness; reflectivity; fluency with data; and ability to engage in probabilistic reasoning. They are metacognitively aware of their own biases and tendencies to make unwarranted assumptions and attempt to guard against them. Most important, they were not rigid or ideological, and they are both divergent in looking for more evidence and convergent in synthesizing new information in order to make better predictions. In other words, they decide based on “integrative complexity.” They are able to act on these traits in a program of continuous learning, both individually, and in teams, in order to make optimal decisions.

Questions for Librarians

The Good Judgment Project, based on decades of research into prediction, suggests for the library community the following:

The need to position libraries among a network of epistemic institutions described in Rauch’s “Constitution of Knowledge”, with its checks and balances, to guard against dogmatism and illiberal habits of mind. That network includes community organizations, citizens’ groups dealing with wicked problems (Deliberative Democracy groups such as the Center for Public Deliberation); bridge-building groups such as Bridge USA, the New Lyceum Movement, the Human Flourishing Lab, the American Exchange Project, and those testbeds for experimentation with evidence-based approaches to reducing polarization such as the Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society at Stanford and its Strengthening Democracy Challenge. What can grassroots groups of librarians do to participate in newer networks of associations to promote better habits of mind and a shared reality among their constituents?
A better professional development program for librarians in thinking about potential futures for libraries as part of this network of epistemic institutions. Ithaka S + R’s studies, reports commissioned by the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) and the Association of College and Research Libraries, have often moved into the “futures” mode in imagining potential futures for libraries without actually addressing the epistemic virtues needed to think about societal and cultural changes and how those will affect libraries. Tetlock’s research shows the potential for learning these better epistemic practices in prediction and also shaping better outcomes for organizations. How could professional associations or grassroots groups of librarians plan better training opportunities for practicing these habits of mind, rather than reverting to predictable workshops and “one-off” presentations that do not reorient thinking toward a better professionalism?
How can librarians learn better multi-disciplinary thinking in order to engage more deeply as partners with faculty, students, community members, in order to participate more completely in the life of campuses or the communities of which they are a part? This ability complements the “habits of mind” reorientation described from Tetlock’s research—the ability to reach for what Tetlock and others call integrative complexity. In order to think better, collectively, about the large challenges for the field, both divergent thinking—looking at all possible evidence and solutions are needed, but integration of those perspectives and evidence are then needed to propose changes. Questions to be pondered here include:

the role of the field, along with other information-intensive professions, in proposing new roles for librarian when A.I. agents are affecting teaching practices, editing, publishing, reviewing, information-seeking, and other core professional practices in which librarians are engaged either directly, or indirectly.
the role of the field in dealing with the charged issues of misinformation, urges to censor materials based on that politicized term, and the larger information and media ecosystem and its affects on the constituents’ knowledge and awareness of widely varying perspectives

In sum, the Good Judgment Project, combined with the Good (Work) Project, provide an outside but much-needed intellectual foundation for the library community to connect its historic values of intellectual freedom, and freedom to read and inquire, and equal treatment for all constituents, with a more uncertain world where professionalism and trust in experts are under siege on multiple fronts. Renewing excellence in the field means better habits of mind, multi-stage practice, individually and with colleagues, in thinking collectively about the larger matrix of sociopolitical, cultural, and educational trends that impinge on libraries and the librarians who lead them.

A Recent Book Extends Professional Thinking

The habits of mind identified both these two “Good Projects” are illuminated further by an interdisciplinary team of authors, Perlmutter (Nobel Prize laureate in physics), Campbell (philosopher), and MacCoun (social psychologist), in their new book Third Millennium Thinking: Creating Sense in a World of Nonsense. Their book addresses the scientific method for citizens, errors in reasoning, cognitive biases and social influences in the scientific community, and the habits of mind and thinking styles summed up by Tetlock and Gardner. However, their most compelling extension of this previous work in prediction is to propose “habits of community” (Perlmutter et. al., 268). These new norms, practices, and tools could become a rallying point for the library field in improving its own research and professional practices, and its interactions with students, faculty, community members, and other constituents. For this interdisciplinary team of authors who have co-taught a “Big Ideas” course at UC-Berkeley, those habits of community offer a pathway for renewed professional practice to overcome the predictable pitfalls in decision-making to which all researchers, scholars, and professionals are susceptible.

The authors call for the following “habits of community”, which are worthy aspirations for librarians as well (Perlmutter et. al., 270):

(1) Shift from “factual thinking” to “probabilistic thinking”

(2) Shift from reductive thinking with binary solutions to “multilevel, nuanced view that include emergent phenomena”

(3) Shift from “masterstroke solutions” to those that are iterative and experimental

(4) Shift from technocratic or expert-driven decision-making to consultative, deliberative consensus-seeking

(5) Shift from “zero-sum-game-tradeoffs” to an enlarged circle of solutions that satisfy more stakeholders

(6) More interdisciplinary teamwork

(7) New suites of tools: Open Science methods; scenario planning; blinded analysis; deliberative polling; prediction markets and forecasting; and online platforms for dialog

The authors remark upon this suite of practices as foundational for bridging the huge divide from siloed and embattled (and often distrusted) experts into more deliberative decision-making with nonspecialists who want to engage in good-faith exchanges on complex social, cultural, and political problems. This kind of deliberative discussion using empirically sound approaches offers the library community opportunities to renew its role as a civic institution that actively supports literacy, rational debate, and civil dialogue. While citizens need to be guided by experts in many complex discussions, the more deliberative, trust-building processes described in this book point librarians to renewed professionalism for themselves, and toward better habits of community that create more social trust.

Pursuing Good Work: A Better Path

Librarianship as a profession now stands at a crossroads. Multiple paths present themselves: into more ideologically-charged activism on passing issues of the day in the polarized present; into a passive withdrawal in the face of those charged and controversial issues, and in the face of large claims about artificial intelligence and the ever-mutating information providers supplanting professional roles of librarians; into even more traditionalist roles as collections repositories without professional guidance, interpretation, and teaching about the information ecosystem and its vagaries.

The possibilities for renewing “good work” and “good judgment” suggested here present a more hopeful option: that of pursing more evidence-based practices in the field, with a firm grounding in research methodologies and better partnerships with other disciplines, and campus and community partners; and with reimagining professional development across career trajectories, from LIS programs forward, based on habits of mind freed from ideological blinders and activist agendas—toward the more universal intellectual virtues of carefulness, curiosity, humility, and persistence. This approach toward professional practice, bringing together the norms of both the Good Work and Good Judgment projects, will better position libraries and librarians away from debates about activism around particular issues of the day and toward an active role in the network of epistemic institutions that are necessary for a thriving liberal democracy.

Sources

*Rauch, Jonathan. (2021). The Constitution of Knowledge: In Defense of Truth. Washington D.C: Brookings Institution Press, 107.

Kendrick, K.D. (2017). The Low Morale Experience of Academic Librarians: A Phenomenological Study. Journal of Library Administration, 57 (8), 846-879. https://doi.org/10.1080/01930826.2017.1368325

Perlmutter, P., Campbell, J., and MacCoun, R. (2024). Third Millennium Thinking: Creating Sense in a World of Nonsense. New York: Little Brown Spark.

Schoemacker, P., and Tetlock, P. (2016). Superforecasting: How to Upgrade Your Company’s Judgment. Harvard Business Review, 94 (5), 73-78.

Tetlock, P., and Gardner, D. (2015). Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction. New York: Penguin Random House.

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