Thoughtful Navigator - only a euphemism?

Jason Gibbs - comment at the March 19, 2026 Mid-Year Progress Report

I long had trouble conceptualizing the euphemism "Thoughtful Navigator." So I turned to AI and got a very inspiring answer from Grok. Here's a long quote. 

It's someone who treats navigation as an ethical and intellectual practice rather than a mechanical task. They plan rigorously but remain flexible. The map is not the territory. Anticipate ripple effects. What happens two steps or two decades downstream. 

Listen to the environment and to other people instead of imposing a preconceived route. 

Find beauty and meeting in the process itself, not just in arrival. 

You see this quality in the quiet sailor who double-checks the log at 3:00 a.m., the leader who asks, "What are we missing?" before committing a team, the parent who guides a child without controlling them, or the researcher who follows curiosity wherever it leads while still keeping the bigger question in view. 

In short, to be a thoughtful navigator is to steer, not by force or fear, but by attentive presence. It is the art of moving wisely when no one else can see the full picture yet. 

Vision 2030 purports to apply this to a library service, but it should apply even more toward leadership culture of the San Francisco Public Library where everything is top down. Everything is very siloed. They wallow in numbers. Big numbers good, small numbers bad. And in fact, they only know staff and their contributions through numbers. And of course, nobody ever considers the possibility of the future harm their visions may cause. 

Moving to one of the specifics in the Vision 2030 report, there was a mention of training. The staff training and development committee Stadcom [The Staff Development Committee] has been in hibernation for a while. It consists of a chair and nobody else. There's apparently no funding for staff to attend workshops or sessions at conferences. The library cannot provide coverage to staff to attend the trainings they want within the library and city or even provide adequate time to take online or pre-recorded training. 

So staff asks, they continue to ask, "How can the library support us in attending professional conferences and taking professional level workshops so we can stay informed and relevant?" They also don't understand what it means when you report says of staff development projects that "two are in flight and two are completed." 

It's actually rather kind of traumatizing to some of us to hear in the building-in-flight because during our service as Disaster Service Workers, we were constantly being told that we were building the airplane as we were flying it. And what that meant is we were in the middle of a huge, confusing anxiety producing mess. 

But the library is not in a disaster emergency. It has had established systems that worked and these have been replaced only by a vision.