Photo: Bethlehem Museum of the Mind |
“We are a
learning organization.” I’ve come across that statement in countless strategic
plans and learning frameworks. Executive Directors often describe their museum
in this way in recruiting new staff or updating the board. This phrase appears
in countless capacity building grants too. While pleased by this statement, I
am also curious about what a museum means and how it acts on that pledge.
All
organizations learn; some are more intentional and strategic in learning and in
channeling knowledge into being a better organization. How is your museum as a
learner?
In The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization MIT professor Peter
Senge describes 5 characteristics, or disciplines, that need to work together
as an ensemble for building companies into learning organizations. A prominent
management fad in the early 1990’s, approaches to learning organizations have spread
to other enterprises and have been updated. Related ideas have emerged as learning cities, learning communities, communities
of practice, and learning circles.
Business
management trends may come and go, but learning as a long-term interest persists
in and defines museums. At all stages of their development and regardless of size, museums promote
life-long learning for visitors, generate new knowledge through research, share
and learn from peers and partners, and develop new skills and strategies for navigating
a complex, dynamic environment. How are
museums able to do well for themselves and for their visitors and communities without
being learners themselves?
David
A. Garvin and Amy Edmonson, professors
at Harvard Business School, note that learning organizations are skilled at two
things. They are skilled at creating, acquiring, interpreting, transferring,
and retaining knowledge. They also act purposefully, modifying their behavior in
response to new knowledge and insights they’ve acquired. Within a learning
organization, 3 conditions must be present: specific practices that support learning processes; an
environment that encourages learning; and leadership that values learning.
What kind
of place is your museum for organizational learning and cultural? Is your
museum a place that
learns continuously and strategically? That integrates learning into its work?
That responds to change and challenge by learning together? Is your museum’s leadership
continually looking for opportunities to learn? Does learning cross team and
department boundaries and create a sense of community?
Some guiding
questions and related examples may provide useful pieces for advancing your
museum as a learning organization.
Does your museum have a learning agenda? A learning agenda designates and communicates
areas that are a priority for the entire museum and that overlay professional
development topics for a department or team. Learning areas might be community
engagement, adult learning, play, green practices, social media, or inclusion.
The focus may emerge from the strategic plan, the learning framework, collaborations,
weak organizational performance, or a city issue.
A
collective commitment that could stretch over months or a year, a learning agenda
may seek to deepen current knowledge, build a shared understanding in an area
of emerging importance, or develop new skills. Besides providing clarity and
direction, having a learning agenda demonstrates that staff, trustee, and
volunteer learning is valued by and valuable to the museum.
For instance...
• A
museum that included being a learning
organization in its commitment statements in its planning framework also identified 4 related commitments: evidence-based practice, many kinds of
teachers, knowledge shared with others; and revisiting and challenging
assumptions.
• In
reporting on his trip to Berlin with Hüttinger Interactive Exhibits (Nürmberg,
Germany) Paul Orselli described the coordinated
staff training and learning excursion he participated in and how he saw it expressing a
commitment to staff learning and capacity.
What supports for organizational learning are in place? A selected topic can be explored
in various ways. A museum may commission a study of best practices, form study
groups, develop a training program and schedule, or form a task force. It may
identify a question to study together as a staff: how has community engagement
changed us as an institution? Or what does it mean to be a thought leader? Whatever
the approach–and often multiple approaches are selected–dialogue and inquiry flow through the process.
Regardless
of particular methods, it is critical to allocate time in schedules; span
teams, departments, and hierarchies;designate shared practices; and introduce
systems to capture and share knowledge. Without tangible and intangible
supports for constructing knowledge collaboratively, organizational learning is
a struggle.
• In active practice, a team member brings an
activity or program to engage the group in discussing how it supports an
innovation strategy, engages participants, or supports family learning. With
the group’s input, the activity is aligned and strengthened.
•
Minnesota Children’s Museum has a Video Volunteer who is responsible for capturing museum staff development
efforts through digital video and sound. Videos are for training new
staff members on museum philosophies and practices.
• Inspired by
Reggio pedagogy and guided by research agendas and learning frameworks, museums
including the Exploratorium, Providence
Children’s Museum, Columbus Art Museum, and Portland Children's Museum (OR) are following
practices for making learning visible.
How do you make new knowledge into institutional
knowledge?
Everyday, each of us has numerous opportunities to rethink, learn, and discover
some piece of information, assumption, or idea. Some encounters are incidental
and some are central to a museum’s learning interests. We learn about a
membership structure a museum is implementing, hear about a study on curiosity,
go to a workshop on inclusion, or read the task force’s report on digital
technologies.
For organizational
learning to make a difference, a museum needs practices for sharing information,
reflecting on and consolidating new knowledge, determining the relevance of
information, and getting information and ideas to stick. With time and dedicated practice a museum
will develop its own approach to learning as a group.
For instance...
• Lisa
Marcinkowski June describes in her 2013 post, “Is Your Museum a LearningOrganization?," a process similar to After Action Reviews from the U.S. Army that captures the lessons learned from past successes and
failures, with the goal of improving future performance. The exercise uses 4
questions: What did we set out to do? What actually
happened? Why did it happen? What are we going to do next time?
•
Recognizing that all museum staff and volunteers interact with visitors in some
way, The Wild Center has developed a set of
training opportunities so all staff and volunteers have a shared language and
understanding of The Center’s interpretive practices.
How do you use new knowledge to create change? Putting new knowledge to work to
make a difference is a critical moment in emerging from a one-time learning
project to creating an on-going learning culture. At this point, a museum starts to use
data to inform decision-making. It discovers whether its strategies are, in fact, able to move
performance indicators, and whether its feedback loops relay meaningful information to the necessary people.
Throughout
the process, a museum also needs to be open to stumbling on and capturing unexpected connections and insights which may be as, or more, valuable
than intended outcomes. Before
hitting the pause button on a project, a museum needs to ask what it will do
differently as a result of this work and what it has learned from this learning
project to improve the next.
For instance...
• After
implementing the museum-wide training program, The Wild Center saw an increase in membership, an improved visitor satisfaction, and fewer
visitors reporting they did not interact with staff. Results have been
sustained and improved over 5 years.
Along
with along with the signature, position, organization, telephone numbers, fax, and address on
an email I received recently from an executive director, was, “I am currently reading
The Lean Start Up by Eric Ries. What book or journal would you include
that you are reading? What book would your colleagues name?
Inevitably, I come across a related study or article on the topic of a post just after I have posted–as I did this time on organizational learning in museums. I recommend "Bridging Research and Practice through Organizational Learning" by Christine Reich, Director of Exhibit Development and Conservation at Museum of Science, Boston in Curator. (Volume 59, No.)
ReplyDelete