32 Years and 25 Linear Feet of Hand To Hand

Hand To Hand editor, Mary Maher and 32 years of
the publication (Photo: Julia Bland)

During InterActivity 2018 in Raleigh (NC), tables stretched across the convention center lobby. Over the 4 days of the conference, participants, presenters, and vendors moved around the tables loaded with stacks of back issues of Hand To Hand (H2H), the Association of Children’s Museums' quarterly publication. Boxes and boxes of back issues, as far back as 1986, had been shipped from ACM’s Arlington (VA) office to allow members to browse and collect issues and hopefully reduce storage for back issues in ACM’s new offices.

Some conference goers passed and glanced; others stopped, browsed, and selected issues to take home. Yet with so much happening during the conference–colleagues seen only once a year; multiple sessions and study tours; and a MarketPlace full of vendors–absorbing what these stacks of issues mean for our field–its growth, change, and increased potential–was a challenge.

Thirty-two years is a long time, more than a generation. When 32 years of a field is explored in 4 issues in each (or most) of those years, countless stories and threads emerge making our field’s interests, concerns, and growth visible. And impressively so. 

Initially Hand To Hand was a newsletter with a mix of long articles and short bits of information about exhibits, museum openings, people. From 1986 to 1993, Linda Eidecken was publisher/editor; she wrote the newsletter in cooperation with the AAYM (American Association of Youth Museums) board. In 1993, what had evolved into the Association of Youth Museums (AYM) bought Hand To Hand from Eidecken. Mary Maher took over as editor and designer and has continued in that role for 25 years. A few other changes came with this transition. The news and information portion became AYMNews and H2H strengthened its focus on substantive articles, case studies, museum initiatives, and reports.   

Scanning the stacks of issues on the tables, H2H design changes were easy to catch. For years, H2H was a duotone (black plus 1 PMS color), tabloid size (11 x 17), and usually 8 pages. Decisions about color and size changed as web and PDF formats gained in use. In 2007, H2H was a 16-page, 8-1/2 x 11 publication. The first full color issue was printed in Spring 2015. The most recent issue, a 32-page double issue, covered the history and culture of children’s museums.  

These stacks are more than a “fire sale,” more than a publications list, and more than cardboard boxes in storage. These approximately 120 issues of Hand To Hand tell something about where we started, where we are, where we are going, and how we are getting there.

In scanning issues of H2H, some consistent areas of interest come through, as do the evolving ways in which children’s museums–and increasingly other types of museums–work and engage to address them.

An enduring interest in children and their wellbeing is evident in issues on play (Summer 1998, Fall 1999, and Winter 2008), humor (Fall 2000), health and wellness (Fall 2006), and cognitive development (Fall 1990). Strong roots in early childhood are reflected in a research review on young children in museums (Summer 1996) and a Great Friend to Kids Award to Head Start Founders (Summer 2007). From the beginning Hand To Hand has served as a way to look reflectively and critically at what a children’s museum is (Spring 1987, Fall 1992, Winter 2014/2015) and has given us the opportunity to be a community of learners around topics like these.

Several topics such as planning, exhibits, research, visitor services, and play appear in the very first issues

The most recent issue of Hand To Hand 
chronicles the history and culture of
children's museums

and again over the next decades. This is not simply repeating a topic with new titles and authors. Rather, topics are reframed and reflect greater understanding of a topic and how to address it.

Following one topic, research, across 32 years shows the focus recurring and shifting in how it has been addressed and what it suggests about the field’s maturation. In the Spring 1989 issue that explored research and evaluation in children’s museums, Mary Worthington wrote, “Who Should Do Evaluation?” The Winter 2004 and Spring 2005 issues focused on research, in particular, integrating it into museum practices. When the Fall 2014 issue, Revving up Research, came out, the focus was on composing a research agenda for the field. By Spring 2016, an entire issue was dedicated to the Children’s Museum Research Network that has been active in conducting research across 10 research network member museums.

Early on, themes and articles in H2H focused internally on the museum, an understandable interest of museums that were just opening, growing fast, and figuring out what a children’s museum was. Some articles such as “Running a Non-Profit” (Winter 1991) were nuts-and-bolts. Others looked at setting up a children’s advisory board (Winter 1988 and Winter 1989) and conducting self-studies (Spring 1992). Profiles of exhibits and museums in most issues offered information and examples of exhibit topics and design to staff hungry for ideas.   

Over the 32 years, more articles and issues have reflected the complex nature of children’s museums’ interests. Topics that may have initially seemed well defined, like play, programs or audience, have been increasingly understood in greater depth intersecting with other interests, like culture, partnerships, leadership, and sustainability. This awareness comes through in issues on Enhancing the Visitor Experience to Increase Revenue (Summer 1993), Planning for Change (Winter 2002 and Spring 2003), and The Cultural Meaning of Play and Learning (Winter 2008).

Just as a museum makes a journey from self-interest to a common good, so has the children’s museum field. This is apparent in an increasing focus on the larger environment in which museums operate. World events came to the forefront in 9/11 Response (Winter 2001) and After The Disaster following Hurricane Katrina (Winter 2006). With time, the global stage assumes a higher profile in Children’s Museums Around the World (Fall 2008) and Global Issues Impact, Local Impact (Spring 2013).

This journey towards a common good, of being useful in their communities is increasingly noticeable across 32 years of Hand To Hand. The Summer 1990 issue, Museums in Downtown, was the first to place children’s museums on the community landscape. A growing sense of responsibility to be engaged with the community and a deepening understanding of their potential impact are evident in the focus of somewhat more recent issues. Do The Right Thing: Children’s Museums & Social Responsibility (Winter 2000); Shared Values, Many Voices (Summer 2002); a double issue on diversity (Spring and Summer 2007); Declare Your Impact (Summer 2009) and Social Justice (Fall 2016) have probed these topics from more perspectives and emerging contexts.

The first issue of Hand To Hand
featured a profile of
Elaine Heumann Gurian

In “Looking Back 23 Years” (Spring 1988), Mike Spock reminded us that our field is for somebody, not about something. His insight has been invaluable in understanding who we are as children’s museums. It is equally helpful in recognizing the source of children’s museums’ strengths to which every single issue of Hand To Hand attests. Our field is defined by people, their collegiality, and generosity. By-lines, photos, and interviews amplify the centrality of people in this enterprise whether it is an interview with Brad Larson (Winter 1997), Elee Wood’s by-line (Fall 2016), or Elaine Heumann Gurian’s photo on the first issue of Hand To Hand (Winter 1986-87).

Hand To Hand fully relies on the people who contribute to every issue. In fact, without them, there would be no Hand To Hand. The publication has benefited greatly not only from the contributions of colleagues in our field but also from many outside the field. They have shared personal insights, professional knowledge, organizational lessons, and sometimes, personal loss. They have also generously shared their time and writing talents. While the circle of authors keep widening, there are many who have written several H2H articles.

Thirty-two years of issues also demonstrate that children’s museums have a wealth of friends who have helped the field and enriched Hand To Hand. Loyal friends like George Hein, Professor Emeritus at Lesley University, have written on many topics for Hand To Hand over the years. The voices of researchers like Karen Knutson and Kevin Crowley, UPCLOSE (Spring 2005); museum professionals from outside the field like Kathryn Hill at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (Winter 1993); and museum planners like John Jacobsen (Summer/Fall 2017) and designers like Peter and Sharon Exley (Spring 2008) have extended the range of expertise and perspectives covered. Countless authors including Jim Collins, Richard Florida, Tom Kelley, Richard Louv, and Neil Postman have shared their work with the field through InterActivity presentations highlighted in Hand To Hand.

Hand To Hand would not have grown and evolved, guided and reflected our maturing field were it not for its steady-handed, word-loving editor, Mary Maher. Working closely with ACM staff she frames issues, finds writers, and works with each one. She designs each issue, and transforms an often fuzzy but promising idea into a quarterly publication that goes to museums, members, and authors, across the U.S. and the world.

So, when the next issue of Hand To Hand arrives, spend some quality time with it. In the meantime, pull out some of your favorite H2H back issues or go on-line and have a look. Take time to reflect, enjoy, and appreciate the contributions of so many in our field. And think about contributing yourself.

The Designated Reader

Photo Credit: Wikipedia

Twenty years ago, somewhere near mile marker 187 in Glacier National Park, the alternator on our car went out. After hitchhiking to the nearest gas station and having the car towed to Kalispell, MT, we learned that the closest alternator supplier was 250 miles away in Spokane, WA. Since it was the start of the Fourth of July weekend, the part would arrive in 4-5 days. Our stay in the area turned out to be much longer, however, because the wrong part was sent the first time.

For several reasons, the holiday wait was not a disaster. One reason was the great quantity and variety of reading material where my husband and I were staying. That’s when my husband was anointed as the Designated Reader. He did and still will read nearly anything: the Economist, Guns and Ammo, old New Yorkers, National Geographic, Better Homes and Gardens, Popular Mechanics, Fine Woodworking, Readers’ Digest, and Sunset Magazine. He will also read cookbooks and sailing manuals, how to build hay bale houses, and anything about the history of the English language.

From years of experience, I know it’s great to have a designated reader in the house. I regularly enjoy a constant flow of articles, links, book reviews, travel tips, and new studies on museums, gardening, travel, birding, literacy, old houses, book arts, and more. 

Not surprisingly, I also believe every museum should have at least one designated reader. Museums operate in a dynamic community, educational, and economic context. Subsisting on ideas re-circulated internally is hazardous to a museum’s health. To stay current, be prepared for inevitable bumps, and challenge themselves, museums must have a steady diet of ideas, information, and perspectives from in and outside the field. Every museum needs staff and trustees who think, see, and read beyond the museum walls, carry forward what’s visible in the rear-view mirror, and look past the horizon. Learning individually and collectively as a museum must be fully integrated into its DNA. Designated readers contribute to a vibrant learning life for a museum. 

Years ago Minnesota Children’s Museum’s CEO, Ann Bitter, came up with a related idea. Our Strategy Team (a.k.a. the STeam Team a.k.a STeam) became, in effect, the designated readers for the museum. We added some subscriptions to what the Museum already had and assigned one magazine to each STeam member to read each issue, select, and distribute interesting and relevant articles to others on STeam as well as across the museum. Those articles became fodder for discussion, leads on new technology, challenges to our thinking, and sources of new strategy. In addition to museum publications, we covered business, education, technology, children’s literature, and family leisure. I still have a article, The New Work of the Nonprofit Board” from Harvard Business Review (1996) that I refer to even now.

With her monthly Museum Education Monitor, (MEM) museum educator, consultant, and editor Christine Castle has been the designated reader for museum education for 11 years. The final issue of her on-line subscription service was in December 2015. MEM’s goal was to enhance the development of theory and practice in the field by both academics and museum workers. Each month, Christine invited readers and subscribers to contribute research and resources in museum education worldwide on a related theme such as Adults and Older People, and Science, and Internships. Each month the publication delivered resources including on-going research, blog postings, on-line journals, print journals, new books and media, and professional development. Citations, links, abstracts, and author contacts for each entry made the material easy to access as well as extensive and perfect for designated readers at museums everywhere.

I take my own role of sharing articles, resources, studies, and blog posts very seriously and I enjoy it. Perhaps somewhat like a designated reader myself, I pass out articles and send links to colleagues and clients in areas related to a project: strategic planning, stakeholders, engaging parents and caregivers, or documentation. Sometimes I give a book to a museum at the end of a project to continue the discussions and contribute the museum's library. An issue that several museums are dealing with often becomes the starting point for a Museum Notes post that’s  likely to include links to articles, studies, or reports.

There is, however a limit to how much a single reader who visits only occasionally can cover– especially compared with the varied interests and perspectives that a dozen readers in a single museum who talk and work together everyday can generate. Moreover, a disposition to read is needed in every museum all the time.  A museum that aspires to be a learning organization needs–and deserves–multiple strategies to advance this. The designated reader is one strategy to activate and support. 

From observing the reading and learning lives of museums, I think instituting a designated reader strategy is helped along in a number of ways.

•                Start with 2 designated readers, and possibly more depending on the size of the museum. Float the idea first to get a sense of staff’s interest and response. Invite and encourage people to volunteer to be designated readers; the enthusiasm of a natural-born designated reader is invaluable. Be ready, however, to assign the role to get started. Integrate the designated reader into the organizational, team, and working group structure as STeam did.

•                Align with the museum’s priorities. Every museum has multiple priorities, the topics, or interests, highlighted in the strategic plan, improving quality, or stepping up to community challenges. Making these explicit helps a museum. These are the areas a museum needs to build capacity, provide professional development, develop a shared understanding. These are areas for the designated reader. Sustainability? Access and inclusion? Community engagement? Family learning? Performance measures? Social entrepreneurship? 

And yet, as important as aligning reading with museum priorities is, …

•                …Read widely and stretch. Create a richer reading mix with both familiar sources and more adventurous finds. In addition to reports from the field like TrendsWatch 2016 or IMLS's Brain-Building Powerhouses, read the LEGO Foundation’s Cultures of Creativity, and check-out reports on museums worldwide. Find readings in other sectors: healthcare, business, technology, education, as well as arts and culture. Read current research and museum classics by John Cotton Dana and Stephen Weill. Select different, alternative, approaches and perspectives on a particular topic–free admission, internships, branding, docent training, or museums' role with schools.

•                Shape a process for reading and sharing. A process for reading, sharing, and discussing is likely to evolve with time based on a museum’s practices and its own learning style. But thinking through an initial process built on what generally works well at a museum will help set a smooth course. • Who’s involved and in what ways? • Should readings be distributed to those whose work relates most closely to a topic or does an interesting article or report on a tangentially related topic serve as a friendly provocation? • Would a protocol for discussion be helpful? • How can we actively engage people with the ideas? Through a structured discussion or an informal conversation at a staff meeting? • Do we want to connect threads and themes? Apply ideas to our work? • Should discussion be facilitated by one person? What metabolism for reading can we maintain?

•                Commit resources to the designated reader effort. Reports, blogs, plans, needs assessments, research, and sometimes journals are available on line and free. It is, however, unlikely that all of the key areas a museum intends to dig into will be available for free. Subscriptions are a good and, relatively speaking, small investment in the museum’s future; budget for subscriptions. Anticipate and support the time that is necessary to read and discuss articles and studies. Create a kind of museum library, in binders, on the server, or in an alcove.

•                Expect everyone to read. Keeping up with information and ideas is not the domain of one department, usually the education department. Besides, museums are emphatically places of learning. They expect their visitors to read labels and learn. So why wouldn't all staff, volunteers and trustees be expected to read and learn?

Related Museum Notes Posts

• Perspectives on Professional Reading

DIY Research Agenda

Skyline at Chicago Children's Museum

Do you have questions about learning in your museum? How conversations support and reveal learning in family groups? About making as a learning process? Whether your visitors are environmentally literate? Do you want to go beyond knowing program satisfaction? Would you like to know more about the value your museum offers your community?

Do you often develop goals and evaluation questions on the fly, primarily as part of a grant proposal? Have you completed an evaluation study or exploratory research project and you hope to do more? Do you have a folder of museum studies that you refer to for guidance and inspiration? Are notes for a literature review collecting dust on a shelf? Do you wonder if you have the right mix of theory or practice to guide planning around engagement and learning?

If any of these resonate, your museum might be poised to develop a DIY research agenda.

Roadmap for Research

A research agenda is a roadmap or a framework for research that identifies and prioritizes what a museum or group of museums is most interested in knowing about the learning, engagement, and experiences it offers. It focuses on the impact the museum has on the lives of the children, families, and communities it serves. Development of museum research agendas reflect a shift from a belief in the inherent value of museums to a recognized need for a collective, evidence-based body of knowledge about museums that can be used across institutions to build theories of learning, improve practice, and demonstrate museums’ distinct value. 

Reflecting a growing maturity in the museum field museum groups have been developing research frameworks over the last decade. While initiated for different purposes, these research frameworks share an intention to grow the capacity of individuals, institutions, and the field. They express a common desire to improve practice, build theories of learning, and demonstrate the distinct value of museums while encouraging research and evaluation across the museum. Typically the frameworks include both basic research and evaluation, because evaluation studies have provided much of what is currently known about learning in the museum field.

Work on the AZA Framework for Zoo and Aquarium Social Science Research has been evolving since it was first introduced in 2011. The Center for Advancement of Informal Science Education (CAISE) introduced its Practice-and-Research Initiative in 2014. In 2015 the Association of Children’s Museum released its Learning Value of Children’s Museums. 

These frameworks provide a context for individual museums to conduct research, evaluate projects, and collaborate on multiple-museum research initiatives. They also provide a context where museums can situate their own research agendas. Ideally a museum’s research agenda emerges from its learning or interpretive framework. A learning framework, however, can also be built around a museum’s long-term learning interests expressed in its research agenda.

You might be thinking that you will develop a research agenda some day, when … your museum is bigger or more established; when you have finished the evaluation project or the learning framework you have been developing; when you have greater capacity, the right tools, or a new director of learning.

Don’t let that idea roost for too long because it will slow you down, if not stop you in your tracks.

Start Now

Start where you are and grow from there. Use whatever internal capacity you have and access professional connections and networks. Start with what you like to do most or where you feel most confident. Gleaned from reading through the research agendas and my experience with museums and their research agendas, practical, but not necessarily linear, steps for starting your research agenda.  
• Frame questions. What broad questions about your museum’s learning value and its community service purpose most interest staff across your museum? How do these relate to areas of impact–where your museum believes positive change is possible for its learners and its community? Look at the studies completed over the years at your museum to identify areas of continuing importance. Helpful here is Elee Wood’s article, “Defining the Scope of Your Evaluation” in Journal of Museum Education “Empowering Museum Educators to Evaluate” (March 2015).

• Sort and refine. Cluster questions in various ways. How do questions align with research agendas in the field; with the research and evaluation done in museums in these areas; and with areas of funder interest? Some questions are sub-questions, important to keep, but not overarching research questions. Group the questions into 2-4 areas of interest; or select one question to start with. Before going too far, make sure your museum has a current policy on research and evaluation.
• Familiarize. Wherever you are in the process, check out resources such as:
- “Empowering Museum Educators to Evaluate”, Journal of Museum Education (March 2015) 
- The CAISE Informal Science Education Resource
- ACM’s soon-to-be-relaunched Research Exchange 
- The White Oak Associates' John Jacobsen’s 2010 “A Research Vision for Museums”
• Access capacity. Consider everyone and everywhere as a possible source for related expertise needed to advance your research. Capacity undoubtedly exists in your museum in design, education, marketing, and/or development. Consider creating an internship for a trained intern with evaluation and/or research experience to work under supervision. Tap into a local evaluation network or a regional museum with an internal evaluator. Get to know researchers at area colleges and universities. When you do work with an outside evaluator or researcher, select one interested in building capacity in your museum through engaging staff in the research and coaching.
• Connect and collaborate. There’s a good reason large groups of museums develop and take on a research agenda collectively. Answering big questions is too much for any single museum. Take advantage of the field-wide nature of research agendas and look for opportunities to collaborate. Working together takes many forms from collaborative projects with museums with shared research interests, to joining a multiple-institutional research project, to sharing methodologies and shared evaluation metrics.
• Divide and conquer. Making progress on your research agenda requires a meaningful effort over time. Rather than be intimidated, break the work down into manageable pieces you can grapple with and that are achievable. Identify a variety of studies to be conducted across your museum over several years. Structure projects and initiatives around your research questions and sub-questions. Build in opportunities on those projects to work with researchers and evaluators, engage staff, grow internal capacity, and build new knowledge–one study at a time.
• Engage and share. Engage often with staff in your museum, in other museums and across the field to learn together and to answer shared questions. Standardize definitions; be generous with research tools and evaluation models; share results with partners, collaborators, and online research exchange.

Prepare for the Benefits

However modest a museum’s research agenda might be, it nevertheless enables it to advance itself and serve its community more fully. Having and working on your own research agenda:

• Shifts from research and evaluation as an afterthought to a backbone for planning and driving change;
• Creates a closer fit between intention and achievement in areas of impact and value;
• Builds a more active and enduring internal culture of inquiry and learning;
• Grows capacity among museum educators, developers, designers, evaluators, and marketers;
• Communicates to supporters, stakeholders, and potential partners the museum’s interest in building knowledge, improving experiences, and increasing value; 
• Demonstrates to others outside museums how museums serve as an integral learning resource;
• Builds a stronger case for your museum’s worth;
• Develops new strategies based on research to advance the mission, improve the quality of experiences, and increase impact;
• Contributes to a larger body of knowledge about learning and change in informal learning settings.
A DIY research agenda is win-win-win. Placing your museum’s work as part of that larger collective effort advances the field, your museum, and your community.

Related Museum Notes Posts

• Growing a Field-wide Research Agenda for Children’s Museums

• Thinking Like a Museum Evaluator

• Can Museums Say That? 

• Cultivating an Experimental Mindset

Four Key Practices

With Building a Shared Understanding I cast one of the five practices I have accumulated over the years as the queen of museum practices. Perhaps somewhat of a stretch, it is, nevertheless, useful in distinguishing it as a high-level, long term, organization-wide practice from other productive, but nevertheless, supporting practices. On their own, the remaining four practices do important work in strengthening the museum in small ways towards their larger interests. 

1. Building a Shared Understanding
2. Making Meaningful Distinctions
3. Breaking Things into Smaller Parts
4. Crossing Boundaries
5. Experimental Mindset

Making Meaningful Distinctions 
Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children (1995) is a landmark study by

Marko Remec at Mass MOCA

Hart and Risley on parent talk to young children at home and the lasting difference it makes for children. The title alone consolidated for me a valuable practice around highlighting important differences among otherwise similar ideas or situations. These distinctions, connected to driving ideas or supported by evidence, are crucial to building shared understanding, capacity, consistency, quality, and value.

Familiar concepts or favored ideas often have several or fuzzy meanings with invisible implications–until they collide. A half dozen words now enjoying currency in museums–creativity, participation, play, engagement, impact, learning–have multiple meanings across the field and even with in a single museum. Meaning that seems intuitive to one person rarely is to another.

I recently read a museum master plan that used the terms scientific thinking, science learning, and science literacy interchangeably throughout. While these concepts are related, they’re not same. Each possesses meaning or attributes the others don’t. Undoubtedly one is more consequential to the museum’s driving ideas than the others. In what ways is one concept more resonant with the museum’s interests, supported by evidence, or related to community priorities?

Making distinctions is more than just defining words or word-smithing. Less busy work, it facilitates work, for instance, guarding against false dualities that stymy discussion. Are we about art or people? Are we nice or necessary? Framing important ideas, identifying salient traits, relating them to one another, and clarifying their importance also signals what is less important and why. Staff can channel their creativity and act with confidence following clear direction on where to invest energy and resources to benefit visitors and the museum.

Meaningful distinctions can be made in many ways and virtually all the time. A simple statement caught my eye on Nina Simon’s Museum 2.0 recent blog: “Each of these activities invited contribution on a different level.” Rather than a single participation opportunity, each activity invited a particular kind of participation, for instance, at a point in the process, individual, collaborative, of varying duration, or personal investment, etc.

My strategic planning partner Andrea typically follows a statement like, “The museum’s region is a fast-growing mid-sized market” with, “This is important because…” This links a characteristic of the community relevant to the museum’s vision, mission, and audience grounded in back-up information. It assists the museum in viewing the future, addressing potential growth, and identifying benchmark museums.

Everyday museums have opportunities to make meaningful distinctions about anything that's meaningful at the museum: sustainability, adult engagement, access, inquiry, materials, collaboration, learning, risk/hazard, etc. 
For instance, championing open-ended materials in a studio space says some materials better support the museum’s vision of its visitor experience and learning opportunities. Open-ended materials that invite and extend exploration help clarify why a museum values them. Selecting particular open-ended materials because their properties invite manipulation, build knowledge of material properties, build on existing competence, and encourage representing ideas add important information. Considering how these qualities tend to extend exploration through more questions, experimenting with techniques, defining problems, or richer language connects the materials and their qualities with the broader experiences, and conveys more valuable distinctions. When staff across a museum make these choices consistently, everyday choices serve the museum’s long-term interests. 

Breaking Things into Smaller Parts

From an early age we are encouraged to break a problem apart to make it more manageable. Outside of school we forget until, years later, we fall into this practice again by accident. I did. Twenty years ago when I had the opportunity to work with the owners’ reps for Minnesota Children’s Museum’s expansion project on cost estimating for exhibits, I was reintroduced to this in another and relevant form.

The owner’s reps were bringing their method of estimating building costs to estimating exhibit costs for 15,000 square feet of exhibits we were building in house. Compared to present cost estimating for exhibits,  estimating then was a rudimentary, informal exercise with few or no specialists and no exhibit cost databases, at least that we knew of. I was a bit skeptical that the very same way to estimate costs for lobbies, lavatories, and loading docks would apply to estimating costs for a DIY thunderstorm, musical solar event, or the Harambee–a 2-story musical sculpture in our exhibits.

John and Jerry started with a simple example they explained clearly: making a table. On the one hand, they said, they could estimate the cost of making a table: one cost for one entire table unit with all its parts. On the other, they could split the table into its component parts, estimate the cost of making each, and tally the costs: make a tabletop of a certain size and material; build a skirt frame; make four legs; assemble all the parts. While both approaches would be estimates, totaling the cost estimate of each table part would be closer to the actual cost than one estimate for the table.  

Even as John and Jerry were describing the process of estimating the cost of making a table, I was imagining attacks on many types of problems and the benefit of getting a more accurate view of what I was dealing with: taking on a big project, tackling complexity, exploring something new, developing goals and objectives, or just getting unstuck. Whether solving a budget problem, developing a center for creativity, or building a table, Breaking Things into Smaller Parts manages the parts along with the whole. Without losing track of the bigger picture, this practice asks: what are the component parts? What is known about each? How do the parts relate to one another? What’s missing? What resources are needed?

Breaking Things into Smaller Parts works at virtually every scale, starting a museum or building a science park; developing a capital project budget or the annual budget; framing visitor experience goals or initiative goals.

Crossing Boundaries 
Crossing the cultural, geographic, physical, contextual, and intellectual boundaries that hold us back and limit our thinking opens new spaces for thought and action. In times of fast-paced change or easy continuity, whether a museum is navigating turbulence or sinking into complacency, stepping outside the familiar

Skirball Cultural Center photo

advances new perspectives, challenges thinking, reframes possibilities, and drives change. 

Territory beyond well-known boundaries is wide open. Venture outside the museum field, our cities and countries; explore libraries, retail, hospitals, and parks. Learn from other types of museums and from ones that are smaller, larger, or older. Crossing, not toeing, boundaries of theory, discipline, paradigm, media, department, and terminology allows us to explore what lies at the intersection of areas and to transform ideas in each area by combining them in new ways.

Increasingly the museum field looks beyond its borders, borrowing and adapting frameworks, methods, and approaches from social work, sustainability, and the for profit world to strengthen internal processes and operations. Interest in the Triple Bottom Line, the Hedgehog concept from Good To Great and Blue Ocean Strategy have migrated to museums. To manage these complex and diverse organizations, museums hire people from healthcare, education, business, customer service, anthropology, and theater. A colleague described how her museum director brought his extensive professional networks from previous jobs in other areas to strengthen a collaborative community effort around literacy. Having maintained past connections, he deliberately leveraged them on the museum’s, and the collaborative's, behalf.

By inhabiting another role, we inhabit perspectives that are otherwise unavailable. For years I volunteered in a second grade classroom, accompanying the class on field trips, riding bumpy busses filled with 60 second graders laughing, cheering, and talking to the symphony, book arts center, natural history museum and children’s theater. When we visited the children’s museum, however, I was most challenged in my chaperone role. In spite of knowing the museum, the exhibit, and my small group of children well, I struggled in accommodating their individual interests and different paces for exploring. In all the years we had planned field trips at the children’s museum, I realized, we had never actually stepped into the chaperone role to become chaperones and know the field trip experience from the teacher, parent, or volunteer perspective.

Crossing Boundaries is a daily and doable practice for individuals that introduces and invigorates with new types of diversity. Reading, visiting, training, or working outside our area can stretch us beyond even the best professional development opportunities. Another context, whether physical, cultural, or procedural, can challenge the limits of our thinking and test well-worn and worn-out patterns of thought. Introducing a new process like Design Thinking can energize a team. 

On returning from a journey through new territory, we view and value what we and others do differently, find new paths to follow, and discover new and powerful connections.

Experimental Mindset

Borealis Press

Increasingly my favorite practice is an Experimental Mindset. In many ways this practice energizes and feeds the three other supporting practices.
Museums enjoy a tradition of experimenting. Alfred Barr, first director of the Museum of Modern Art, commented 75 years ago that, “The Museum of Modern Art is a laboratory in its experiments the public is entitled to participate.” Every new exhibition or program, each interactive component or new acquisition, a revised membership incentive, or community collaborative can be a hypothesis about how the museum might invite participation, build loyalty, engage visitors more fully, extend engagement, or increase impact. With prototyping, evaluation, observation, documentation, and research of various types, museums have a wide range of methods to support experimental mindsets. 

Working at every organizational level an Experimental Mindset helps solve new problems as well as solve old problems differently. A suite of experiments projects can be activated in service of museum-wide change as the Columbus Museum of Art has been doing for the past 6+ years. Experiments can also navigate around interpretive challenges as the historic Hunter House experiment described in Pushing the Period Room Beyond the Period. They can be as small as a hand-written sign with a question, re-purposed materials, or QR codes and new technology to rethink the field trip. Regardless of the size, curiosity and an experimental stance fuel this practice. As with all of the five practices, however, museums and museum staff must avail themselves of the practices and their related opportunities. An Experimental Mindset may ask more of staff than other practices do, but challenge and opportunity also invigorate staff and entire organizations. Museums that value institutional vibrancy, groundbreaking ideas, and nimble responses to change and opportunity, can bring an experimental mindset to find innovative ways to encourage and support staff and trustees in being open to new approaches and ideas, taking risks, failing and then failing in new ways, and changing outcomes.

Related Museum Notes Posts 
Following the Thread of Practice 
Five Practices: Starting with Building a Shared Understanding 
2014 Resolution: More Shiny Questions 
Perspective on Professional Reading 
Connecting Contexts for Early Learning