The Art of Relevance – and More

I am admittedly drawn to many of the big roomy ideas that float through museums: public value, curiosity, engagement, interactive, relevance, play, creativity, participation, and dialogue. At the same time, I cringe when I hear or read these same words and ideas used constantly whether appropriately or not. Too much use without rigorous and thoughtful consideration to probe a word for meaning flattens our language and our thinking.

But, I very much like big roomy ideas that are probed, pummeled, unpacked, and played out to deepen and internalize understanding and transform a casual word into a powerful tool for thinking, working, and creating change. Nina Simon has done this and more in her most recent book, The Art of Relevance. As CEO at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History (MAH), at science centers and children’s museums she has worked, as a consultant with museums, and as author of Museum 2.0 and The Participatory Museum, Nina has honed her sensibilities about and a belief in the potential of relevance to transform lives and institutions.

What Is Relevance?

Before delving into her extensive pursuit of relevance, Nina takes time to explore it from various perspectives. She begins by grounding this construct in the work of two cognitive scientists, Deirdre Wilson and Dan Sperber. Two criteria make information relevant to someone: new conclusions that matter to that person (positive cognitive effect) and the effort required to absorb it–lower effort, higher relevance. Thinking about eating bacon, choosing a movie, and commemorating the origin of surfing in the Americas, Nina uses the criteria to explore the construct and its capacity across a range of situations: a painting, a museum tour, cemetery caretaking, soup, or a Laundromat. 

She also takes a few passes at what relevance is and isn’t. Relevance, for instance, is not about familiarity, but familiarity does reduce effort, encourages trying, and assists in making meaning. She challenges easy assumptions: what we do is relevant to everyone and relevance is universal.

After framing relevance, Nina looks at efforts to build relevance in a wide range of situations and settings. She has selected stories of individuals and groups at museums, libraries, visitor centers, zoos, theaters, and parks. Sketch-by-sketch, she makes relevance less abstract, exposing its inherent complexity, and recognizing the hard work involved in someone’s unlocking meaning.

• The Monterey Bay Aquarium shifts their research work to advocacy by responding to their visitors’ interest in positive action.

• The New World Symphony in Miami does the work to reduce the effort for young urban adults to find relevance in classical music.

• The Foster Youth Museum In Oakland evolves forms of displays to empower foster youth to share their stories.

• The Cleveland Public Library makes room for outsiders by serving lunch to low-income kids during the summer.    

These stories, fascinating, poignant and heartening, help clarify how connections are being made and being made to matter to a person or community. Embedded in the stories are innovative and alternative methods and techniques for relationship and community building useful in other institutions. Periodically, Nina returns to the two criteria for making information relevant and sharpening our own sense of relevance.

The mini-case studies of people, places, partners, and projects become even more valuable with Nina’s reflective analysis woven into each. Here is where she makes fine distinctions. Here is where she highlights the importance of place, choices that made a difference, the limitations of painfully broad descriptions of communities, and the value of personal stories. Here is practical advice for getting started, moving ahead, or working around obstacles: get outside, listen, meet people, identify leaders. Just as Nina wholeheartedly describes a project, idea, or change, she wholeheartedly tugs at its parts to expose obstacles, highlight what works, and make connections.

In a sense, the book is personal and that matters in bringing depth, honesty, and complexity to an idea that could remain in pop culture land. Nina refers to this book as “field notes” from her journey in pursuit of relevance. Her experiences as an insider and an outsider, the twists and turns of projects, and her evolving working definition of relevance personalize the work and make it accessible. She breaks down MAH’s Community First process, questions, uncertainty, admiration, and insights. A champion of relevance, she also acknowledges its limitations.

A clear intention to apply her insights on relevance appears to be built into the book’s structure, approach, and language. On the front page of each chapter, 2-3 succinct ideas summarize the chapter, previewing for us what’s ahead. Rigorous thinking, abundant examples, and engaging stories help illustrate complex ideas.

Throughout, she finds ways to involve us in ways that matter, placing us in the shoes of a zoo director or reminding us that, “We are all grumbly insiders about something.” She has a fluency with images weaving an image of relevance as a key throughout the book. Skillfully and creatively she extends it to a door that opens to a room full of experience, welcoming, wonderful, valuable. The room, she notes, can be made bigger–together.

The book is compact. You could breeze through it, but­ you wouldn't ’want to. You’d miss what Nina has carefully tucked into her stories, drawn from her experiences, and her encouragement to create relevant work.

… And More

In The Art of Relevance Nina unpacks, explores, and reflects on relevance in ways that can bring a museum’s core ideas to life, beyond what is often imagined. She not only does this well, but she does more.

She shows what skills and strategies like empathy, perspective taking, commitment, and collaboration look like and the work they do to make a difference. In relating relevance to mission, core values, defining communities, programming, and measuring success Nina is creating a constellation of ideas that guide organizations in planning, navigating dynamic environments, and making a difference. Sharp observations, like the urge to entertain as a serious distraction from relevance, are critical considerations for marshaling focus and building momentum to transform lives and institutions. 

The Art of Relevance has made me reflect on past efforts to forge meaningful connections with partners, draw outsiders in, bring community voices into the planning process, and sustain relationships. It has made me think of revisiting past Museum Notes posts and of new perspectives for future ones.

When you begin a quest for greater relevance, you don’t just answer one question. You answer more, learn more, think more about change. In the book’s Preface, Jon Moscone, director of the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco notes that, “The challenge of relevance is complex and deep.” I would add, “and forever.” Relevance takes hard work, time, and dedicated friends and partners. It will be easier with The Art of Relevance.

Five Practices: Starting with a Shared Understanding

In the billowy word cloud of practice, float professional practice, reflective practice, green practice, and many types of spiritual practice. There are practices that are promising, evidence-based, and best. A set of practices might also characterize a particular museum or an approach. Even as individuals, we are likely to have a few favored practices we rely on, whether or not we think of the methods we deliberately deploy to accomplish our work as practices. I know I’ve accumulated 5 practices over the years, applied and tested across settings. 

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

While likely somewhat idiosyncratic, my set of five is basically what we know as practices: tested methods, processes, and rules used in a particular situation within a field or profession. Accumulated over the last 30 years, my practices confer a kind of confidence: I’ll find my way through situations I am likely to encounter. They provide the kind of security a traveler in a fairy tale has from jingling silver coins in his pocket as he wanders through strange new lands. 

I like new situations. Over the years I’ve found myself in new territory moving from teaching to design to professional development to museum administration to museum planning; the world has been changing as well. I figure I’ll be using these silver coins in the future since they have served me well in starting a museum, building a new museum, planning exhibits, helping others plan museums, developing initiatives, and fielding strategic plans.

These five practices have come from different parts of my work life: from reading, noticing, borrowing from others and, of course, from actual practice. Sometimes with a click, “just something I do” becomes a firmed up practice. A practice may be based on existing practices like inquiry but comes together with a group as with Shiny Questions. At least one practice has migrated from another field. Breaking things into smaller and smaller parts, a practice in cost estimating, is equally useful in thinking about strategies and what precursor engineering thinking in young children looks like. A phrase I came across in reading a study resonated with a roar and consolidated a string of related activities in one swell foop.

Building a Shared Understanding

When a team hums, a department hits its mark regularly, an initiative gains serious traction, or a museum transforms itself, chances are the group has developed and works with a shared understanding of significant, relevant ideas. They may share an organization-wide understanding of the museum’s sustainability commitment and how to further it across every department. They may be working from a common pedagogical framework around learning that they have hammered, negotiated, tested, and continue to revise. Or they may have coined their own vocabulary about family learning with special terms and phrases to describe interactions among family members, reliable strategies for engaging them, and what the chosen outcomes are.

A shared understanding across a team, a department, and levels of an organization deepens appreciation for and genuine caring about a common vision a museum is intent on achieving. Whether initiated by formal leadership, a thought leader, or a team’s energy, cultivating a common language or vision is a practice that engages and brings together an entire museum. Unfolding over time, an understanding explores diverse perspectives in such a way that a deeper, common understanding emerges. Neither static nor finished, understandings continue to be revisited in the light of new information from fresh voices, questions, failures, changing conditions, and new connections. Not at all the product of same-thinking colleagues, it is sustained equally by varied perspectives and the aligned efforts of many. The mutual support, or force, of an understanding galvanizes people in many roles to action and generates shared, productive energy.

Suitable across Many Settings 
In a museum building a shared understanding may center on a framework for public value, on a vision for the museum experience and the amenities needed to realize it, or on how a museum advances its broad learning agenda. This process generates questions such as how is learning (or customer service) part of everyone’s job? Following questions and unpacking meaning connect big, roomy ideas with the everyday language of museum work. What do we mean by program? By learning? By creativity? What does learning look like at our museum? A lexicon of words and concepts emerges and facilitates discussion. Familiar words, crisp with new meaning, replace tired, over-used words that mean everything and nothing.

The value and benefit of a commonly understood direction are apparent across a range of settings. Building Shared Vision is one of the five disciplines of learning organizations Peter Senge writes about in The Fifth Discipline. At the heart of the decades-long educational project of the municipal infant toddler centers and schools of Reggio Emilia is a comprehensive, shared pedagogy that has inspired schools (and museums) worldwide. Over nearly 10 years, Columbus Museum of Art has been intentionally engaged in integrating creativity throughout its learning and visitor experiences. The July 2014 issue of Journal of Museum Education is dedicated to an in depth exploration of their journey. A similar deliberate and sustained approach to a shared vision, in this case of becoming a  “… thriving, central gathering place where local residents and visitors have the opportunity to experience art, history, ideas, and culture” characterizes the work Nina Simon has been leading at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History. The Learning Community, an innovative K-8 public charter school serving Central Falls, Pawtucket, and Providence (RI) has, as its approach, a comprehensive and deeply understood program based in research, clarity of ideas, and explicit instruction.

For museum staff, team, or board to feel connected to one another around a greater hope of bringing positive change to people’s lives requires a way of talking deeply with one another about important ideas. It relies on unearthing the museum’s salient, ennobling ideas; talking, listening, and thinking together. In probing meanings and casting them in the museum’s particular context, a museum’s full team makes ideas accessible and actionable. A museum that enjoys a shared view of what’s possible and a common starting point for framing issues also enjoys advantages in navigating new and complex situations that arise, making decisions, and identifying solutions.

Why? 

Why engage an entire museum–staff and board–in a long-term, challenging effort with inevitable risks, set backs, if not failures, along the way?

By its nature, building a shared understanding is a collective, reciprocal effort that generates a sense of ownership and commitment, shared identity and pride. Work in one area of the museum is integral to work in other areas. Each is necessary to the overall effort and coordinated action required to move forward. Valued for their perspectives, creativity, and experience, staff members are empowered to create opportunities to learn and understand more, and to put relevant, supportive practices into place. Museum capacity builds as staff internalizes ideas and develops fluency around what matters most and how values are expressed. When a museum harnesses a shared understanding across the organization, it experiences a palpable energy, a sense of being alive with meaning and possibility.

Foundational changes will inevitably create shifts, some of which will be disruptive. Many, however, will also invigorate an organization that is serious about change and on the move. For instance, it is likely that a museum will shift from relying on assumptions, hopes, and wishes that a vision will be realized to being empowered to find strategies and tools to act on it. Other shifts will also occur.

• From talking about what the museum does to ... internalizing why it does it.
• From short-term thinking in separate departments to ... on-going dialogues across the museum.
• From acting on untested assumptions about what visitors do and think to… asking and exploring questions and using evidence to inform choices about the visitor experience.
• From presenting cherished programs staff likes and has done to … developing programs relevant to visitors, grounded in research, and capable of advancing the vision.
• From counting what is countable–participants and “likes”–to … documenting changes in practice, progress towards outcomes, and shifts in how the museum is viewed by stakeholders.
• From I and my, and they and them to … we, our, and us.
• From attracting staff, trustees and funders content with business as usual to … garnering attention, talent, and support of decision-makers and funders attracted by potential and persistence.

An Overarching Practice

Among the five practices, Building a Shared Understanding is perhaps an overarching practice, one that serves an entire museum across all its endeavors and its trajectory. Tied to foundational ideas, effecting meaningful change, and engaging staff, trustees, and visitors, Building a Shared Understanding is as basic as providing for safety and keeping the doors open and goes well beyond. In fact, Building a Shared Understanding is possibly THE practice of a museum. It is clearly supported by the other four practices.

Next up: Making Meaningful Distinction, Breaking Things into Smaller Parts, Crossing Boundaries, and An Experimental Mindset.

Related Museum Notes Posts

• Following the Thread of Practice

• 2014 Resolution: More Shiny Questions

• Perspective on Professional Reading

• Learning Frameworks

Planning Out Loud

Bigger than a prototype, louder than a focus group, and unfolding over months–and possibly years, planning out loud is long-term, deliberate testing of multiple aspects of a museum by engaging the community.

Prototyping components, exhibits, text, and programs has become an established practice in museums over the last two decades. There are many examples, from specific exhibitions to large-scale efforts like’s NySci’s extended prototyping for Design Lab Community engagement, a key component of planning out loud, is also an established strategy for inviting the community into the museum and generating content. Nina Simon highlights an enormous range of examples at multiple scales in Participatory Museum and writes about her experience with everyday community engagement at the Museum of Art and History (Santa Cruz, CA). A recent article in Madison’s Cap Times spotlighted Madison Children’s Museum’s hosting listening sessions with children, youth, and teachers across the community as part of its planning of a new 8,000 square foot floor that looks to serve an older audience.

Planning out loud is based on an assumption that, if being curious, asking questions, reflecting, and learning through social and physical interaction is valuable for our visitors, then it’s valuable for museums as well.

Two museums I am working with, the Children’s Museum of Southern Minnesota (Mankato, MN) and Tulsa Children’s Museum (OK), are planning out loud. In bringing new museums to their cities and regions, they are going well beyond prototyping components, exhibits, and labels. They are testing across operational areas from hours, to staffing, to how much mess. They are testing the potential of community partnerships and are testing their business model. In a way, they are prototyping the whole museum with the voice-over narrative to accompany the planning.

Evolving in Plain Sight

Planning out loud is an approach that can advance a museum’s planning in particular community contexts. When a museum or a new concept and what it offers isn’t familiar to a community, bringing transparency to the planning process can bring stakeholders along. Building confidence in the effort can be valuable when the memory of a failed museum is fresh in funders’ minds. Finally, it can make good use of the time when the economic climate slows fundraising, delays construction, and postpones opening the doors. 

Founded in 2005 by early childhood educators, the Children’s Museum of Southern Minnesota (CMSM) has been diligent about following the steps in starting and opening a children’s museum. Over the same time, the Museum has engaged children and families in hands-on activities at locations across the region including a temporary exhibit. These choices have built awareness and support around what a children’s museum can contribute to local children and families, and the greater community.

In 2007 a committed group of parents and professionals organized Tulsa Children’s Museum (TCM). Reflecting a strong commitment to align the Museum with community priorities, TCM conducted a community survey, a series of listening sessions with parents of young children, a resource scan, and interviews with community leaders to inform the role it would play in the Tulsa area. While learning from stakeholders across the community, TCM was also developing partnerships with other organizations to “borrow walls,” offer mobile and traveling exhibits, bring health and wellness programming to schools, and present a family concert series.

Solidifying foundational ideas and taking activities out into the community are typical early steps in opening a new museum. These museums, however, have started pursuing a different path in planning and operating test sites. They are converting what can be limitations into opportunities. Without permanent homes, they serve their audience in parks, schools, and  libraries. They know they have several years ahead of planning a building, developing and designing exhibits, growing staff, and recruiting volunteers. Yet, they want to be serving their audience now. They are eager to build awareness and a loyal following, grow internal capacity, and develop confidence, their own and funders’, in a sustainable future.

CMSM opened PlayLab in the first of two temporary, long-term spaces in 2010 to share the kind of experiences children and families would enjoy in a permanent home. PlayLab is a location, a state of mind, and an expression of their Learning Purpose: Make the joy and value of play, and its connections to learning and well-being, visible to children, parents, teachers, and the community. The name PlayLab also points to the Museum’s interest in learning how exhibits and experiences play with the Museum’s audiences, and how audiences play with exhibits.

Being “community led” has been a commitment of TCM, one expressed in multiple ways. Since mid-2011, the Museum has been taking steps to plan and open Discovery Lab, a temporary space in which to test topics, activities, themes, and exhibits with the community as its on-going focus group. An extensive site selection process has focused on finding a test site location that is familiar and accessible to families who are less likely to visit museums and that has attractive amenities for families likely to seek out museums.

Inviting stakeholders–partners, community members, families, school groups, service organizations, neighbors, and curiosity seekers–in on the thinking, planning, questioning, and testing says, this is our museum; if we test ideas together, we own them together.

Tapescape at PlayLab

PlayLab has been an invitation for community members to come, explore, play, and bring their ideas. CMSM has been committed to working with ideas and materials that community members contribute. A quilter fashioned a giant farm landscape; a mom wanted to start an art scraps store at the museum; and a board member and architect saw a photo of a tape structure and built TapeScape. Recently, the Museum added prototypes for its Sand, Stone, and Quarry Zone exhibit.

Prototyping sand play at PlayLab

Engaging a wide range of Tulsa area organizations as partners is central to TCM’s community-based strategy. In its first five years, the Museum worked with community arts organizations as well as the Library, Tulsa Historical Society, and Tulsa Public Schools to offer programs, events, and exhibits. In Discovery Lab, Museum partners will sometimes inspire, fabricate, or source activities and exhibits. They will lend expertise, help reach new audiences, co-host events, and very likely add something TCM can’t yet imagine.   

Planning a test site prompts discussions and decisions about what must be happening in the museum for children of different ages with family, school, and community groups in order for the museum to achieve its intended impacts. What are essential ingredients in the experiential mix to encourage this? Questions surface about which audience groups must be served fully because of their high presence; should toddlers have their own area or should there be tod-pods throughout; how much is enough to do; and how should technology be used. Mindful navigation of such questions is necessary to leave open, welcoming room for visitors to contribute, give feedback, and help make the decision.

Many of these discussions and choices were made by CMSM as it developed its Learning Experience Master Plan. As complete as such plans seem at the time, however, there are successive distinctions to make: how finished or “in-process” can exhibits be, what is CMSM’s definition of prototyping, which components must be prototyped; what are the prototyping questions; and what other information should the Museum gather.

In developing its Design Lab master plan, TCM is looking at operations, focus areas, visitor experience, community engagement, partners, and budget. For each area, it is asking: what it wants to test; how to test it; and why it is important. As each question gets answered, new questions surface: which of our partners can help here? what should our hours be? how do we develop our prototyping skills? what does success look like?

Planning out loud is a way of making the museum’s thinking, testing, and learning visible to itself and to its stakeholders. New staff is learning about meaningful questions to ask, ones to which they need answers in order to provide an activity that encourages cooperation, needs less facilitation, invites greater variations in play, relies less on text, or accommodates multiple players. Some answers will come from visitors. Staff are learning who and how to observe; what information to gather and how to summarize it; how to organize notes, quotes, photos, comment cards, and counts; when to problem solve together to revise or retire an activity. CMSM has been scheduled regular observations and is training its Play Workers as observers. It is sharing its process on FaceBook, sharing, for instance, the unanticipated challenges of dust from sand quarried locally. Blogging can also highlight progress, insights, and surprises internally and externally. When the explicit intention is to learn from and with visitors and partners, the feedback staff harvests and shares and how it adjusts the experience, becomes part of the work.

Leading and Following

Especially for a new museum, planning out loud qualifies as a leadership practice. A deliberate questioning, testing, revising approach that engages visitors distinguishes such extended test efforts from opening the museum doors prematurely or with untested assumptions. At every step of the way, the museum is setting precedence. It is encoding inquiry and collaboration with its partners and audience into its organizational DNA. It is prototyping processes and systems, building internal capacity, fashioning its internal culture, uncovering organizational structure, defining its brand, and growing a toehold in the community. Testing assumptions about attendance, hours, staffing, and pricing provide a reality check on the business model and operating budget.

Planning out loud is not necessarily easier than another planning approach and it has its own challenges. Funders can be skeptical. If this is such a good idea, why test it? Are we funding something twice? Striking a balance between an orderly and open planning process relies on a well thought out approach with clear planning coordinates, a willingness to be flexible, and a capacity to be nimble. At the same time, this visibility can produce an accountability that nips at the heels of planners; some days it feels invigorating and other days it feels like pressure.

By their nature, test sites are dynamic venues with experiences that are fresh, if unpredictable.

Regardless of the choices a museum might make, the exhibit experience mix and role of partners, will change constantly. Some experiences will succeed, while others will not. Some failures can be tweaked while others must be tossed and replaced. Unplanned contributions from partners or neighbors may also come through the door just in time to offer new possibilities and lessons.

Planning out loud is evaluation writ large, lived long, and with open arms.

Notes to the New Year

Notes on stickies, book margins, receipts, business cards, and even napkins suggested the idea for this blog. These notes keep track of ideas, people, websites, definitions, things to do, museums to visit, books to buy, and articles yet to read. Some are half-thoughts to complete. Others are resources for museum I work with. Culling through this year’s notes, are five that point to interesting possibilities for the coming year.

• A Conversation about Educational Leadership In Museums in the Journal of Museum Education; Vol. 34, No. 2.  Author Leslie Bedford calls Mark H. Moore’s ideas of public value “The Big Idea.” She highlights Mary Ellen Munley’s and Randi Roberts’ work to adapt his ideas to help museums shift from activities that benefit individuals to action that benefits communities. 
• Note: With this and Carol Scott’s work, public value becomes a workable framework for museums to push harder on making their contributions to their communities valued and recognized.
• Investing in Children Summit presented by Louisiana Children’s Museum and Tulane Institute of Infant and Early Childhood Mental Health, New Orleans, LA. The Summit focused on community-based projects in several US cities and Reggio Emilia (Italy). Each effort reflects its community. All are ambitious and complex, relying on extensive networks, robust relationships, varied perspectives, and aligned and shared resources related to children’s well-being and community vitality.  
• Note: The work in Reggio is both an inspiration and a challenge to US projects. Unfolding over 60 years, it has produced positive and enviable changes for Reggio and its children through an approach that views children as strong and competent; values childhood; appreciates complexity; and side-steps standards, school readiness and metrics.
• Learning from the Edges, Moving to the Middle a dynamic session at the Visitor Studies Association Conference. Three visitor studies panelists positioned at the edges of the room represented three contexts: performing arts, art museums, and nature‐based settings. A facilitated discussion among them explored parallels, intersections, and differences of audience and visitor studies in the demographics, motivation, experience, benefits (and more) of the three contexts.  
• Note: This innovative session format succeeded in making the relationship among ideas visible across context perspectives and space.
• Twin Cities Museum Collaborative. For two years museum colleagues have been exploring ways to strengthen mission-related services to new and existing audiences by working collaboratively. We hope to build on audience research and local audience data; explore the learning value of TC museums; and pilot strategies to increase and sustain the engagement of more diverse, including younger, audiences.  
• Note: Collaboration is a methodology and a structure and, ultimately, a shared perspective that evolves with time.
• The Participatory Museum by Nina Simon. Nina sets participation in the context of a museum’s mission and vision and find ways to encourage greater participation from any starting point an enthusiast or museum might start. The principles of participation and varied examples in both her book and Museum2.0 blog make the possibility of engaging the public feel exciting, right, and necessary.  
• Note: Exploring ideas and learning with others power the intellectual and creative work of museum educators, exhibit developers, designers, and evaluators. Participatory projects, programs, exhibits, and museums have great potential to bring this remarkable opportunity and its benefits to visitors.