Navigating Professional Reading in a Pandemic Moment

Origami by Peter Keller

Are you reading more and enjoying it less these days? Are you reading less and enjoying it more? For me, it could be one or the other depending on the day. Often, it is both. Consequently, I am selective with my reading which involves trying to figure out what that means.

On the one hand, given the tumultuous times we are going through, we can’t retreat and avoid facing the challenging realities surrounding the museum field and its future. On the other hand, we are trying to see into a future that can’t be seen. Nevertheless I navigate this territory by thinking how do we make sense out of where we are, think about how to move forward in a meaningful way and, at the same time, make room for what we don’t know might happen?  

 

Consequently, I scan the articles, blogs, on-line journals, and videos looking for ones by thinkers and writers interested in the big picture, bold questions, and new opportunities that will create movement and change—and hope. I've dubbed this intriguing terrain between planning and chance. And since what we are facing is so enormous, I think about it as three questions.

§  What do we understand about our current situation and the dynamic context of our community in the pandemic and post-pandemic world?

§   What matters long-term to our organization and community that must be valued, preserved, and protected?

§  What’s possible? What new opportunities do we want to be poised for?

 

These questions are intentionally big and roomy and demand courage to address them honestly. They insist on people from across a museum engaging, listening, thinking together, building on one another’s ideas, and assuming a shared good-faith interest in the museum’s future. While set out as if in sequence, these questions do not follow a linear, step-by-step sequence. Instead they are more like a large spiraling conversation that is carried out in the tentative tense, reflecting uncertainties, helpfully expressed as would, could, let’s, maybe, perhaps, what if?

 

Each question generates more questions that prompt thinking, listening, and reframing. They are enriched by varied perspectives within and beyond the museum. They connect to resources, create openings for more thinking, and support change.

   

#1 What do we understand?

This question is about developing a current, realistic picture of the museum, its strengths and challenges, the community it serves, and the context in which it operates. The challenge of addressing this question is to be honest and realistic, to be neither too granular nor too self-congratulatory. For developing a shared understanding, these sets of questions and relevant resources might be helpful.

 

§  What resources are we working with? Consider people, skills, knowledge, leadership organizational culture; visitors; relationships, community position, and reputation; public space—indoors and out— and facility management; and time–immediate and long term.

§  What new limitations are we facing with our resources, business model, staff, audience, safety?

§  How can we understand and view more of our resources as assets?

§  What possible trends could impact the museum: financial, health, employment, local educational?

§  What accomplishments do we have—areas where we have a solid, impressive track record—that we can build on and leverage?

§  What don’t we understand that we really need to? What additional information do we need; how and where will we get it?

§  What are we learning that we can share with others internally, with partners, across the community, and in the field?

 

Resources that might be relevant and interesting:

§  AAM’s Center for the Future of Museums by Elizabeth Merritt

§  Nonprofit Lifecycles: Stage-based Wisdom for Nonprofit Capacity by Susan Kenny Stevens

§  Managing in Times of Transition on Paul Orselli’s Museum FAQ YouTube interview with Christian Greer

§  Quantifying Our Museum’s Social Impact: How the Oakland Museum of California is using data science to measure impact by Johanna Jones

 

 

#2 What Matters?

This question calls us to think about what matters in the long-term to the organization and community that must be valued, preserved, and protected. In exploring this question, the challenge is to be clear about the museum’s enduring purpose and deep values without being limited by cherished beliefs. To develop a shared understanding around what matters, the museum can explore these sets of questions and relevant resources.

 

§  What is fundamental to who we are, based on our vision, mission, and values and audience?

§  What are our community’s assets, needs, and priorities that engage with our purpose?

§  How can we frame what we want to be as we move past the pandemic preserving what is essential? Is it, for example, to survive and re-open; rebound; be more human-centered; occupy a larger position on the local learning landscape; be part of the regional well-being infrastructure; or become a smaller, more nimble museum?

§  What high potential future do we want for our museum and community?

§  In what new ways can the museum matter, or matter more, to its visitors, partners, and community? What must we preserve for that to happen?

§  What might be a game changer for the museum, something that would affect what matters?

§  What are we learning that we can share with others internally, with partners, across the community, and the field?

 

Resources for thinking about what matters.

§  Templates for Change on Ann Ackerson’s Take 5

§  Where to Now, Museums? on Ed Rodley’s Thinking about Museums 

§  Running Museums as Businesses: An Interview with Gary Hoover on Paul Orselli’s ExhibiTricks blog 

§  Challenge Your Thinking, Change Your Museum on Museum Notes

 

 

#3 What’s Possible?

This question is about developing a shared understanding around the kind of new opportunities for which the museum wants to be poised. Preparation and the nature of chance itself drives the challenges for addressing this question. They involve expanding a view of what is possible without losing sight of what’s essential. The following sets of questions and relevant resources are intended to help in thinking together about possible futures for the museum.

 

§  Where might new or unexpected opportunities emerge? Given how we’ve framed what matters, what areas of possibility or opportunity have the greatest potential to move us forward?

§  How can we re-imagine the ways in which our assets–our track record, capacities, relationships–could link together and respond to these opportunities?  

§  Of the possibilities that energize individuals and the museum collectively, how can we build consent around those most promising to our future?

§  Thinking about these opportunities, what do they allow us to accomplish that we couldn’t otherwise accomplish that works towards a greater good?

§  Are they very likely, somewhat likely or very unlikely to occur? Are they temporary or long-term change? Who will be affected by the actions we take?  

§  What do we understand about these possibilities and what they require of us? How can we use available time to grow needed capacity and the conditions for success? How can we be alert, selective, and nimble in responding to unanticipated change and opportunities?

§  What are we learning that we can share with others internally, with partners, across the community, and in the field?

 

Resources to inspire thinking about possibilities include:

§  Our Story by Amanda Schochtet on Micro

§  Calling All Phoenixes on Nina Simon’s Medium

§  Creating a Better World Means Asking Better Questions by Hildy Gottlieb in Stanford Social Innovation Review

§  The Power of Being an Experiment on Creating the Future

Good luck on the road ahead!

Vision, Process, and Position for the Big Museum Project

Second in a series on Growing A Museum; originally posted June 2012

A changing American Swedish Institute reflects a changing Twin Cities

Once in a museum or science center’s life, if it is fortunate, it is able to reinvent, redefine, or renew itself on a major scale.  It may re-craft its mission, vision, and values. It may expand its current home or create a new home.

The impetus for such a major change may come from a strategic plan that points to growth. Evidence of a need for more space to serve a growing audience or to provide additional services and amenities may come from attendance data, stakeholder input, and industry benchmarks. Perhaps a long-awaited opportunity to be part of downtown redevelopment ripens. Funder interest may be more promising than usual. Typically a combination of these factors converges to set the stage for a museum’s next iteration and move it into its future. In these major projects, the thrust of cumulative choices may emphasize greater civic prominence, an impressive architectural presence, or deeper engagement with a changing community. A museum’s transformation may change the local cultural and civic landscape of its city or town.

Regardless of the factors that converge, the scale of the enterprise, or the gathering momentum, bumps are inevitable during the course of a large project. Some are simply due to the nature of a complex effort. Others result from external conditions that would have been difficult to anticipate, like the 2008 recession. Still others come from prematurely launching a project without the key pieces being in place.

Yes, it is important to do a market analysis, a fundraising feasibility study, identify campaign leadership, select an architect, and hire on exhibit planners. Conventional project planning and management, however, kick in later in the process than is often recognized. The earliest stages of a project are difficult to visualize, but they are truly formative. The early swirl of questions and possibilities can be hard to manage and consolidate; but they must be addressed. The desire for a set of concrete ideas of the future and actions for getting there can be very insistent.

Before firing up the board and staff and reinvesting in its future, however, an institution needs to step back, re-examine its past performance, its current status, and its core purpose. It needs to engage in repeated consultation and clarification prior to developing definite plans, concrete steps, and long-term commitments.

The outcome of this critical period of exploration is clarity around a vision that will guide and inspire the project; a process that will support and deliver on that vision; and the position the museum hopes to assume in its community and among its stakeholders.

                   

This sounds simpler than it is. Not only are board and staff eager to get going, but this stage of planning requires both patience and focused attention on institutional planning practices. Perhaps more challenging is how vision, process, and position entwine and interact; they can easily lean into, meld with, and be confused with one another. Yet they are decidedly separate and make distinctly different contributions to the endeavor. To confuse them can cause problems and require course corrections along the way. Clarity around vision, process, and position often distinguishes two equally ambitious projects from one another.

Vision Leads

Contrary to numerous examples, a project vision is not a list of superlatives: the best, the most, the premier, or world class. Big is not a vision, nor is having concepts for five galleries. Like a museum’s strategic vision, a project vision is a compelling response to community priorities and recognized needs based on what a museum does consistently well and is recognized for. In short, where it matters.

Creating a vision is a prelude to uncovering opportunities and developing future plans. A museum must look out at its community and connect those priorities and challenges with its own mission and assets. This phase explores questions such as: What are present and future challenges to the quality of life in our community? What are community priorities for the audience we hope to serve? How might we respond to these needs? In the past, what have we done especially well? What does the community see as our contributions and our assets? What is our current and likely future strategic context? What else is on the local cultural and learning landscape?

To explore these questions, a museum will engage a range of stakeholders  including members, donors, parents, voters, politicians, other organizations, educators, and business leaders to assure varied perspectives from across the community. Some people are able to imagine and articulate the existing and emerging community needs a museum might respond to. Others will share their interests and motivations for using services. Information and perspectives are gathered through interviews, focus groups, visitor panels, environmental scans, and readily available needs assessments.

Pushing hard on what will distinguish a museum and help it flourish is invaluable. By connecting the big, pulsing dots between itself and its community, a museum can make its vision for the project both more compelling and more responsive to needs. To draw others to the project and engage their support, a museum's vision must be roomy enough for others to find a home for their hopes and aspirations. Such a vision also integrates internal and external factors: the museum’s interests, capacity, and conditions and those of the community. As such, a vision is a durable guide for board and staff in planning, making decisions, assessing choices, and brokering priorities.

Process Supports

A major museum planning project is a matryoshka doll of processes, nesting at successive scales yet all in service to realizing the vision. The visioning process moves from gathering and distilling stakeholder perspectives and information; to finding synergies among priorities, interests, assets, and opportunities; to bundling significant threads in compelling ways; and finally to testing, refining, and adopting a vision. Not only is this where opportunities and innovation are to be found, but arriving at a vision through a broad, inclusive process removes a great deal of risk for a project. If well conducted, it ensures the plans that do emerge will be robust, appealing, and have community support to see them to fruition.

By defining the nature and magnitude of likely change–relocation, a new building, a strategic level change in audience, a focused role in workforce development–this initial process lays necessary groundwork for charting successive master planning steps. It must be completed before launching the parallel, intersecting master planning processes of exhibit-experience-program planning, architectural-facility planning, fundraising planning, business planning, etc.

These intertwining master planning processes help realize the vision by shaping the building, cultivating resources, building awareness, and operationalizing the vision. At the very heart of what a museum hopes to accomplish, however, and at the head of the queue for getting there, is planning the visitor and learning experiences in exhibits and programs. Without a well-developed, attractive image of the museum’s transformational change, what it will look and feel like for visitors, and what it will mean for the community, experience and exhibit planning are challenged to move forward in a meaningful way. A list of topics, hope for attracting a broader age range, and ideas about a "wow" experience is a limited alternative to a full and inspiring vision. Other decisions and processes build on how exhibits will fulfill the project vision and look to a clear and shared vision as well.

At any scale, a process choreographs steps that engage players and their expertise and perspectives. It allocates resources for accomplishing tasks in concrete ways that help move towards and realize the vision. A museum’s internal capacity in experience planning, operations, finance, development, and leadership is as critical to any process as multiple perspectives, coordination among steps, time, and accountability to assure the museum moves forward with the process.

Position Follows

A solid position in a community and among stakeholders is invaluable for a museum embarking on the multi-year process of major institutional growth and change. Position, how a museum is recognized, viewed, and valued in the lives and minds of its visitors, donors, and decision makers, reflects what it accomplishes for its community and itself.

A secure position builds on where a museum has consistently delivered value and been successful, rather than on what it finds attractive among its peers’ positions, locally or nationally. Sometimes a museum will over focus on how it wishes to be viewed on the local cultural, learning, and social landscape or with a particular stakeholder group without realistically considering its own history, actual capacity, or the current context. Claiming a position that involves going toe-to-toe with a local museum already well established in that spot is a costly and risky proposition. A museum wants to be confident its position is one it can actually and effectively assume over time.

Recognizing its value from the standpoint of others offers insights that can challenge a museum's view of itself. Questions about itself and potential position might ask: Is this position true to our deeper purpose? Is it validated with our distinct products, experiences, and expertise? Does it enable our growth? Does it bring something to the community that is missing and valued? Is it already occupied by another organization? A realistic assessment of a museum’s distinct contribution to its stakeholders and a track record it can point to with confidence (if not great pride) strengthens its position.  

For these and other reasons, a museum’s position benefits from a clear, strong vision grounded in hearing community voices about what they need and want that is not being provided and which aligns with a museum’s mission territory. At the same time, attention to position can strengthen a vision, a major project, and a museum over its lifetime. Focusing on position can sharpen a project’s vision by considering it from both internal and external perspectives. It can help coordinate a complex project by pointing to a common aim expressed across multiple dimensions of this remarkable opportunity. Finally, it can set a museum up to increase capacity, invest resources, and build a track record that will continue when the project ends and the next phase begins.

Working Together

Regardless of how a museum goes about its early stage of a major project, its vision, process, and position have to work together. Vision should lead, process should support, and position should follow. Allowing these to get out of balance or confused one with another can slow down planning, use resources, and erode morale and credibility.

Launching a process without a solid project vision is setting off on a voyage where little is known about the purpose of the journey or its destination. With the enthusiasm that characterizes most beginnings, a museum will gather expertise, form teams and committees, make-up timelines, and start activities. Before long, however, teams will be revisiting the same questions and encountering obstacles that require inspiration and direction from a vision to resolve them. Multiple starts, lost time, and frustration characterize a process leading the way and untethered to a vision.

When position assumes too great a priority, especially too early in planning, a museum tends to focus on what’s new, now, and wow rather than on its mission, strategic interests, and strengths. For instance, a museum might claim an attractive niche without understanding it well or without the track record, reputation, or related capabilities required to occupy it fully. Without a clear vision for guidance, a museum, in fact, assumes an image or a posture rather than a meaningful position grounded in actual relationships and accomplishments.

Pressure from many sources to get the project going nearly assures that a museum will not focus too much on vision or for too long. Occasionally, however, a museum does become enamored with crafting a vision for its project. Lingering around the vision can keep a project on too lofty or aspirational a plane, allowing the vision to become too grand, precious, or simply unrealistic in scale.

Reinventing, redefining, or renewing itself on a major scale is a huge opportunity for both a museum and its community; it is a reinvestment in their futures. The early stages of exploration set the stage for great possibilities. It is the time to shape a compelling vision that can guide and inspire a process for realizing that vision and can help the museum assume the position to which it aspires.

Rewind: Strategic, Not Strategic

I’ve been thinking about this 2012 post recently. Our work in museums and for our communities is challenging, even if very rewarding. Challenges are plentiful enough without also slowing our thinking, confusing others, and excluding others with fuzzy meanings for words we use. What do we mean by the words and phrases we use frequently in our work? Strategic is one of those words used often, casually, and ineptly. Because museums need strategic thinking across the organization, this can be a problem. Distinguishing between what’s strategic and what’s not strategic is invaluable at  ever level of the organization, among trustees and staff, in marketing and finance, in development and visitor experiences.

Wind

No Wind

Long ago a simple children’s television cartoon illustrating the basic concept of wind caught my attention and has stayed with me. First came a simple drawing of a child whose hair stood straight up when squiggly lines vibrated along with a whoosh sound; a voice from nowhere said, “wind.” Next a frame showed the same child with neat, tidy hair. No squiggly lines vibrated. There was no whoosh; the voice said, “no wind.” Several "wind", "no wind" repetitions followed. This clear, simple demonstration of a concept and its opposite appealed me. I vowed to find ways to use it to illustrate challenging concepts.

Applying this simple method has been helpful to me and to museum staff and boards I work with to contrast strategic and non-strategic. In museums and during planning work, strategic, and its parent word, strategy, are often tossed about freely and in exceedingly casual ways. Considering how frequently the words are used, it's surprising how little they are clarified for the context they are used. Strategy is used in military as well as business, academic, education, healthcare, and non-profit context. It is used to mean plan, positioning, ploy, pattern, and perspective.

Should you be in a planning session, an interview, or budget discussion, don’t pick a possible definition of strategic and cross your fingers that others share it. A situation that occurred repeatedly in one museum suggests why not. An executive director would tell her senior managers to “be strategic” in developing a platform or an initiative. Several weeks later when they presented their work, she felt they hadn’t really been strategic and she repossessed the assignments. I’ve wondered what she thought strategic meant and what her managers thought it meant given that dynamic.

It’s not easy to define these words. Recent checks–on-line, in planning books and journals, and in my notes and files–re-confirm this. A few paltry definitions exist like, “…of or relating to strategy.” There’s an abundance of military definitions and references to strategy. Strategic describes innumerable efforts such as strategic planning, thinking, awareness, management, and communications. 

Not surprisingly, these words feel big, impressive, and intimidating. Being strategic is frequently confused with an interest in big ideas, being bold or intellectual. The overlap is not automatic. Equally often, being strategic is buzz. The result often is staff pursuing small, unconnected actions or boards captivated by big fuzzy ideas. 

A Working Definition for Strategic

After gathering, sifting, and distilling definitions of strategic, here’s my working definition for strategic in a museum context. It’s not a big, fancy, conceptual idea, and that’s the point. Strategic is:

An integrated perspective that ties explicitly to a larger intended effect.

• Integrated means spanning the museum’s functional (or departmental) areas and serving both internal (organizational) and external (community) interests and factors. This is a systems perspective on the organization as a whole and its interconnecting parts. What goes on outside the museum–the community’s vitality, other culturals, even the weather–impacts the museum.

                • A larger, intended effect might mean advancing the mission, vision, sustainability, or achieving a competitive position. It involves stepping back and viewing things from a broader vantage point. Concern is more with the gap between today’s reality and intent for the future than with today’s reality.

Several implications follow from this working definition. First, a strategic perspective differs from an operational, or tactical, perspective. Focusing on things running more smoothly or efficiently, operational concerns might involve extending a best practice, integrating software systems, or updated safety training for staff. Being strategic is not better than being operational; but it is better to know the difference, use each as appropriate, and coordinate them.

Second, being strategic is an ongoing perspective applied to everyday decisions. It is not just confined to a strategic planning process every five years. Knowing the overarching reasons for what a museum is trying to accomplish is necessary and front-and-center. There’s no reason a working definition of strategic shouldn’t be developed and shared plainly, broadly and frequently within a museum. Critical to where every museum is headed, strategic is integral to discussions and decisions about everything from shaping goals, developing budgets, setting targets, allocating staffing, deciding on outsourcing, working with partners, and cultivating funders.

Finally, a perspective that encompasses a broader, longer view and takes into account the interaction of forces is more likely to create substantial change every museum is interested in. That, rather than small, incremental progress, is the value of being strategic.

Strategic, Not Strategic

Applying the wind, no wind method, here are some examples that may be familiar in museums. While some are strategic and others are not strategic, there are also situations when something leans into being strategic just as there can be some wind, but not much.

•  Interested in increasing attendance? Many museums are. A typical goal is to get more visitors to the museum. Alone, that is not strategic. Focusing on getting more of the right visitors to the museum is strategic. Who the right visitors are relates to the museum’s larger interests, its mission, and its community. Increase the number of visitors in a target audience group, underserved members of the community, family groups, or a mix of visitors who can pay full price and those who can’t also helps the museum reach other goals. Getting more of the right visitors relies on marketing, education, exhibits, and visitor services all working together.

• Even when budget trimming is essential, cutting the budget 10% across the board is not strategic. It may seem bold and carry the aura of being more strategic than it is. Slicing 10% everywhere makes no distinction about where services affect visitors most, where resources are accomplishing more (or less), in what areas the museum is over-extended or off-mission, where risk accompanies cuts, or where cuts hobble efforts to grow income. Finding cuts amounting to 10% of the budget is strategic when they factor these considerations and serve the highest priority, the long-term health of the organization.

•  Expanding the museum’s physical footprint is not strategic. It might just be a case of building envy or ambition. Creating a larger community footprint, however, is strategic. A bigger building may be necessary to accommodate a museum’s increased and established community leadership role; a new function like a science preschool; or increasing access to parts of its collection relevant to the community’s past.

•  A digital dashboard of indicators looks cool. If it’s an exercise in counting attendance and membership, it's not strategic. On the other hand, it is strategic if the metrics are counting what counts. Meaningful metrics track a museum’s performance across key areas; they are monitored, shared, factored into decisions, and inform new goals that make progress towards larger goals such as sustainability, community engagement, or being a recognized and valued resource.

•  Reorganizing staff happens often and in small ways. Adding an assistant position to development, increasing hours in guest services, or combining marketing and public relations can be efficient, enhance communication, or serve visitors better; this is not strategic. Restructuring staff based on results of a MAP (Museum Assessment Program) report or to implement a strategic plan is moving towards strategic. Realigning staff to act on the museum’s mission of life-long learning to provide a continuum of experiences across the life span is strategic.

•  Prototyping is a best practice; building capacity to prototype in-house to test and redesign exhibit components leans into being strategic. Connecting prototyping to a long-term museum or learning interest becomes strategic. When an in-house prototyping team develops expertise in extending visitor engagement, actively involving parents, or increasing conversation in family groups, documents it, and recycles it into exhibit development and design–now that’s strategic.

• Strategic is not always big. Small experiments can be strategic. Interest in better serving or growing the upper end of the age range in a children’s museum can, for instance, be explored in a series of steps as a strategic experiment. Such work might: observe exhibit areas where this age group already has a greater presence and spends more time; interview them about what they like about the activity or area and why; develop and add similar layers in other areas of the museum; observe for changes in the presence of this age group in those areas. Repeat for another area of the museum. Monitor for changes in the presence of this age group in the museum. 

A Change In the Weather

Wind, no wind. Strategic, not strategic. These simple pairs shift the possibility of seeing in new ways: seeing the organization in a long view; noticing the interconnections between parts; and following how individual actions feed into a larger system or story. While nothing, in fact, really changes, looking at things differently, looking at them strategically, leads to making different choices. Making different choices, strategic choices, creates long-term change. Now that’s strategic.