Harnessing Vision, Data, and Collective Action

Paper Cave; Kotaro Horiuchi Arkitektur

Several ideas I have explored over the past few years on Museum Notes have come together recently in a clearer, more helpful way. Reading Nina’ Simon’s blog post on local data and picking up on Marsha Semmel’s reference to collective impact in a recent conversation connected Revisioning Vision Statements, Vision With a View to Impact, and Collective Impact, casting new light on the relationship among them and their value to museums. As she always does, my strategic planning partner, Andrea Fox Jensen, brought additional clarity and a few valuable pieces to the relationships between these parts.

Individually, each of these topics is concerned with museums helping to build stronger communities. All–vision, data, and collective action–are capable of engaging more fully with one another in a coordinated approach to community-level change. Guided by a common vision of a community, its challenges and opportunities and supported by shared information, the collaborative efforts of a museum and its important partners hold the promise of long-term, broad-based impact.

Vision
Many museum visions focus in on the museum. They list how it hopes to be perceived by its partners and stakeholders: high quality, a premier resource, a place of choice, etc. Museum visions can also project out to the community to embrace a deeper and more expansive purpose. They can express the positive change a museum believes is possible for its community that it can help accomplish with partners and stakeholders.

Where the community’s challenges and opportunities intersect with a museum’s long-term interests and strengths, is a museum’s niche in making a difference related to conservation, health and well-being, strong families, the achievement gap, or workforce development. A museum’s mission expresses what and how it intends to contribute to this change. Similarly other organizations build on what they already do well that the challenge needs. The collective intentions of these organizations begin to describe a common agenda and a set of priorities.

The externally oriented vision is a catalyst for moving from intention to impact, from isolated initiatives to coordinated action. By engaging local stakeholders and considering their perspectives in framing its vision, the museum finds partners with shared interests and related initiatives in priority areas. In getting to know each other, partners begin to identify valuable organizational assets such as relevant expertise, lessons from previous collaborations, infrastructure, and related organizational data. At this initial stage, a shared platform takes shape, one that supports collective conversations on an on-going basis, brings partners together before acting, and encourages shared development of questions and information, and joint ownership.

Data, Local and Shared
To move the needle on community-level change, a museum and its partners need more than multiple organizations with a shared agenda delivering relevant programs where they have current capabilities. While helpful, partners also need a common understanding of the challenge and what they hope to accomplish; where they are starting and what progress looks like. This requires information–data–about the children, youth, families, or neighborhoods they serve; the quality of life measures at present levels; and supporting indicators capable of indicating progress.

But what information is needed and were does it come from? Information should describe relevant aspects of improved lives for targeted individuals and groups. Long-term outcomes typically relate to a more vibrant community in areas of health, safety, education, civic engagement, social capital, or the environment. Indicators tracking outcomes may relate to youth believing they can achieve their goals; lower obesity rates; increased levels of civic engagement; greater access to learning technology; involvement in meaningful community activities with opportunities to contribute.

Data sources include readily available information from other entities as well as data generated by partners. In her blog post, Learn to Love Your Local Data, Nina Simon points out that often the data partners need already exists. Baseline information may be available from community assessments, the local United Way, or area foundations. It is local, shared and manageable for smaller organizations. Community-wide sources of data are place-based with a high degree of relevance. Furthermore, since this information is already shared, it reinforces the common purpose of the efforts and sets the tone for joint ownership of information.

A more ambitious approach is working collaboratively to collect data with partners. This is the approach the StriveTogether Network uses. And, although organized for evaluation and research, groups like the Denver Evaluation Network do have the capacity to collect local data for museum partners or local partnerships. 

Collective Action
Complex social problems are a function of a wide range of factors interacting over time. Collaborative efforts that create and sustain positive change at a meaningful scale require organization to coordinate and align efforts. The supportive organization can take varied forms, ranging in structure, size, and level of infrastructure.

Since 2000, Harlem Children’s Zone (HCZ) has taken a comprehensive, holistic, and place-based approach to supporting the Harlem community, starting with babies. With its clear vision, pipeline of programs, evidence-based decision-making, and robust infrastructure, it has made it a model for other transformative partnerships. Many communities and museums are familiar with the HCZ-inspired federally funded Promise Neighborhoods with cradle-to-career programs.

The Strive Partnership launched in 2006 developed a shared agenda to improve student achievement in the Greater Cincinnati area. Its approach, often referred to as Collective Impact, follows 5 principles that together build alignment and lead to significant change: a common agenda, shared measurement systems, mutually reinforcing activities, continuous communication, and backbone organizations. 

When 40 organizations in Norwalk (CT) came together in 2005 to form Norwalk ACTS, the focus was on 6 cradle-to-career outcomes, from kindergarten readiness to post-high school guided by volunteer management. Now a group of over 100 organizations, Norwalk ACTS uses the Strive model. One of the original members,  

Stepping Stones Museum for Children serves as the anchor organization.

All efforts aren’t as formal and structured as HCZ, Strive, or Promise Neighborhoods. Lower maintenance structures typical of many museum partnerships use similar principles: an articulated joint vision, shared data, identified outcomes and impacts, and collective action. Over the past 3 years, the Children’s Museum of Tacoma and its community partners have been collaborating to build a child-centered community, supported by a volunteer structure similar to the one initially supporting Norwalk ACTS.

These and other efforts are gaining the attention of museum associations. IMLS will be analyzing current projects to support comprehensive community revitalization. Through a partnership with Local Initiative Support Corporation, IMLS will look at best practices and strategies to better understand how museums and libraries are engaged in sustained commitments to community-level change. For those attending InterActivity 2016, Collective Impact will be the theme of the Association of Children’s Museums annual conference hosted by Stepping Stones Museum for Children. Geoffrey Canada, President of Harlem Children’s Zone, will receive the Great Friend to Kids Award.

Related Museum Notes Posts

Revisioning Vision

Collective Impact
Vision with a View to Impact
Public Value: From Good Intentions to Good Work 

Better Versions of Our Ideas

"Ephemeral Rays" by Charlotte Smith

I have several cherished theories, none of which is based on any shred of evidence. One is that most of us want better versions of the ideas we already have. True, we like what we have come up with, but want an improvement over it. This might pertain to a concept for an exhibition, the title of an article, a vision statement, an idea for a museum initiative, or the theme for a party. We do like our idea and we don’t want to give it up. We just wish it were more, more…provocative, current, simpler, deeper, or perhaps edgier.   

Not surprisingly, I’m ever-so-pleased when I find something I like to think about, write on, or do, that is accomplished in a way I wish I could manage. In the last several days, I have fortuitously come across links to three interesting websites and blogs that illustrate my cherished Better Version theory. While located in my silo and what I write about on Museum Notes, these writings do so with spark and spunk. Of interest to me, it is also a pleasure to share them with others interested in stretching their thinking and deepening their insights.

But will you be here?  An argument for tours that encourage life-long museum going by Jackie Delamatre on Rebecca Herz’s Museum Questions

Rebecca Herz has been hosting a series of guest posts on museums and schools; all have been very good. In this one, her guest Jackie Delamatre challenges some basic assumptions about school tours in museums. Now an educator at the RISD Museum (Providence), her provocative questions are based on observations of students in tours she has lead at the Guggenheim Museum, Whitney Museum and Museum of Modern Art. I think Jackie is able to highlight where museums limit themselves in imagining what tours (and other programs) might be by replicating the teacher-directed approach of classrooms in informal learning institutions; placing curricular connections high on the list of goals for school visits; and structuring space and lessons that answer questions we hope students also have. What if, Jackie wonders, the primary goal of a museum visit were to foster an understanding of, appreciation for, and techniques for being future visitors in a museum? This question opens inviting new territory for museum educators to explore ways in which learners might direct their own learning, explore what interests and motivates them, and allows them to explore their thinking and ideas. 

Related Museum Notes Posts

• The Dance of Informal and Formal Learning

• Completing the Experience

 

The Happy Museum

How can an idea like a Gross National Happiness Index (GNHI) not get one’s attention? I came across that and a link to the Happy Museum project in this week’s Center for the Future of Museums' blog post, Lost Pleasures. The Happy Museum Project (HMP) in the UK is concerned with enlarging the idea of community–in time, space, and participants–well beyond what museum aspirations and planning typically embrace. With a determination we seldom see among museums, HMP pursues a museum’s role as a steward of people, place and community. An appetite for roomy ideas connects well-being and environmental sustainability. Well-being is supported by the restorative benefits of museum visits, resilience, and community and museum synergies that include resources like outdoor space. Reimagining museums’ role in increasing community vitality involves civic engagement with a mutuality among museums, visitors, and citizens. HMP clearly favors a museum’s measuring (and doing) what matters over easy-to-quantify financial and resource measures. Its experimental mindset (it describes its efforts as “a creative enquiry”) is also expressed in commissioning projects and conducting action research. More expansive than what most museums are likely to consider, HMP is a friendly provocation to museums to stretch their vision, challenge their assumptions, and activate their community relationships.  

Related Museum Notes Posts

• Public Value: from Good Intentions to Public Good

• Revisioning Visions Statements

 

Department of Play

A Boston-based collective, Department of Play’s mission is to bring a spirit of empathy and wonder to public life through immersive, irresistible, and aesthetically appealing collective experiences in public space. In staging temporary play zones at familiar and unmemorable locations across Boston, Department of Play is not just for or about children. It does use play as a collaborative endeavor capable of shaping and transforming public space, increasing social exchange, and impacting quality of life. Department of Play seems to be the kind of partner museums can work with and learn from as they envision the positive change possible for their community and engage members of the community in realizing it. This is also an organization that serves a wide audience, has a strong sense of what it is about, and expresses it playfully in small (hello[at]deptofplay[dot]com) and large ways; activities are designed with research in mind.

Related Museum Notes Posts

• Play Spotting

• The Play Outfitter

Strategic Planning Notes

Recently I responded to a query on ChildMus about strategic planning and suggested a link or two from past Museum Notes posts. Scrolling through the list of posts a dozen seemed relevant and I forwarded them. A few days later I thought this same set of posts might also be helpful to other museums setting out on strategic planning. Below are those posts, grouped into typical strategic planning steps.

Preparation: Preplanning gives a solid boost to the process; it helps right-size the scope, gets the necessary players in place, and removes some of the bumps that are inevitable in planning. Start with:

• Planning to Plan

Community Context All planning takes place in a larger context. In strategic planning, awareness of the community context is critical for understanding relevant environmental forces, how the museum might respond, and the role it might play in the community.

• Unpacking Nice + Necessary

• Public Value

Vision Statements: My approach to vision statements is decidedly externally oriented rather than internally oriented. The promise of this approach just keeps getting stronger as I see how it works with more museums, including ones of differing sizes and at various stages of development.

• Revisioning Vision Statements

• Vision and Impact

Mission and Values: Museums are guided by a shared sense of a deeper purpose that is made explicit in mission statements and expressed in the beliefs that guide behavior and work of the organization. If a museum is able to capture its distinctive value in its mission, other parts of strategic planning–and its work–will be easier.

• Mission Check 

• Missions That Matter

• Values as Commitments

Stakeholders: Internal and external stakeholders are the people likely to affect or be affected by the museum, its plans, and projects. Audience is a key stakeholder groups, central to a museum’s aspirations and its reason for being.  A sound and shared understanding of stakeholders and audience will assist stratgeic planning.

• Stakeholder Mapping

• Audience, an Area of Enduring Focus

For Good Measure: At its best, strategic planning invites solid strategic thinking. But not everything that seems to be strategic actually is and not every strategic planning tool supports strategic thinking. Become familiar with the various meanings of strategic that your team might be bringing to the process and look critically at how to get better thinking out of a familiar planning exercise.

• Strategic, Not Strategic

• The Trouble With SWOTs 

                                       

Vision, Process, and Position for the Big Museum Project

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 is often what 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.

Mission Check

Sometimes a museum needs a new mission statement and sometime it doesn’t. Often, it’s hard to tell whether a mission is out-dated and inadequate or it needs to be clearer, more aligned, or expressed in a more compelling way. How does a museum tell whether it needs a new mission statement or a better mission statement? Try a mission check.

A mission check is something I do with museums as part of a planning audit or developing a planning framework. I draw from a set of exercises I use early in a strategic planning process to review, revise, and align the museum’s driving principles. These are the vision, mission, and values that together give meaningful direction about where a museum is headed and how it will act. Missions are what most people are most familiar with, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that mission statements are as robust as they might be. Common ills of a mission statement are being generic, missing an important component like the audience, or being excessively long.

Basic Mission Parts

A clear statement of the reason a museum exists, a mission statement answers four questions: What does it contribute? who does it serve? how does it deliver? and why is this important? Looking at whether and how your mission statement answers these questions is a good place to start a mission check.

Below are four mission statements. In the left-hand columns are the missions of a small art museum, a science center, a cultural and natural science museum, and a children’s museum. The right-hand column is my sort of the mission statement according to what, for whom, how, and why.

The Art Museum brings art and people together for enjoyment, discovery, and learning. We strive to create a place where people of every background can be touched by art. We are committed to exhibitions and programs that will strengthen and sustain our community.

What: Bring art and people together for enjoyment, discovery, and learning; (and) touch people with art For Whom: People of every background How: Create a place; exhibitions and programs Why: Strengthen and sustain our community

To create a culture of learning through innovative environments, programs, and tools that help people nurture their curiosity about the world around them.

What: Create a culture of learning; (and) nurture curiosity about the world around them For Whom: People How: Innovative environments, programs, and tools Why:

The Museum sets the stage for lifelong learning in South Texas. Through innovative programs in history, science, and culture, strengthened by collections and facilities, the Museum enriches lives, promotes a quality life for all South Texas people and generates a legacy of knowledge.

What: Sets the stage for lifelong learning in South Texas; enriches lives, promotes a quality life and generates a legacy of knowledge For Whom: All South Texas people How: Innovative programs in history, science, and culture, strengthened by collections and facilities Why:

The Children’s Museum is an essential learning resource that engages the young children of the (City) community in play and active exploration together with their parents and other adults to expand their capacity to learn.

What: An essential learning resource For Whom: Young children of the (name) community How: Engage in play and active exploration together with their parents and other adults Why: Expand their capacity to learn

Sort your museum’s mission statement and talk about the following.

• How well does your mission statement cover these key areas? Typically, it’s easier to recognize some parts than others. For instance, distinctions between what and how can blur; a solid explanation for why  is rare.
• How clearly does your mission statement express what it contributes? This part often deals with what a museum does such as, collect, preserve, and educate. The children’s museum mission, “An essential learning resource,” describes what the museum is. The other missions express what the museum does, or is a two-part what: “Create a culture of learning” as well as “nurture curiosity about the world around them”.
• How meaningful is the description of who your serve? Several references to the audience in the examples are generic, “people”, and “people of every background”. “Young children in (a particular) community” is more precise.
• How clear and distinctive is how your museum delivers its mission? Often this is a list subject matter areas and/or a list of exhibitions, programs, and collections. While important, these lists do little to distinguish one museum’s purpose from that of another museum.
• What does your mission express about why your museum is important? This is the hardest of the four questions. Why is often implied or buried in how. The art museum makes the connection between “touching people with art” and “strengthening and sustaining our community.”

Through this exercise, you might identify a missing or weak piece in your mission statement and a way to correct it: perhaps a clearer reference to who you want to serve, a more engaging expression of how you will deliver your mission, or a deeper version of why this is important. You might focus on how the parts could work together more forcefully or be expressed more clearly. The art museum, for instance, might explore what happens when “creating a place where people are touched by art” is how it delivers. The science center could be more explicit about why “nurturing curiosity about the world around them” matters.

Pushing and Probing

The answers to these four questions–what, who, how, and why–can seem obvious. That’s not entirely surprising since the mission has attracted people to work on its behalf; the mission is also what a museum tries to do every day. But an obvious and single answer is not enough; it needs pushing and probing to expose what’s behind it.

Strategic planner Andrea Fox Jensen will often follow up a very straightforward statement with, “This is important because….” Drilling deeper into an assertion invests beliefs and easy statements with well-earned meaning. It distinguishes between feel good intentions and efforts capable of making a difference.

This is a challenging practice, but exactly what’s needed to probe unspoken and sometimes untested assumptions and beliefs. The practice reveals where a mission is shallow; can shake loose less obvious relationships among what, who, how and why; and is likely to suggest ways to strengthen the mission. One example of the succession of statements moves form a basic statement of audience to imply why a museum matters.

• We serve all children eight and under and their families in the greater (city) area.
• This is important because… All children in this age range, regardless of background, benefit from varied    cognitive, physical, social, and emotional experiences.
• This is important because… Early experiences impact later development including success in school and in jobs.
• This is important because… Children with limited experiences can benefit from varied and targeted play and learning experiences across settings, at school, home, and at the museum.

Uncovering what is worthwhile behind the initial answers sometimes requires saying what’s obvious or feels corny, like “to make a better life…” Push ahead anyway. Continue to unpack why the museum is important until you know what you do, for whom, how you do it, and why it matters. This process allows a museum to fully inhabit its mission.

What Are We Saying?

“Wordsmithing” can be an expression of frustration when mission statement work is lagging. Focusing too soon on prepositions and parallel constructions can curtail exploration of what a “culture of learning” is or what “building community” looks like. But words do matter. Try writing a mission statement without them. Clogging up a mission statement with jargon, clichés, and lackluster words puts a drag on a mission statement’s potential to express what you care about in a way that others will also care about. Revisiting the language of a mission statement strikes somewhere between the mechanics of a sentence and the power of words to make people care.

Working in a small group, revisit the words in your mission statement and look hard at what they are saying. This exercise highlights qualities in the text that relate to and reinforce a mission’s function. Use highlighter pens or colored dots to designate these qualities.

• Highlight words that express your relevance to your community. 

• Highlight the 2-3 words that distinguish your museum from other museums.

• Highlight the words that represent the museum’s greatest opportunity for impact or touching many lives.

• Highlight a few key words that give crucial guidance in making strategic choices.

If one quality isn’t present, go on to the next. You can also vary this exercise by adding or substituting other qualities. Tally the group’s response for each quality. While this is not intended as a vote on wording, there’s information here. How do the highlights cluster? What words or phrases resonate strongly? Which qualities align most strongly with one another? Have other words or phrases that feel fresh or are more precise surfaced during discussions? Might they do more work than words like multidimensional, essential, innovative, or interactive?

From Mission Check to Next Steps 

A mission check helps answer the broader question, “do we need a new mission statement?” Fielding one or more of these exercises might assure your museum that your current mission statement defines the museum’s deeper purpose and functions well in guiding the museum. Some times, results of these exercises will indicate areas of the mission that need strengthening. Perhaps specify who the museums serves; pull in a sharpened understanding of why the museum matters. Toss out tired words and import some compelling language. Give a chiropractic yank to forcefully engage the four parts with one another to convey what you care about that others will care about.

 

A mission check also helps a leader or leadership group manage the moans and groans of “What? Redoing the mission again?” (At least temporarily.) If the mission check indicates a new mission is truly needed, you have made a case for investing valuable time and energy. Some of the groundwork has been laid and, likely, pointed to a starting point somewhat further along. If you are considering a full overhaul of your mission, take a look at Missions That Matter. In any case, give the time and effort to your mission it, your museum, and community deserves.

Vision With A View to Impact

Recently I was asked to review a museum’s planning work as part of their preparation for a major organizational transformation. The basics were in order for a small, young organization. They have a basic set of driving principles, a vision, mission, and values and a good understanding of their audience. They also have articulated some sound learning ideas and strategies that relate to being a strong and useful partner to area schools.

Of the pieces they have, however, the weakest is their vision. A set of cheerful strings of superlatives, the vision could describe the dream of any museum from Anchorage to Miami. This piece, I noted, was exactly the piece they most need to be ready for the journey ahead: to be a relevant and robust museum firmly aligned with their community and its priorities. How else will they be confident of attracting support? How will they be assured that what they plan to bring to the community is relevant and valued? How else can they choose among very attractive, and certainly, competing alternatives? How else will they know whether their use of resources has served them and their community well? How else will they be confident about their long-term organizational health?

A less-than-adequate vision statement is not unusual among museums, but this can place a museum at a serious disadvantage. Even if a museum is not about to change its physical footprint in size or location, it does need to pay attention to its community footprint.

A museum at any stage of development undergoing a major organizational change needs a deliberately developed expression of the deeper purpose it fulfills for its community, a vision. For that matter, a museum navigating tough economic times or intent on being a recognized and valued community asset–in short any museum–needs such a vision.

Last year I wrote about externally focused vision statements that my wise and knowing strategic planning partner, Andrea Fox Jensen, had introduced to me. In contrast to the familiar vision statement placing a museum at the center, this kind of vision projects a museum’s vision out to its community. Looking outward, the vision focuses on the positive change a museum hopes and believes is possible for the community it serves. Its vision of change engages with a specific aspect of a better future that matches the museum’s own long-term interests. Perhaps it is a more vibrant community, increased social cohesion, greater civic engagement, or improved quality of life.

Readers thirsty for harder-working vision statements have found their way to Re-visioning Vision Statements in large numbers. Good vision statements, (even just examples) are hard to come by; externally focused ones require an even longer search. Gradually, though, I do notice more vision statements looking outside the walls of the museum, past everyday activities, and beyond a reputation among peers. One I recently came across  from The New Children’s Museum (San Diego, CA) envisions a community with a vibrant artistic and cultural life in which all children and families share the joy of being active participants.

Assuming an outward perspective opens up many possibilities. One is a more obvious connection between the positive change a museum hopes and believes is possible for the community it serves–its vision, and what it intends to do to contribute to that change–its impact. This connection is closer than it might at first appear. In her blog, Leading By Design, non-profit governance and leadership consultant, Anne Ackerson, posed the question, “Should Vision Statements Be Impact Statements?” She also asks, Without long-term external impact, what's really the point of your nonprofit?

Changing perspectives places familiar elements in a new light. The shift can challenge cherished assumptions and initiate changes that, if not fundamental, are major. As a museum broadens its view to encompass its community, it will also see itself and the community in a fresh light and find new ways to relate to and be integrated with the community. Placing itself on the local learning, cultural, and social landscape will spotlight strengths, suggest new relationships, surface opportunities, and point to areas of change. 

Three basic features involved in connecting vision with impact work solidly together: know your community, connect assets, and describe the change.

•            Know your community––People, priorities, players. A solid understanding of a community may come from many sources, but it must include the voices and perspectives outside the museum walls, from leaders, citizens, thinkers, critics, and friends. Listening to and learning from the community and from studies and reports identifies community priorities, challenges facing residents now and the vitality of the community  in the future. In imagining the community if these challenges were resolved, the museum begins to envision a future for the community that is bold and positive but, with stretching, is possible. Where these challenges intersect with a museum’s long-term interests and its strengths are areas in which a museum can have a role in making a difference.

•               Connect assets––the community’s with the museum’s. Framing a museum’s impact relies on connecting and building on strengths, tangible and intangible, its own with the community’s. A community’s assets might be stories of pulling together during a flood, a sense of pride as a regional hub, strong neighborhood centers, or a history of welcoming new immigrants. A museum’s assets might be its site or location; trusted after school programs in neighborhoods; expertise in evaluation; or being an easy partner with long-term alliances. Areas in which strengths engage firmly and productively with community challenges and priorities are areas a museum can be active in focusing on change.

•         Describe the change–both short and long-term. A vision of the positive change the museum believes is possible for its community comes into focus; the museum assesses its own capacities for contributing to this change; and the museum begins to picture what the changes look like near and long term. What will be different for this audience group, for this neighborhood; how will the readiness gap help shrink the achievement gap; how will new arrivals be less isolated or seniors more engaged? how will the museum change in 5 years? In 10 years? In pursuing such questions deliberately, a museum defines outcomes, gathers information, and adapts its programs and services to better serve its audience, community and itself.

Hard Work Ahead

Developing an externally oriented vision statement aligned with community priorities and focusing on intended impacts takes time, diligence, smart resources, and collective effort. This is especially true with the initial shift to a view to the community and its priorities. The extra work required to shape such a vision, however, is worth it. Fresh insights, new relationships, and efforts and resources focused where they matter most is just too important to leave to good intentions.