Community Goals: A Better Path to Expanding the Purpose of Museums
Museums have purposes. People have goals.
I’m making an artificial distinction between two words — purposes and goals — in this article. I’ve found that folks often conflate a museum’s purposes/goals with community purposes/goals. They’re often not the same. I hope assigning different meanings will provide clarity.
A purpose refers to a museum’s mission, proximate objective, or just a short-term aim (e.g., “collect 50 more addresses at the event this weekend than the one we held last month”). Purposes can refer to things the museum is trying to make progress toward, or they can describe conditions the organization is trying to maintain or nurture.
A goal is a person’s intent or objective. Like a purpose, a goal can be big or small, enduring or ephemeral.
Progress isn’t required for an organization to have a purpose or for a person to have a goal.
A museum can have a purpose even when it is not making progress on the purpose. For example, an art museum may decide it needs to diversify its collection to include more local artists or artists with cultural connections to changing demographics in the region. It can have that purpose without doing anything about it. Maybe decision-makers cannot decide how to proceed, or some other constraints prevent the museum from achieving that purpose — The purpose is still there.
Similarly, a person can have a goal even when they’re not addressing it. For example, if my goal is to write an article that describes how we in MAP define purpose and goal, I may spend months putting it off. I still have the goal, even if I’m procrastinating.
This is important in progress-space research because we want to learn from people who are blocked in their efforts to achieve a goal at least as much as we want to learn from people who have succeeded.
Staff are not a representative sample of a community.
I sometimes hear from museum professionals who are uncomfortable with the distinction between museum professionals and their communities. They think that underscoring the difference between a museum’s purposes and a community’s goals creates an “us vs. them” or “othering” mentality.
I respect that concern, but there is a greater risk in museums assuming that they understand or have listened to people enough to represent and support their goals. Just consider how few museums have adopted a practice of progress-space listening — that is, listening for how people address their goals, not just how visitors think about things like their experience (an example of evaluative research with existing audiences) or brand perception (an example of market research).
Yes, staff are members of their communities. This makes them a vital resource. They can serve as valuable links to communities that the museum wants to approach and listen to. (Explora has taken this approach … more on this example below.) But just because you’re part of a community does not mean you can account for the various ways people approach their goals.
Define communities in terms of goals, not demographics.
In progress-space research, we study groups of people who share goals. Communities are defined by goals, not demographics. This is because museums can’t support demographics, only goals.
If you disagree, ask yourself:
Do all BIPOC men think the same way about advancing their careers?
Do all millennials think the same way about dating?
Do all Spanish speakers think the same way about fostering their children’s love of learning?
Do all lower-income mothers think the same way about finding a way to reclaim some time for themselves on the weekend?
Of course not.
Defining communities in terms of demographics reinforces bias and stereotypes. (That is the kind of thinking that is othering.)
So why do museums continue to rely on demographic descriptions of communities?
In part, because it’s easier — inertia is powerful. Our tools also encourage this kind of segmentation. Advertising, in particular, reinforces targeting demographics.
But another reason is that demographics can impact people’s thinking, and I don’t want to gloss over that.
Discrimination and racism can impact how people approach their goals.
If a person has been discriminated against because of their race, gender, age, income, or other demographic characteristics, that experience will impact how they think, feel, and make decisions around achieving a goal.
Identifying people primarily in terms of goals instead of demographics does not mean we ignore or discount the harms inflicted by racism, ageism, or any other form of discrimination. In fact, it’s just the opposite — By starting with goals first and layering in an understanding of thinking styles, we:
start with a more respectful, nuanced understanding of people’s identities, and
create dedicated space to account for the specific ways that discrimination has impacted the ways people approach their goals.
The traditional way of segmenting people by demographics (and often only demographics) appears to recognize harm but, in fact, may only support the same stereotypes that perpetuate harmful and exclusionary decision-making in organizations.
As is often the case, the starting point — the initial frame we adopt to view the challenge — has an outsized impact on results and when and where we stop listening. If we start with demographics, we stop listening too soon.
A “relevant” museum is one that is working to achieve its purposes by supporting (some) people’s goals.
In the absence of any deep listening around a particular goal, we tend to fill the void by proposing new offerings related to a topic we believe is relevant, often to a particular demographic.
But a museum doesn’t make itself relevant to its communities by creating content in response to topics in the news.
Topics are not goals.
What’s the difference between a topic and a goal?
Climate change is a topic.
Reducing my family’s carbon footprint is a goal. Influencing local legislation that fights climate change is a goal. Organizing a protest at a city council meeting concerning climate change is a goal.
A museum that creates content about the topic of climate change will have less impact than a museum that leverages its resources to support a goal related to climate change because the latter is specific and rooted in the progress people are trying to achieve.
Achieving relevance by addressing topics is well-meaning and — especially in the eyes of other museum professionals — the results are praiseworthy. But an exhibition that stems from a museum’s interest in the topic of racism and the Black Lives Matter movement is different than an exhibition that arises from listening to people who:
have tried to expose racist policies and actions in the public school system
are trying to deal with a police unit that is harassing them and their neighbors
want to relocate to a new neighborhood but can’t get a home loan
These are examples of people trying to address a goal — they aren’t just topics.
To expand a museum’s purpose, look to people’s goals.
In other words, look outward by listening for what goals are important to the people the museum hopes to support and, crucially, how they approach their goals. Their approaches won’t all be the same!
Specifically, it’s important to listen for interior cognition, which consists of three things: Inner thinking, emotional responses, and guiding principles in relation to a particular purpose. What not to listen for: generalizations and, especially, opinions and preferences. (More on this in a future article.)
Expanding the purpose of museums could mean more museums addressing more progressive topics. This seems to be a common call among museum professionals. But a more resonant expansion of purpose would be rooted in supporting more (specific) community goals.
The risk in expanding purpose from the outside in is that museums end up with more top-down decision-making. That’s more a prescriptive approach than a supportive one. (It doesn’t matter if the museum professionals calling for change are younger or emerging professionals — They are still experts, just experts with less experience.)
Of course, organizations have to start somewhere, and someone (the museum) has to prioritize which goals it will try to support.
And some museums and museum professionals do listen — there are degrees of listening, it’s not black and white — but few museums have a regular diet of listening for goals.
Explora is an exception. They listen continuously to external groups and deliberately steer the conversation away from their museum and back to the goals of the people they’re listening to. One result of that listening regimen is a new childcare center they’re opening to support parents for whom childcare is an obstacle in advancing their careers. (I’ll share more on Explora’s approach to listening in an upcoming conversation with Co-Executive Director Kristin Leigh.)
How different would it be for a museum to begin with a goal they want to support rather than starting with a topic they want to address?
What if a museum looked at its resources — collections, staff expertise, funding, public trust — and asked, “How can we use these resources to support a goal?”
Compare that to the question: “What should our next exhibit be about?”
None of this means that expertise is bad. It just means expertise can get in the way.
Kyle
If you’re interested in how these ideas apply to the community listening you’re already doing in your museum, contact us.
