Emergent Value in Museums
Martin Brandt Djupdræt and John Falk lead a working session on what visitors value about museums, and why the most meaningful outcomes can be challenging to measure.
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Outcomes Soup and the Trouble With Belonging
Occasionally, a client or community member will say that the outcomes that museums deliver can blend together into a kind of experiential soup. For example: Can’t people feel a sen…
Value Reverses the Order of Things
Leaders need help from the people they lead.
Leaders are the result of inefficient investments
There are lots of background processes running on your computer at any given time. You don’t think about them unless something goes wrong an…
What Happens After a Visitor Surprises You?
Share a time you learned something about your visitors that should have changed how your museum works, and hasn’t yet.
Fortunately, outcomes are nothing new
Whether that’s an opportunity depends on your perspective.
By topic
Outcomes4
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Measuring the Value of Museum Experiences
My colleagues and I recently surveyed nearly 7,000 visitors across sixteen U.S. history museums to find out what well-being benefits visitors actually experience — and how long…
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From Evaluation to Research
I came across this article, Evaluation, Research, and Communities of Practice: Program Evaluation in Museums, and thought it was really interesting. The author, Lynda Kelly, asks…
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If It Matters, It’s Observable
Every measurement is a reduction — a simplified picture of something more complex. That’s what makes it useful. But having the richness of our work compressed into something…
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Measuring Belonging
During The Outcomes Conversation, a few of us started talking about what it would look like to go deeper — to pull in research and literature that connects to the outcomes…
Strategy1
Other4
How technical problems mask adaptive challenges
Try this: Never proceed with a solution to a technical problem without first naming the adaptive challenge behind the problem. Ronald Heifetz, founder of the Center for Public…
Mission is sacred, so close the gap between mission and outcomes
You won’t get everyone to think about their work in terms of outcomes . Any time you try to reframe how people work, some people will resist. Outcomes aren’t special in that way.…
Making room for double-loop learning
We don’t often make time to confront our own uncertainty. With everything a person has to do, or could be doing, there’s little reason or incentive to go looking for the limits…
There is no average driver
There’s a tendency to think of averages as being “fair”. If we describe people in terms of averages, then we are somehow more likely to do them justice (or less likely to be…
By contributor
Kyle Bowen4
How technical problems mask adaptive challenges
Try this: Never proceed with a solution to a technical problem without first naming the adaptive challenge behind the problem. Ronald Heifetz, founder of the Center for Public…
Mission is sacred, so close the gap between mission and outcomes
You won’t get everyone to think about their work in terms of outcomes . Any time you try to reframe how people work, some people will resist. Outcomes aren’t special in that way.…
Making room for double-loop learning
We don’t often make time to confront our own uncertainty. With everything a person has to do, or could be doing, there’s little reason or incentive to go looking for the limits…
There is no average driver
There’s a tendency to think of averages as being “fair”. If we describe people in terms of averages, then we are somehow more likely to do them justice (or less likely to be…