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 Lead…
Museums are under steady pressure to prove their value. In response, we often reach for familiar metrics like attendance numbers or evidence that people are learning from their par…
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…
My colleagues and I recently surveyed nearly 7,000 visitors across sixteen U.S. history museums to find out what well-being benefits visitor…
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 in…
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…
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…
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…
“Engagement” is a security blanket. It’s vague enough to mean almost anything — attendance, repeat visits, social media impressions, time on site — and doesn’t have to have any…
How does an institution decide on an experiential posture? This question came up this week with two museums we’re working with. Identity questions are the hardest to answer.…
Every museum makes choices about how it wants to treat the people who walk through the door. In dozens of small moments, it leans one way or another: toward provoking a visitor…
Shared Experience, Human Well-Being, and the Future of Museums I have spent a lot of time lately thinking about the future of museums. In addition to my own writing and talks,…
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…
If an organization hasn’t determined what value it’s trying to provide to the communities it supports, it’s operating in a vacuum. Organizations struggle in a vacuum — there’s an…
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…
If an organization hasn’t determined what value it’s trying to provide to the communities it supports, it’s operating in a vacuum. Organizations struggle in a vacuum — there’s an…
How does an institution decide on an experiential posture? This question came up this week with two museums we’re working with. Identity questions are the hardest to answer.…
Every museum makes choices about how it wants to treat the people who walk through the door. In dozens of small moments, it leans one way or another: toward provoking a visitor…