Continuous learning as a cure for busyness and burnout in museums

It’s easier to substitute one behavior for another than to stop doing something entirely.

Scratch the surface of many “I quit, cold turkey” stories, and I bet you’ll find a lot of substitution stories — ex-smokers who started a 10-pack-a-day chewing gum habit; people who used to clip their toenails in the subway opening underground nail salons. Substitution is a powerful way to overcome undesirable habits. Then, once we’ve vanquished the enemy, we tell everyone (including ourselves) that we won a great victory through sheer willpower.

Is the same true for groups of people? For organizations?

It’s probably better to ask if there’s any reason to think it would be different for people working together in an organization. I mean, do people really change much just because they’re trying to coordinate with others? I doubt it. If anything, a cold-turkey, no-substitutions change among a group of people is likely more difficult than it is for an individual.

So, when a MaP community member emailed me last week saying they’re leaving the museum field, I began thinking (again) about brain drain in museums — how it seems like so many smart people are leaving and have been leaving for some years now. (Whether this is strictly true or a misleading series of anecdotes isn’t all that important, I think, because sometimes acting as if something is true, even if it isn’t, is the best thing to do. Even if museums are not hemorrhaging talent, acting as if that is the case and taking steps to improve conditions for museum workers isn’t going to be a bad thing.)

There are many reasons why people leave museums, but burnout has to be high on the list. Burnout is born of busyness, which is usually defined in quantitative terms — we’re busy when we have too many things to do and not enough time. But that seems incomplete. People can tolerate and enjoy more tasks and obligations under the right conditions. When we know why we’re doing what we’re doing, how our efforts contribute to a larger goal, and feel we have some say in how we achieve our outcomes, we can take on more work.

If you were to assess whether someone is too busy and at risk of burnout, you might look for unrealistic timelines or project lists. You’d assess how stressed they feel. Another symptom to look for, which I don’t hear as many people talk about, is conflation. People who are too busy may conflate, for example, learning from visitors or members with engaging visitors or members. Of course, it’s hard to learn from someone without engaging them since any genuine effort to understand another person will generate trust and appreciation that can become associated with the organization as a whole. Nonetheless, a person suffering from busyness may merge these two functions. Interviews with members, for example, become confused with a telephone campaign to bolster acquisitions or renewals.

But just as a smoker will struggle to quit without some oral substitution like chewing gum, it’s hard for a busy organization to heed demands that it just stop creating more and more work for employees.

What’s the substitute?

If busyness is more about the quality of work and less about the quantity, then the solution isn’t necessarily to do less — or at least we might not want to start. (While I agree with people who preach the value of rest and implore museums to ask less of staff, that approach doesn’t seem to have changed much.) Instead, it may be better to adopt a different frame by changing the order of things.

The current order of things in museums is projects first. People or departments take on new projects and then do some learning to support that work (maybe). When the project is complete, any learning ends with it. I think this is such a common approach, it may go unnoticed, and, since it goes unnoticed, we don’t think to even look for alternatives.

But if we give ourselves permission to explore alternatives, a perhaps obvious question is: What if we reversed the order? What would a learning-first approach look like? What would it mean for projects to emerge from learning efforts rather than the other way around? Is busyness (and, by extension, burnout) more or less likely to thrive in that upside-down world? And how realistic is it for us to realize that reversed reality?

If “learning-first” is just another way of saying evidence-first, then it seems reasonable to believe that a learning-first approach would lead to fewer projects, if not less work, that are more substantive (fulfilling) than a projects-first approach. After all, starting with projects and (sometimes) learning to support that project is more likely to support a handed-down-from-on-high-because-who-knows-why situation. Members and visitors are not going to create projects for you — they don’t give assignments, even if museums do sometimes ask them to do their homework for them and come up with ideas. (Can we please stop doing that?) Learning from them will suggest new paths forward, though, which can become projects, but projects that emerge from that work will be imbued with meaning for staff. The why is baked in.

You may think this isn’t relevant to you if you work at an institution that does have a learning habit. Maybe you regularly survey visitors, for example, or have staff dedicated to answering questions about your audience and customers. But remember, we’re talking about the order of things, not the activities themselves. Which comes first, the project or the learning? It can seem like a chicken-or-the-egg question, but the difference is that organizations didn’t invent chickens and eggs — They do have control over the work they do, though.

You can see the projects-first approach in how museums operate today. If/when a museum has the resources, it will either create a dedicated role or team to answer questions staff have about the work they're doing, or it will commission learning from an outside firm. Either way, evaluators or other researchers are usually learning to support projects, whether those projects are still forming, underway, or complete. Projects are always prioritized over learning, but just because something is always done one way doesn’t mean that the natural order of things or that they can’t change.

Manage learning, not projects

If learning came first, would that mean museums would have learning managers rather than project managers? What would it be like to be continually learning rather than continually … project-ing?

You’re probably thinking, “How is continually doing anything going to help reduce busyness, burnout, and turnover in museums?”

It does seem counterintuitive to suggest that introducing more of something — especially something that’s not all that familiar to many staff, and so doesn’t come easily — is going to somehow create better results and reduce busyness. Project-based learning feels more manageable. The busier we are, the more we yearn for anything that can provide a feeling of closure and completion and, if we’re being honest, learning never ends.

Besides, project-based learning isn’t all bad. Isn’t sporadic exposure to the people we support better than no exposure?

But what has a project-based approach to learning given museums? Snapshots, often taken years apart. (We have some survey data from 2028 …) Still, images are no substitute for home movies if we’re also trying to develop programs that are genuinely relevant to people’s lives.

If we assume that organizations, like people, will have a harder time quitting cold turkey, then we have to find a substitute, and learning feels like a natural choice. Not all museum professionals are driven by a desire to learn from the people they support, but I’ll wager it’s more common in museums than in most other sectors.

Strategic paradigms suggest that change is possible

But is there evidence to support a learning-first or continuous- or learning-first model? I’ll share two sources I draw from — one is farther afield and one closer to home.

First, there’s Gary Hamel and C.K. Prahalad’s research into strategic intent, which describes two very different approaches to strategic planning among Eastern and Western cultures:

… Western companies focus on trimming their ambitions to match resources and, as a result, search only for advantages they can sustain. By contrast, Japanese corporations leverage resources by accelerating the pace of organizational learning and try to attain seemingly impossible goals. These firms foster the desire to succeed among their employees and maintain it by spreading the vision of global leadership.

If you read the article, you may begin to view talk of “sustainability” in museums in a new light. What seem like level-headed appeals can begin to seem unnecessarily burdensome — or, at least, they would be if institutions were operating in a learning-first context.

Both models recognize the problem of competing in a hostile environment with limited resources. But while the emphasis in the first is on trimming ambitions to match available resources, the emphasis in the second is on leveraging resources to reach seemingly unattainable goals. Both models recognize that relative competitive advantage determines relative profitability. The first emphasizes the search for advantages that are inherently sustainable, the second emphasizes the need to accelerate organizational learning to outpace competitors in building new advantages. […]

Both models recognize the need for consistency in action across organizational levels. In the first, consistency between corporate and business levels is largely a matter of conforming to financial objectives. Consistency between business and functional levels comes by tightly restricting the means the business uses to achieve its strategy—establishing standard operating procedures, defining the served market, adhering to accepted industry practices. In the second model, business-corporate consistency comes from allegiance to a particular strategic intent. Business-functional consistency comes from allegiance to intermediate-term goals or challenges with lower-level employees encouraged to invent how those goals will be achieved.

The authors discuss strategy in terms familiar to for-profit companies operating at a national or global scale, but I think their descriptions can also apply to the cultural sector. Many museums are eager to demonstrate “practical” leadership (often to boards that consist of for-profit leaders who subscribe to the Western strategic model described in the article).

Many companies are more familiar with strategic planning than they are with strategic intent. The planning process typically acts as a “feasibility sieve.” Strategies are accepted or rejected on the basis of whether managers can be precise about the “how” as well as the “what” of their plans. Are the milestones clear? Do we have the necessary skills and resources? How will competitors react? Has the market been thoroughly researched? In one form or another, the admonition “Be realistic!” is given to line managers at almost every turn […]

Although strategic planning is billed as a way of becoming more future oriented, most managers, when pressed, will admit that their strategic plans reveal more about today’s problems than tomorrow’s opportunities.

I’m citing the article at length because I love it. The point is that organizations can and have thrived by adopting a learning-centered approach to their work. Not only can a reverse-order paradigm be adopted, but it has been adopted with considerable success in other parts of the world.

A learning-first model isn’t out of reach for museums.

You might think, “Ok, but that’ll never work in museums.”

But Explora is doing it. Explora has a regular habit of listening (learning) from their communities and their initiatives come from those listening sessions. Their new early learning center is the most recent example of a project that came from community listening efforts. (You can learn more about Explora’s listening practices in this MaP & Tell Unconference session.)

What would it take to stem the tide of busyness through learning?

What would facilitate a learning-first approach at your organization? What prevents it from happening? Share a comment below or email me at kyle(at)museumprogress.com.