Two critical challenges to diversifying audiences: Availability and Alignment

In last week’s Research Office Hours session, we talked about two approaches to opportunity mapping and how they relate to the progress cycle. The progress cycle is how I visualize the steps people take as they try to address their goals:

The Progress Cycle

First, people identify a goal (more or less consciously). Then, they consider what they believe their options to be (this is when they filter out many solutions like museums for any number of reasons). They decide on a solution, and finally, they evaluate the results (did it help me meet my goal?).

Most of the learning that happens in museums is in the solution space; Museums tend to learn from the people who have already chosen the museum.

One participant in the session last week spoke to what I think was probably on others’ minds:

I'm just thinking about being based within an institution — The [visitors] outside my door have made the decision to come in, and so I'm already at that step four, evaluating the decision that they've made to be here, but I've missed everyone who didn't make the choice to come into the museum … and I'm not physically going out there to talk with them about — like, ‘What free activity would you like to do today? What's your goal for a free activity?’ So that they can tell me all of the other things … I am not even physically in this space to be able to listen in that moment. It's a lot harder for me to get in that space than it is to be in phase four of this cycle where I'm literally in outside my door.

Their comment got me thinking about two distinct challenges — availability and alignment. Thanks to the conversation last week, and especially the above comment, I realized that I’ve been conflating these two problems for a long time.

Availability vs Alignment

Availability refers to the echo chamber problem that’s common in museums: We only hear from the people who want to be heard from, and those people are not representative of the people we want to ‘engage’.

As the participant last week pointed out, it seems so much easier to walk outside our office and intercept visitors than to find and learn from non-visitors. Availability — which lends itself to the creation of an echo chamber —is a real problem. But I think alignment is the real monster.

Alignment refers to the challenge of knowing who we should be talking to. The progress space is vast — Think of all the ways a cultural institution can support people: Big, enduring goals like advancing one’s career to little, ephemeral goals like getting out of the rain during an unexpected storm. And everything in between. For us to know who to learn from, we have to know which goal matters most to the organization today. To know which goal is most important, the people in the museum have to have a shared sense of what matters.

• Are we here for people who are trying to advance their careers as historians? If so, we should think about all the ways people who want to be historians go about advancing their careers and then hang out in those places to learn from people who have that goal (which may or may not include museum-goers).

• Are we here for caregivers who want to help the kids they care for be successful in school? If that’s the most important goal, then we should go to places where caregivers go to address that goal — including, but not limited to, a children’s museum.

Mayber there’s more than one goal that your institution wants to support, but until there’s a decision as to which goal is more important, we can’t begin listening to learn how people approach their goal.

In the absence of alignment around which goal is most important to the museum, we will always default to the most obvious goal: “Visit a museum”, which is the most basic understanding we can have for the people an institution supports. “Visit a museum” is a goal, but it doesn’t tell us anything about why someone behaves in the ways they do. If we stop there, we don’t respect visitors’ differences, and we’ll never be able to support them on their terms.

Which is the real problem?

In general, I think both challenges can be difficult to overcome, but one is hard like lifting weights is hard, while the other is hard like solving climate change is hard. I’ll explain.

Solving the availability challenge is lifting-weights-hard, which means that it seems daunting at first, but once you start doing it regularly, you realize it’s not as hard as you thought. It’s a practice-based problem.

Solving the alignment challenge is climate-change hard, which maybe isn’t a perfect analogy because it’s not that complex, but it’s similar in kind. Alignment isn’t solved (only) by a change in habits, it’s also about coordinated effort. Where availability is more or less within an individual’s sphere of control, alignment is not. There are more dependencies and variables you can’t control in a climate-changey problem like alignment.

Consider political parties, for example.

If the Democratic Party asks me what I want from a political party, my answer will be brief (if I give any answer at all) because I’m not all that interested in political parties.* Only politically active people (and probably only a subset of those) are interested in improving a political party.

But if people from the Democratic Party ask me about the cost of living on Long Island, I can talk about that all day long because I buy groceries and want to buy a house. Those are goals that matter to me.

Now, people from the Democratic Party probably feel more comfortable calling around and asking people how it (the party) can improve. They want to acquire more voters, so they ask questions they believe will directly improve their desired outcome. The result is an echo chamber where party members only hear from people who share their goal.

What’s the alternative?

Don’t ask me about how I think the Democratic Party can be improved.

Ask me about my goals — the progress that I’m trying to make.

Don’t ask me about what I think of candidates.

Ask me about how I think and behave in response to rising costs (inflation), how I save for a home, or how I shop for a home.

Asking those kinds of questions will seem hard at first because it feels unnatural, but that resistance can be overcome with some trips to the listening gym. And if we know the goal that matters to the organization, we can brainstorm ways to access people who have that goal. (If the Democratic party wants to support people who are looking for ways to address inflation, they need to talk to people at Trader Joe’s, not Whole Foods. If they want to support people who are shopping for a house, they need to find people who rent, not people who own a second home and spend their weekends sailing.)

It’s the same with museums.

If you ask most people how you can improve a museum, they won’t respond with much interest, if at all, because most people — even those visiting — don’t care about building better museum experiences. That’s our job, not theirs. But if you ask a budding historian how they advance their career or if you ask a caregiver how they try to help their kids be successful in school, they’ll have lots to tell you because it’s important to them.

Just as a Democratic campaign staffer will feel more comfortable asking people about their feelings about politics than they will about asking how people shop for houses, a museum professional will find it easier to ask people about their feelings toward the museum or their visit than they will about how they help their children succeed in school. Both have much to gain if they can overcome this availability bias and make the uncomfortable familiar.

The real challenge is alignment, though.

A rogue campaign staffer or museum professional can, with a little grit and determination, get out there and talk with half a dozen people about a goal that matters to them. Authorization and acceptance within the workplace help, but it often isn’t necessary. (If anyone has ever been fired from a museum for expressing genuine interest in the lives of the people the museum hopes to support, please let me know, and I will issue a correction :-)

What they can’t easily do, though, is know which goal they should be learning about. They have to have alignment to achieve real impact in their learning. To stick with our example goals, which is more important or valuable to the museum today: Advancing historians’ careers or providing educational opportunities for caregivers concerned about their children’s future success? If people don’t have a shared understanding of what matters, then no amount of training or effort will help because you can’t know how to direct your newly acquired skills. (This, by the way, is why we have a prioritization workshop, in addition to training.)

So, if you’re interested in creating a more inclusive museum that supports more diverse groups of people, you’ll need to overcome both challenges: Availability and Alignment. I wish I could tell you that it was simpler, but I hope having names for the challenges — and knowing that they are multifaceted — is a step toward overcoming them.

Have a good week,

Kyle

*Unless democracy is at stake, but even then, one could argue that my goal is to maintain a system of government, not support a political party.