Why your museum needs a role, not a mission
How many strategic plans are children of the Abilene paradox?
Wikipedia’s description:
The Abilene paradox is a collective fallacy, in which a group of people collectively decide on a course of action that is counter to the preferences of most or all individuals in the group, while each individual believes it to be aligned with the preferences of most of the others. It involves a breakdown of group communication in which each member mistakenly believes that their own preferences are counter to the group's and therefore does not raise objections. They even go so far as to state support for an outcome they do not want.
There must be a few people within any museum who are skeptical when their institution decides to spend an unholy amount of time and energy revising its mission statement. But, time and again, mission, vision, and values are what come out on the other end of the strategy pipe.
Non-profits in the U.S. must have a statement of purpose, but a statement of purpose doesn't have to be a mission statement. An organization's purpose could be to fulfill a role within its community.
This might seem like semantics, but the language we use shapes how we address the world and, as a result, the outcomes we realize. Just as our posture can communicate something about our state of mind, the language an organization employs speaks to how it thinks about its relationship with the people it supports.
A mission is something you execute or pursue. An organization with a mission evokes grandeur and leadership — a willfulness and spirit that feels out of place this far into a post-colonial world.
On the other hand, a role is something you offer to play — like a character in a play.
If you swap mission for role, you can't help but find yourself asking important contextual questions:
Are there other roles being played?
What's our relationship to those other players?
Who is the role for?
What would happen if someone else played our role?
What would happen if our role weren’t played at all?
All those questions demand specific answers in a way that a mission statement waves away. A mission is something that can more easily be unilaterally chosen. An organization is hard-pressed to claim that it plays a specific role without at least demonstrating how that role functions in a community’s ecosystem. Compared to a role, a mission statement is a wishlist or fairy tale.
A role is more humble. A mission feels arrogant in comparison.
So many museum mission statements include something about “inspiring curiosity”, for example. It’s taken for granted that people need their curiosity inspired. Maybe teachers need someone to inspire curiosity among their students because test scores improve overall if students are curious about what they should be learning. But if that's the case, why doesn’t the museum say that its role is to help improve educational outcomes as defined by the state? Some might say we need florid, vague language to "inspire" staff, but for many people, a concrete purpose with measurable results is far more inspiring than costly corporate poetry.
What would happen if you took 10 minutes to write down your institution's role? How does what you come up with compare to your organization’s mission statement?
Try it out and let me know how it goes in a reply to today’s letter.
Have a purposeful week,
Kyle
P.S. Opportunity mapping helps museums assess how well they’re fulfilling their roles, and we can help you bring the approach to your museum. Contact us if you’d like to learn more.
