Staff at one museum didn’t distrust their visitor research — they distrusted the summaries their colleagues produced from it. The data was fine. The interpretation felt like someone else’s conclusion, arrived at behind closed doors, handed down as settled.
That gap between information and the conditions surrounding its interpretation is well-documented. “We need better data” is a familiar refrain in museum leadership. It frames the challenge as an information gap: if we just had the right research, the right metrics, the right evaluation, we’d know what to do. But an organization can possess useful information that it does not act on. That is an action gap. Trust and shared ownership can affect whether the information gets used.
A working model for this relationship: informational value × relational capacity = organizational action. Sound research can go unused when the people expected to act on it distrust the interpretation or had no hand in shaping the questions. Museums can reproduce these conditions. Research gets commissioned by leadership, interpreted by a small team, and presented to staff who played no role in either process. In a 1997 Ernst & Young survey of 431 US and European organizations, reported by Ruggles in 1998, only 14% of respondents rated their internal knowledge transfer satisfactory. Szulanski’s research identified difficult relationships between source and recipient among the barriers to knowledge transfer. Museums that want research to drive decisions have to design for it: shared interpretation, visible methodology, contestable reasoning. That involves process work as well as data work.
Colquitt and colleagues’ meta-analysis of 183 studies links procedural fairness with trust. Brockner and Wiesenfeld’s review of 45 independent samples found that procedural fairness mattered more to people’s reactions when outcomes were unfavorable. People can be more willing to accept difficult conclusions they helped interpret. Staff skepticism about handed-down findings isn’t irrational; it reflects appropriate doubt when the methodology is opaque and interpreters have a stake in the conclusions. The dynamic shifts when reasoning becomes visible, contestable, and jointly owned.
Sources:
Colquitt et al., Justice at the Millennium: A Meta-Analytic Review (Journal of Applied Psychology, 2001)
Szulanski, Exploring Internal Stickiness (Strategic Management Journal, 1996)
Ruggles, The State of the Notion: Knowledge Management in Practice (California Management Review, 1998)
Brockner and Wiesenfeld, An Integrative Framework for Explaining Reactions to Decisions: Interactive Effects of Outcomes and Procedures (Psychological Bulletin, 1996)
Connects to: Solution Aversion.