It’s tempting to think that alignment is the critical factor in predicting an organization’s success, but situational awareness may be the more important measure.
What do I mean by alignment and awareness?
Alignment refers to the degree to which staff are focused on the same challenges or opportunities.
Awareness refers to the scope of an individual’s attention — the altitude at which they prioritize challenges and opportunities. A few examples:
If a staff member talks about an immediate and very organization-centric challenge like facilities or storage space, this would be a lower altitude of awareness. If we were to zoom out and adopt the perspective of a visitor or local community member, we probably wouldn’t even know that the museum didn’t have enough space for its collection.
If someone cites staffing issues as a challenge, this could be coded as higher-altitude awareness. Staffing challenges are more abstract than storage space, perhaps — one can experience a lack of space more directly — but having too few or inadequate staff will have a greater impact on the museum’s relationship with its visitors. While visitors might not name it as such, they might feel its effects on the quality of their experience or service. The problem reverberates in their decision-making (e.g., “I’d rather not go back there.”)
At the highest altitude, we look for people talking about community goals — what the museum could be and how it could fit within the lives of visitors or constituents. At this level, a person is thinking in terms of the role the museum can enact, not just what it needs to address so that it can fulfill its mission. (This article has more on the distinction between mission and role.)
A higher altitude of awareness isn’t inherently better than a lower altitude. Everything is contextual—we have to attend to each altitude. Opportunities at higher altitudes may depend on resolving challenges at lower altitudes.
Also, notice that these different altitudes of awareness don’t necessarily correspond to one's position within the organizational hierarchy. For example, an executive director might be very focused on financial constraints, which is an organizational challenge, while a director of education might be thinking more about how the institution fits within the context of the community, which would be an example of a higher altitude of awareness — opportunities. Again, both are important and interdependent.
We’re beginning to measure these two things — alignment and awareness — by distributing a survey to incoming directors in The Strategic Museum Exchange. Each incoming participant is asked to complete the survey and distribute it to their staff.
In the first iteration of the survey, which I distributed to participants in our second cohort earlier this year, I thought of coding responses in terms of alignment alone. But now I think alignment is just one vector, and there’s much more to learn by layering in other factors like awareness.
For example, imagine a museum where staff are operating at the same altitude of awareness — suppose they’re aligned on addressing the problem of facility constraints. Most people are working together to solve the storage problem or are at least aware that it is the priority for the institution. The organization would score high on alignment, but since no one is thinking about the community context (i.e., the museum’s role), it may also be adopting a risky build-it-and-they-will-come mentality.
I wonder if there’s some sweet spot between shared understanding (alignment) and differentiated altitudes of attention (awareness) within an organization that produces optimal results.
If you’re interested in measuring these qualities at your institution, check out The Strategic Museum Exchange. You can sign up if you’re an executive director or share the page with your ED and encourage them to register. Our next learning extension cohort begins October 11th; We’ll focus on the role museums can play for their communities during the climate crisis with special guest @Robert Janes. The group is free. Organizations enrolled in our Organizational Membership program can receive a personalized report on their staff survey results.
If you have questions about the group, comment on this post or message me.