MaP will celebrate its fifth birthday this year.* This means we’re old enough to ask "“But why?” about every little thing, but still too young to accept “because that's how museums work” as an answer.
Shortly after our community was born, a museum director emailed me with what she likely saw as essential guidance — or perhaps a warning. She explained to me that associations and similar professional groups are created around specific disciplines or functions. MaP would not succeed unless we focused on one of these — for example, marketing, membership, visitor experience, etc. Her message was clear: To succeed, MaP would have to pick a lane and stay in it.
It seemed like reasonable advice — Who would argue against a more focused, or at least more recognizable, approach to supporting the sector? I worried for a time that I was making some fundamental mistake that was obvious to everyone except me. After all, if so many other professional groups used function as an organizing principle, they must be doing so because that was a proven path, right?
Needless to say, we didn’t take her advice. MaP remains open to all cultural professionals whether they work in membership at an arboretum or as an executive director at an art museum. Two realizations (which admittedly came to me much later) made this path not just viable but vital:
Organizing around current museum structures assumes those structures represent an optimal end-state rather than an accident of history. It seems more likely to me that departments have accrued over the years. We approve of these divisions because we created them, then formalize that approval through “standard practices” and various systems of recognition and reward. It’s a slow-motion form of rationalization that plays out over many years.
There's no such thing as “departmental strategy”.
That last point is the focus of today’s letter, and it might sting if you have "strategist" in your title. It's not meant to diminish your work. But it may challenge how we think about strategy itself.
The Illusion of Departmental Strategy
Strategy focuses force. When an organization has different departmental strategies, it has no strategy at all. Instead, it has well-meaning teams distributing institutional energy across multiple fronts, diluting their potential impact.
In the years since I received the director's note, I've seen this pattern repeatedly in our Prioritization Workshops. The workshop is designed to help museums identify which community goals they're best positioned to support. Participants redefine audiences in terms of community goals (not demographics), then choose which goal shows the most strategic promise for their institution before learning from that group.
But here's where we hit a wall that reveals a deeper problem.
To make a strategic choice — one that will yield compounding benefits — we need to know what challenge or opportunity matters most to the organization. Is it financial sustainability? Then we need to prioritize goals with the strongest revenue potential. Is it dwindling engagement? Then we evaluate community goals through that lens. Is it staff attrition? Then maybe we need to pause and do some internal listening first.
The conversation often stalls at the moment when we ask which goal is most relevant to the organization’s critical challenge — not because the people in the room lack capability but because they’re not sure what the critical challenge is. The institution lacks what Richard Rumelt calls “the kernel of strategy” — a clear diagnosis of their critical challenge and a coherent approach to addressing it. (Here’s a description and interesting critique by Roger Martin, if you’re interested in going deeper.)
No one person or group in the museum is at fault. Blame is irrelevant and unproductive. Often the critical challenge hasn't been named because it’s not really a part of museum practice. Strategic planning is just that, planning, which isn’t the same thing as strategy (see: ). Other times, some people know what's most critical but that information hasn't been shared (and shared again and again, because alignment requires repetition).
The Hidden Cost of Fragmentation
Workshop uncertainty isn't fatal. Learning about any community segment creates value — You can't listen deeply and not come out better for it at the end.
Even so, progress comes in many forms — learning can be additive (good) or multiplicative (best). Will listening to any community segment provide useful insights? Almost certainly, if we're open to what we might discover. But will those insights serve as a lever, creating compound effects across your organization? That depends entirely on how well that segment aligns with your critical challenge.
This is the hidden cost of departmental fragmentation. It's not just that departments might work at cross-purposes. It's that even when everyone is doing good work, we miss opportunities for the kind of strategic coherence that turns good into great.
The Force Principle
The principle at play isn't new. Military strategists have long understood that ten units of force applied in different directions achieve less than five units applied at a decisive point. Napoleon's success came not from having the largest army, but from his ability to concentrate force where it mattered most. Carl von Clausewitz called this "economy of force" — the idea that even secondary efforts should contribute to the main thrust.
The military metaphor might seem extreme, but this principle of concentrated effort appears everywhere transformation happens. Consider a river system. Small streams each carry water, but only when they converge do they gain the force to carve canyons and reshape landscapes. Your departments are these streams: Marketing's awareness campaigns, education's programming, development's relationship-building — they all move resources, but in isolation, they rarely reshape institutional landscapes.
Even in nature, this principle governs transformation. A magnifying glass can focus scattered sunlight into a beam hot enough to start a fire. The light isn't stronger — it's just unified in purpose and direction.
Learning** is a force — Like all forces at our disposal, its impact depends not just on its strength but on where and how we direct it.
Look at your museum's initiatives across departments. Are they arrows shot in different directions, or are they streams converging into a river, gaining force and momentum as they unite?
Evidence of the force principle’s power can be found everywhere in our political landscape today — Look at how effective Trump has been in countering resistance to his agenda by flooding the world with controversy. While I wouldn’t credit him with intentionality, he and his associates presumably understand that his natural tendency to generate (justified) outrage yields an advantage by fragmenting opposition. By generating multiple simultaneous crises, they effectively prevent opposition from concentrating force on any single issue. Each new controversy splinters attention and resources, ensuring that while many fights are fought, none achieve decisive impact. It’s a masterclass in anti-strategy: If you can’t overcome unified opposition, create conditions that make unity impossible. Force your opponents to disperse their energy across too many fronts.
Of course, it’s unlikely anyone inside your museum is being so deliberatively disruptive. But our organizational structures and metrics can inherently push us toward fragmentation. Marketing tracks awareness, education counts participants, development measures donations — each department optimizing its metrics while the institution's potential for transformative impact dissolves into a thousand small successes.
This is why the Value Realization Collaborative emphasizes the importance of leadership involvement from the start. In our workshops with Dr. John Falk, we're not just teaching new measurement techniques or audience research methods. We're helping museums find their point of maximum leverage — that critical challenge or opportunity where concentrated institutional effort might have the greatest impact.
Challenge this through self-reflection: When was the last time your museum achieved something truly transformative rather than incrementally better? I bet it happened when different departments weren't just cooperating but converging — when every action, regardless of its source, pushed toward the same strategic outcome.
That’s strategic coherence. It's not about departmental coordination or cross-functional teams, though those help. It's about finding your institution's canyon-carving opportunity and focusing every stream of effort toward it.
Motivation Is a Multiplier
There's an equation that captures something essential about institutional progress: motivation x ability = performance.
Through courses and workshops, MaP can help improve ability — that's largely what the Value Realization Collaborative's curriculum addresses. But ability is only part of the equation. Without motivation, even the most sophisticated skills and frameworks remain theoretical.
This is where we encounter a crucial divide in museum work — one that goes deeper than departmental boundaries. For our purposes here, let’s define two types of museum professional:
The Preservers: Their energy flows from the idea of "museum" itself. They're driven to maintain and refine what a museum "should" be, guided by tradition and established practice. Their north star is institutional continuity.
The Catalysts: They're energized by the museum's potential impact in the world. While they respect museums' traditional functions, they see them as tools rather than constraints — means to an end rather than ends in themselves. Their north star is community progress.
Neither motivation is inherently wrong, but they create radically different approaches to progress. Preservers excel at optimizing within existing structures — making departments more efficient, programs more polished, metrics more precise. I suspect the director who wrote to me years ago approached their work this way. Catalysts, by contrast, look for opportunities to transcend those structures when they block meaningful impact. They aren't seeking change for its own sake — if existing approaches can produce better outcomes, they'll use them. But no structure or habit is sacred if it stands between the museum and genuine impact. I think the people drawn to MaP — probably you and certainly those in the Value Realization Collaborative — tend to be Catalysts.
This is why, when people ask me who should lead their Value Realization work, I emphasize that intrinsic motivation matters more than role or title. Every department can connect their work to community impact. What we can't manufacture is the drive to reimagine what that work could mean.
Think again about your institution's last remarkable achievement. I bet you'll find two elements: strategic coherence (everyone pushing in the same direction) and transformative motivation (people invested not just in doing museum work well, but in fundamentally rethinking what that work could achieve).
Structure Isn't Sacred
As MaP approaches its fifth year, I find myself thinking about that director's early warning about choosing a lane. She wasn't wrong about how associations typically work. But I wonder how many other assumptions we accept simply because they're familiar — not because they serve the impact we hope to create.
What if our organizational structures aren't just neutral containers for our work, but active shapers of what we believe is possible? Every department optimization, every role assignment, every metric we track — these aren't just operational choices. They're strategic decisions that either concentrate or fragment institutional force.
This isn't about reorganizing your org chart (although, let’s not rule anything out). It's about noticing the small choices we make every day that either build momentum or disperse it. What would change if we started asking different questions in our planning meetings? What might emerge if we evaluated opportunities through the lens of force multiplication rather than departmental optimization?
I'm curious about your experience with this tension between structure and strategy. When was the last time you felt your museum's full force focused on something that mattered? What made that possible? What prevents it from happening more often?
Share your thoughts in the comments. I suspect we all have stories about both the frustration of fragmented effort and the exhilaration of concentrated force. Understanding these patterns might help us imagine new possibilities for focusing our institutional energy where it matters most.
Have a good week,
Kyle
*Actually, the MaP Community will celebrate its fifth birthday. MaP is older, having lived previous lives under other names and incarnations. This is one reason why we don’t mark MaP’s birthdays — I’m not really sure how old we are.
**In years past, I would have used the word “research”, but I’m more and more convinced that “learning” is better. “Research” is the word of choice for people (researchers) who (consciously or not) need to dress up their work and make it an activity for a select few. The problem is that Research is easily departmentalized, which weakens its potential. Learning, on the other hand, resists being pigeonholed — Everyone can and should be learning within an organization. That’s one reason why I think of MaP as a community learning endeavor, not an audience research firm.