Some of you are struggling with how to get your colleagues to shift their thinking about incorporating research into their decisions. This is a pattern I’ve noticed in recent months while reading through responses to our Outcomes Assessment as it’s been deployed across various institutions. Your colleagues have a complicated relationship with learning (research). They often have a genuine interest in measuring the impact or value of their work, but they also worry (more or less consciously) that embracing evidence-based decision-making will erode their authority or capacity to make independent decisions.
First, hold on to the possibility that many of your colleagues may actually be more willing and able to accept diverse learning inputs than you might suspect. I regularly notice how people who have worked together for a long time have mentally written off one another and reduced each other to caricatures. There’s no malice in it — it’s just natural for us as humans who need to process information efficiently to create quick heuristics about the people around us. Try to look out for the tendency and ask whether someone should really be written off as unapproachable or whether it’s possible that they respond to change in a register that’s unfamiliar to you. Pay less attention to what they say about research in general and more attention to whether they’ve ever asked a question about visitors that they didn’t already have an answer to. That can be a clue that there is a path to shifting their perspective — you just haven’t figured it out yet.
That said, there will be some who are truly disinterested in public value or outcomes. These folks are working for themselves, in a sense — that is, they show up to work because they want to advance their careers in a predictable way. They measure their success by how their peers in the discipline regard them. They identify as an Educator, Historian, Curator, or another discipline-specific role. Their real audience is other Educators, Historians, or Curators. The public is almost incidental or a necessary inconvenience to them. Imagine dairy farmers who just love the end product. They don’t care about the animals — cows are just a necessary vehicle to produce milk. If they could produce and sell milk without cows, they would, but since they can’t, they continue working on a farm. There will always be some museum professionals who view visitors and members as tokens that must be spent to further their own interests. Don’t try to change these people’s minds, but hold out the possibility that these people are fewer than you imagine.
You may find, for example, that the resistance to evidence-based decision-making is, for some staff, resistance to abstraction. It’s understandable that someone already spread thin would hear "we’re introducing visitor research” and translate it as more work. Concretely, though, what you’re proposing is actually a new creative lens, but people can’t know that without experiencing it first.
What does it look like when a museum is already moving past that barrier?
This week, in a meeting with a client whose team has been doing this work for over a year, the team shared the results of the listening sessions they’d been conducting. This museum has identified a particular user goal that is of interest to their institution: people who are new to the area and are trying to cultivate a sense of belonging in their new home. The museum believes that that’s a strategically valuable moment. If the museum can support newcomers, it may become a valuable resource and hub for those individuals in the longer term. Understanding how newcomers think and feel as they navigate this moment is central to the museum’s ability to position itself as a viable, relevant solution for those newcomers.
In the meeting, we talked about some of the emergent patterns from their listening. For example, there was a cluster of quotes from the sessions in which people described a moment when their assumptions about the people who lived in the region were challenged. Different people, at different times, described in different ways how they interacted with their new neighbors and learned that people in this part of the country aren’t quite what they had imagined. They had an ‘aha’ moment that was important to their transition as newcomers.
So what? What can the museum do with this information?
So much. We talked about what the museum offers today. Are there programs or events or marketing campaigns that might support this mental moment? Yes — or changes can be tested on existing offerings that will support the moment. After all, is an expert who can’t find creative ways to frame a gathering, exhibit, or marketing campaign in terms that resonate with the intended audience really an expert at all?
But why? Why would the museum choose to change what it’s doing to support that moment?
Why wouldn’t it?
In our meeting, we talked about how success is defined in museums without this kind of information. In other words, in the absence of any understanding of how people think and feel as they address a goal that matters to them, we’re left with what? Nothing other than our own categorical definitions of success. Meaning, we can only judge the value of the work we do through the lens of whether it succeeds on museum-shaped terms. Is this a ‘good’ program? Well, I guess we have to count how many people show up. Is this a ‘good’ exhibit? I guess it depends on whether other museum professionals like us say it’s good — or if some professional group decides to give us an award for how cool it looks or how it meets some measure of ‘excellence’ (which, of course, is just shorthand for “you produced something that looks even more museum-like than most other museums!”). In short, without an understanding of how people themselves address their goals, we’re left with no way to evaluate our own work other than in terms of the narrow opinions of people like ourselves or craft. Professional standards are useful — they encode valuable, discipline-specific knowledge — but they’re a floor, not a ceiling.
Try flipping the question. Imagine we lived in a world where museums were judged entirely on their ability to speak to and design for specific user needs and goals. Then, someone comes along and says, “You know, we should really stop worrying about all this and go back to evaluating success only in terms of our own internal, professional standards. It’s really not important how relevant this stuff is to visitors. What matters is whether other museums and museum associations recognize what we’re doing as being just as good or better than other museums.” People in that world would be understandably skeptical of such a suggestion. But, since it’s what we’re used to in our world, what would otherwise seem absurd appears reasonable to us.
In the absence of this kind of specific, external understanding of how intended users approach the goals that matter to them, what’s left? What is a marketing or membership manager left to do if they have no idea what goal the museum is trying to support or how people approach that goal?
Checklists. Facts. Does the social media post convey the what and when? Does the email campaign look on-brand? None of this means craft doesn’t matter. It does. But these things should be table stakes. A painter knows how to properly stretch a canvas. A director knows how to light a scene. But a painter doesn’t feel proud that they’re able to stretch a canvas. A director doesn’t feel a sense of accomplishment at having shot a scene just because it’s well-lit. Yes, it’s harder to communicate the value of a program or event in terms that resonate with specific mental models of users; it’s harder to design an exhibit that considers the purpose of the people who will encounter that exhibit. But a painter doesn’t complain that painting a picture is harder than stretching a canvas. Craft is the substrate, not the measure. When craft standards become the only standard, you’ve built an entire evaluation system around the canvas and never looked at the painting.
But how is this relevant to you and your museum? You’re probably not trying to support newcomers to your area. Maybe you’re thinking the goal itself is bizarrely specific.
It is pretty specific, but that’s what makes this museum special and relevant to its community. You have to get to choose your own goals at your institution. In doing so, you’ll set yourself on a path that makes you look different from other museums. Eventually, it’s possible you may even be less likely to be recognized for ‘excellence’ by the institutions that normally bless cultural institutions with legitimacy through awards and recognition. The standard-bearers, like AAM, who, however unwittingly, are a source of normative pressure, may be slow to recognize your efforts. That’s okay. You don’t work for them.
So, what’s the real blocker at your museum? Is it that people are understandably reluctant to incorporate yet another lens through which to consider their work (abstract), or is it that they haven’t had the chance to experience user research (concrete) as a generative tool that can enrich day-to-day decisions?
So don’t call it research. Call it a conversation about an interesting question. The data can show up when or if it’s useful.
Your colleagues might surprise you.