There are lots of background processes running on your computer at any given time. You don’t think about them unless something goes wrong and you have to force quit something or run a terminal command to kill some process that’s run amok. But even when everything seems to be running normally, they can still impact the performance of the machine.
Our brains are the same way. For example, there’s a background process we might call the Efficiency Monitor that’s constantly running to varying degrees. The Efficiency Monitor is constantly looking for ‘waste’ it can eliminate. It tends to assess things in terms of short-term gains. It’s not only concerned with budget or monetary costs. For example, the Efficiency Monitor is the thing that makes us feel rewarded when we find the shorter path to a decision.
Some brains and perhaps some cultures are more likely to have hard-working Efficiency Monitors. American brains may be more efficiency-seeking than brains in other parts of the world. Relative to some nations, the U.S. is a competitive place with pronounced inequality. Those are things that drive an overactive Efficiency Monitor. Or consider brains that operate in non-profits — perhaps especially museums. Those brains may be more likely to view the world through efficiency-seeking glasses. Of course, there are always exceptions, but it stands to reason that a brain operating in a resource-scarce environment (i.e., inside the body of a museum director living in the United States in 2026) would be more likely to have an Efficiency Monitor process working overtime. A little daemon churning hard in the background, consuming an outsized portion of the mind’s resources. But it’s running constantly, so its perniciousness goes unnoticed. Like a laptop fan that’s been spinning so loudly for so long that its owner forgets how quiet the computer was when she bought it.
We tend to ignore the costs of efficiency.
For example, it’s inefficient to ask all the staff at a museum to take a few minutes to reflect on the value it provides to its users. (This is what we do when an organization participates in our Outcomes Assessment.) If each person spends an average of 15 minutes thinking about the outcomes the institution supports and there are, say, 100 staff members, that’s 25 hours of staff time consumed. That’s the sort of calculation that sends our Efficiency Monitors screaming into overdrive. But what is the cost of not allocating time for collective reflection? What is it like to work in a place where no one has ever invited anyone to consider why they do what they do and what the value (real or potential) of that activity is?
Or consider how inefficient it is to have a meeting with ten people when five would do. This is especially true if the meeting is of strategic importance. Surely any question pertaining to the museum’s positioning, strategy, or experiential posture should be left to senior leaders. But that meeting may be the only place where strategic thinking happens. Where, other than in that meeting, is a museum professional going to get to practice the skills required to make strategic decisions? To my knowledge, the ability to surface hidden assumptions, challenge latent beliefs, and determine what would have to be true for a strategy to succeed are not things that are taught in school. It is inefficient for someone who cannot do those things to be a part of a discussion where those things must happen, but it’s also true that those things can’t happen unless people are given the opportunity to struggle with them.
When we work with a museum, I’ve always thought fewer people in the room is better. If we can use more scalable solutions like surveys to capture staff input, then it’s fine to limit the strategy discussion to the senior folks who obviously belong in that discussion. To do otherwise just seems inefficient.
Lately, I’m not so sure. Is the obvious choice best if we’re thinking in the long-term? What about other museums — ones that I may never work with but that the people in this museum may go on to lead 10 years from now? Does today’s efficient choice rob them of a better leader?
We would never say, “You know, almost none of these kids are going to become biologists, so we may as well not teach biology. Why waste all this time and resources on science when almost none of them will become scientists?” All kids learn some degree of biology and life sciences, in part because some will become biologists. We don’t call that inefficient. But when it comes to decision-making (strategy), we tend to believe that because only some staff will go on to lead a museum, almost no staff should be given the opportunity to reflect on the institution’s purpose. Never realizing that exposure to problems with no easy answer and confronting ambiguity is the very thing that might keep someone in the field and prepare them to be that next leader.
So, I’m considering an experiment. What if, at the next museum or two we work with, we introduce a quota? For every two or three senior leaders in a strategy discussion, there has to be one person who is peculiar. Peculiar in the sense that they demonstrate some innate or outstanding curiosity. A security guard who seems to always be noticing things about visitors. Someone who sits at the front desk and has an annoying habit of saying, “Hey, I have an idea. What if we tried …?” Perhaps this all just boils down to leadership training. I suppose there have been programs like Polaris, which take a kind of mentorship approach to the question. Then there are things like AAM’s Museum Leadership Academy, which is new and, for all I know, is a great program, but it seems like everyone in it is already a CEO or at least a senior leader. And all those programs kind of happen outside of work. I wonder if there’s a role that organizations like Museums as Progress can play in making a more intentional contribution to the field by designing client engagements toward long-term investments in future leaders.
Who else is thinking about this? To what extent does your institution intentionally work toward building strategic muscles among staff? Is it working? How do you measure it? Let me know in a reply to today’s letter.
Have a good weekend,