In his book The Culture Code, Daniel Coyle describes a tower-building experiment where kindergartners consistently outperformed adults. Given twenty pieces of spaghetti, tape, string, and a marshmallow, the kindergartners built structures averaging 26 inches tall, outperforming other adults, including groups of business students, lawyers, and CEOs.
Why?
The adults approached the challenge with professional seriousness. They analyzed materials, discussed strategy, and created detailed plans. Their interactions looked smooth and organized — collaborative expertise in action.
The kindergartners simply grabbed materials and started building. No strategic discussions. Minimal conversation. Their process appeared chaotic and disorganized.
The children's energy was focused on achieving a better outcome. The adults, while ostensibly focused on the task at hand, were also attending to themselves in relation to the group.
Coyle identifies this as "status management" — determining hierarchy, establishing roles, navigating social positioning. As adults, we do this unconsciously, but this low-level social navigation made the teams far less efficient — subject to hesitation and subtle competition.
Of course, this also applies to museums. Humans are humans. Our brains constantly scan for approval or rejection signals — evolutionary code from when social exclusion meant death, not just awkwardness. While today's consequences are less dire (we can find another group to join that's more welcoming of dad jokes), our neural wiring hasn't caught up. Our brains still process workplace interactions as potential tribal exclusion threats.
Status management has a sibling — call it decision management — in the tendency to second guess decisions. People can spend considerable mental energy on questioning decisions already made (their own as well as others'). Decision management is arguably healthier than status management in that the consequences of making strategic decisions are, in fact, real where status management is often more like an evolutionary echo we can't quite shake. Decision management is also less reptilian and more within our control than status management.
At the same time, decision management is more potent when a museum is trying to navigate a fundamental shift — for example, if a museum is trying to support outcomes that matter to their communities rather than continuing down the path of producing traditional outputs (exhibits and programs), decision management becomes a problem. Focusing on a specific outcome that matters to visitors triggers a threat response because it is frighteningly specific and quite unfamiliar.
Whether you're trying to realize a foundational change or simply trying to implement the next version of a traditional strategic plan, here are some ways you can reduce the waste inherent in decision management.
1) Make strategic cycles shorter.
Many museums are still on strategic cycles of five years or more, which should be reconsidered.
Global pandemics come and go in five years; Democracies falter and fail in less time.
We can debate the degree to which an institution's strategy should react or respond (they're two different things) to external change, yet still agree that the strategic cycle could be cut in half — and then in half again.*
Shortening the strategic cycle has second-order benefits when it comes to getting internal buy-in and supporting staff morale. Shorter cycles means more focus — think one or two strategic pillars, not 12 — and it means there's hope on the horizon for anyone whose preferred initiative is deprioritized. For example, if you really believe that the museum is uniquely positioned to support a social well-being outcome and your institution chooses to prioritize the intellectual well-being of participants instead, it's much easier to accept that decision when you know you'll likely still be working at the museum when the decision is reviewed again. Shortening the cycle clarifies even as it lowers the perceived stakes.
2) Include more perspectives from within the institution in a consistent, systematic fashion.
A good strategy is a bet that marries a critical challenge to a viable external opportunity.
Example: “Our institution is struggling financially (challenge). Given the landscape we're operating in, we believe that we have a unique advantage when it comes to providing personal well-being — in particular, providing a sense of connection/belonging with members of participants' communities (opportunity).”
In MaP³, we measure internal alignment around a critical challenge and staff confidence in the institution's ability to support participant outcomes (the opportunity). In the absence of these measures, decision-makers' assumptions and biases (which, again, we all have because we're all human) are left unchecked, which, in turn, means we're at greater risk of succumbing to our own blind spots. A consistent approach to incorporating staff perspectives into decision-making leaves less room for questions about whether we really got a well-rounded view later.
Aside: You might be thinking, "What about including more perspectives from outside the institution?" Outside perspectives are important — so important that the museum should be listening continuously, not just once every several years; Listening to external communities certainly does inform strategy but not in the way museums usually approach it, which is to ask people what they need or want from the museum. That's a question only a museum can answer. Doctors and healthcare administrators don't host focus groups asking communities how they can enhance care because it's obvious patients aren't prepared to answer such questions. That doesn't mean hospitals don't listen to patients — they just know better than to ask the people they support direct questions about what value they can provide.
3) Identify thresholds and failure signals in advance.
Museums don't often take a simple step that can short-circuit decision management uncertainty: Apply if this, then that logic in advance.
"If we don't see [minimal leading indicator] by [date], we need to revisit our assumptions and course correct. Short of that, we will not bother second-guessing ourselves between now and then."
4) Use frameworks that support mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive (MECE) choice sets.
When we're not sure if we understood all the possibilities, we're bound to wonder later if we made the wrong decision. One of the reasons we're working with John Falk and utilizing his well-being framework in identifying participant-centered opportunities for institutions is because his outcome set is because it provides an exhaustive list of opportunities — We can largely set aside questions of "are we missing anything?" when it comes to potential visitor outcomes.
5) Relentlessly return to the data that illuminates the path.
A meeting in Zoom is no different than a campfire gathering to our ancient brains. So, it's natural for conversations to trend toward social realities and unchallenged assumptions when navigating an important decision.
When we replace the campfire with data that communicates the realities at hand — here is the challenge your leaders and staff recognize to be most critical; here is where your staff are the most or least confident in your institution's ability to provide value — we have a life preserver that can combat the sinking weight of our ancient programming. (Apologies to the mixed metaphor police.) It helps to have an outside voice in those moments — someone returning everyone's attention to what the data reveals.
The Strategic Shift: From Ceremony to Progress
Coyle didn't mention it in the book, but you can imagine that the kindergarteners were not actually working with the same materials as the other groups of adults. Yes, they were all given the same 20 pieces of uncooked spaghetti, tape, string, and one marshmallow, but does anyone doubt that the kindergartners were ultimately working with 200 broken pieces of uncooked spaghetti, balls of tape, and a half-eaten marshmallow by the time they were done? Even so, they produced better results than the adults navigating complex social waters.
The takeaway isn't that we should all try to become more childlike. Museum leadership is more complex than building a tall tower, and children cannot produce strategy.
But we can improve our awareness of the conditions that undermine our own success. We can introduce structures that compensate for evolutionary disadvantages and find others who can hold us accountable — fellow travelers who can ignore our pleas when we beg return to the siren song of our old habits.
If you're looking for a partner who can embed these interventions into your strategic decision-making, you'll be interested in MaP³.
To some, that will read as a shameless plug, but there's no reason to shrink from the fact that we're developing something that will be valuable to some of you reading this. Our team is building something I don't see elsewhere, which combines research expertise with peer learning and the accountability that comes with a community of practice.
Pricing for MaP³ will increase tomorrow at 12pm ET. If you'd like to participate at the current rate, simply reply to this email ("tell me how") and we'll connect with you about next steps.
Have a good week,
Kyle
*If you're horrified at the thought of renewing strategy every 15 months, ask about the beliefs fueling the emotion. Certainly, if you were to keep up the same strategic planning approach that you've always had, you'd never stop strategic planning. However, "our plan needs to be five years long because we need to include a dozen different initiatives and we need to include a dozen initiatives because the plan has to be five years long" is akin to "I only smoke because I drink and I only drink because I smoke".