Two weeks ago, I shared the thirteen structural variables behind every gathering and asked for your help. Seventeen of you responded, and the pattern in your answers surprised me: no one was missing a piece of information that would have addressed their problem. Every challenge was a tension — move forward while overworked, be responsive while planning long-range, build membership while campaigning. That changes what a gathering needs to do.
Here are three things to keep in mind when you’re thinking about how you can support people’s goals:
Their context (their goals, what they want/need, etc)
Your context (what you’re good at and what you’re not good at)
The ecosystem (what the alternatives are — where people can go or what they can do to address the stuff under thing #1 above)
Their context (their goals, what they want/need, etc)
This category is one I’m going to resist the urge to go deep into, because it's obviously a category that you could write a book on. Instead, I’ll try to keep it simple and invite you to consider it through a single lens: which of these outcomes are you trying to support?
Aside: Throughout this post, I’ll anchor these categories to MaP’s gatherings to illustrate with examples and share what we learned from you this month through our survey. It was a small group — seventeen of you with a half dozen follow-up conversations scheduled to go deeper — so I’m treating the results as a qualitative signal, not statistical evidence. The patterns matter more than the counts. (Thank you to those who responded.) Just keep in mind that the intention here is for you to translate this to your context with minimal effort.
At MaP, we want to support a number of outcomes, including:
Participants feeling connected to something bigger than themselves. Sometimes I think this is the most valuable thing that we can provide. My hunch is that if we can provide this to our participants and community members, then other outcomes become more achievable, and one trigger for this ‘connected to something bigger’ outcome is think about important issues and see things in new perspectives, another outcome we want to support.
We also want to help our participants act in new ways/do new things because if we want museums to realize better results, it follows that people will need to behave in different ways. For example, directors will need to become comfortable framing the value of their museums in diverse ways for diverse audiences. Our Value Articulation Intensive aims to support that ‘new way of doing’ In order for people to achieve this goal, though, they may need to feel a sense of connection/belonging with members of their group or community. If our gatherings can’t create that feeling of connection, then new behavior may never take root.
It’s important that participants feel intellectually safe and secure because otherwise they won’t be as likely to act in new ways.
For those participants who are further along in the journey from outputs to outcomes, we need ensure their understanding of something is confirmed or affirmed. In other words, there are many obstacles to overcome on the path to using outcomes as an organizing principle within a museum — many opportunities to lose sight of the goal, become discouraged, or otherwise just fall back into the habit of optimizing work for ‘audience engagement’ and other goals that really just serve the institution without supporting communities on their terms. So, we need to provide spaces like Outcomes Lab where we can host gatherings that affirm and advance the thinking of the people advancing this work internally.
It’s always good to be aware of what you’re not pursuing in addition to what you do want to support. For example, we’re not especially interested in helping museum professionals satisfy their curiosity and/or learn about topics they find interesting, important, and/or timely because there’s no shortage of webinars or conference-type events for museum professionals who want to dive into current events or interesting topics. It's not that that stuff has no value. We just don't need to provide more of it.
Now, returning to the category (your user’s context), it’s safe to say museum professionals are looking for the above goals because they are all human beings. But our survey uncovered some particulars like:
“How to move an institution forward and try new things when everyone feels overworked.”
“How to be responsive to new things we're trying while planning long-range.”
“How to build up membership while also doing a capital campaign.”
There’s a structural pattern in the responses — a challenging conjunctive. Move forward while overworked. Be responsive while planning long-range. Build membership while campaigning. Notice how these challenges aren't really about knowledge gaps. They're tensions. Competing demands that must be navigated simultaneously, where the answer depends on local context, institutional politics, and tradeoffs only you can weigh.
The pattern held across every cluster — resource strain, institutional direction, people and culture, sector-level uncertainty. Nobody was missing a piece of information that would unlock their problem.
This matters for gathering design because most professional events often assume an informational gap. Webinars, panels, keynotes — they rest on the premise that the challenge is “I need to learn x.” But if the problems are conjunctive, the format need is processing or application. You need structured space to think through tensions with peers who face similar ones so you can make your own situation more legible to yourself and arrive at a decision you can act on.
That finding helps me decide that our gatherings need to be built for processing, not information delivery. For the foreseeable future, we can stop wondering if we should host a webinar with as many people as possible on topic x or y.(Note: This doesn’t mean webinars aren’t valuable. It just means we’re not going to host them!)
Your context (what you’re good at + what you’re not good at)
In addition to weighing the context of the people you want to support, you also have to consider your own context.
This is an interesting category because it’s both over- and under-emphasized. Over because it’s easy for us (humans) to drift into creating the things we like and assuming that others will appreciate it as much as we do. Under because it actually requires some analysis and continual reflection to appreciate the difference between what your team likes to do and what your real strengths and weaknesses are.
But because institutional strengths are ultimately grounded in individuals — human resources — the honest version of this analysis often comes down to what energizes your team and what depletes them. You’re unlikely to have a perfectly balanced bench of people who are equally good at every genre of support that exists. For example, if you have someone who is naturally a people person, you may not want to ask them to write blog posts. They draw strength from other people, not sitting alone in a room typing. Don’t swim upstream unless there’s a good reason to do so.
Our survey asked what conditions made a peer conversation actually work — the kind you’d want to have again. The top response, by a wide margin: it felt safe to be honest about what wasn’t working. After that: I already knew and trusted the other people, it was small enough that everyone actually talked, the conversation kept going afterward — it wasn’t a one-off, and the other people were dealing with similar challenges.
Safety. Small size. Continuity. Shared challenges. Again, those conditions are structurally incompatible with broadcast formats — you can try to design for them in a webinar, but you’d be paddling against the current. The formats where participants get the most value from MaP involve smaller containers where the structure does the heavy lifting, not the host’s stage presence.
Another strike against large-scale gatherings.
The ecosystem (the alternatives)
What do people do right now to address the kinds of challenges in #1? The survey asked where you turn when working through hard professional questions. Worth noting: these are the people who chose to stay in a community built around this kind of work, so the answers reflect their preferences, not the sector's. Still, the pattern is useful for our design decisions.
The dominant answers, by far: books, podcasts, or published content and informal conversations with peers at other museums. Then colleagues inside my institution and a peer group or executive network. Down at the bottom: professional association events or conferences.
There’s no shortage of books, podcasts, and articles for museum professionals who want to think about hard problems. And people clearly value informal peer exchange — calling a trusted colleague at another museum to talk something through. Those two channels dominate.
But notice the gap between them. Content gives you frameworks and ideas — it’s where most people start. Informal conversations give you the candor and context-specificity that content can’t. What almost nobody reported having access to is the structured version of peer exchange — designed to help you work through a specific tension, with protocols that ensure everyone contributes, in a container small enough to be real.
Conferences, which nominally exist for professional exchange, barely registered. And when we asked what had kept people from joining peer exchange events in the past, the second-largest cluster after scheduling conflicts was format opacity — I wasn’t sure what to expect or how it would work, and I wasn’t sure if I’d have to talk or could just listen. People can’t form a clear picture of what the experience will be like, so they don’t show up.
The sector has content infrastructure. It has informal peer networks. What it doesn’t have is practice infrastructure — the structured space where professionals can act in new ways, not just think about them. Most of the people who responded already reach out to peers when they’re facing hard problems. They just do it informally, because the structured version barely exists as a recognizable category.
What it means for our gatherings
People in our community (or at least those willing to speak up) seem to be navigating conjunctive problems that require processing, not just information. The conditions that make processing work — safety, small size, structure — are the conditions that, relatively speaking, we’re better suited to support. And the ecosystem is full of content and informal exchange, but almost entirely missing the structured practice space in between.
So, based on your input and the evidence base behind the thirteen variables, I’ve developed a small menu of format structures for our gatherings. Each one is a specific configuration of those structural levers, tuned for a different kind of outcome.
Structured practice sessions: You show up, get paired with one or two other people, and practice a specific skill using a defined protocol. For example: each person describes a real tension they’re navigating in two minutes, then the others respond using a structured listening method — not advice, just disciplined attention. You leave having actually done something, not just heard about it. No ongoing commitment.
Peer diagnostic groups: A small recurring group of five to ten people. Each session, one person presents a real institutional situation — a board dynamic, a staffing decision, a strategic bet that isn’t working — and the others use a structured diagnostic protocol to help them see it differently. Not advice, not “here’s what I’d do,” but questions, pattern observations, and reframes that make your own situation more legible.
Sector sensemaking sessions: You receive a short data brief in advance — anonymized findings from across the sector. In the session, you work in small groups to interpret what the patterns mean for your own institution. The room does the sensemaking; the data provides the shared object, so you’re not starting from scratch with strangers.
Every format is built around peer exchange rather than presentations. The structure constrains how people interact, so the experience doesn’t depend on who happens to be facilitating. And every format is designed so you can go deep without months of trust-building, because the structure creates the safety that would otherwise take long relationships to develop.
The first sessions back on the calendar will likely be Peer Diagnostic Groups — specifically, Outcomes Lab sessions and Value Articulation Intensive Sessions, which are both scheduled to begin in early to mid-April.
If you’re designing gatherings at your own institution (for your communities or for internal stakeholders), the three-lens framework may be useful.
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