Identity works for organizations in much the same way as it does for individuals. It’s helpful as a heuristic, but it often impedes progress.
For example, ‘museum’ is an organizational identity in a similar way that ‘artist’ is an individual identity.
The helpful heuristic version of ‘museum’ is when you’re visiting a city for a weekend and you want to know how you might spend an afternoon. The ‘museum’ category comes with fairly predictable features. Each person will have different feelings and associations with those features, which will color their decision to choose the museum or not, but the category isn’t mysterious. Similarly, if you’re introduced to an artist at a party, the word provides clues as to what they care about. Your assumptions about them based on that identity label may be more or less accurate, but the label provides a kind of beachhead for understanding.
Every organization struggles more or less consciously against its identity. The proof is in the conversations you have with your colleagues when you talk about the value your institution provides to the communities you support. When you debate, for example, how to get younger people to engage with your institution, part of the challenge you’re naming is that some younger people have associations with the ‘museum’ (or garden or library or zoo) label that are hard to overcome. The upside to having a clear identity is that there are some situations where the label facilitates choice more easily (e.g., the ‘what to do on Saturday while I’m in New York with my kids’ moment). The downside is all the baggage that comes with simplistic labels. Yoga in the galleries can promote physical well-being, but it takes a lot of messaging and probably decades of work for the word ‘museum’ to begin to cultivate an association with physical well-being. (That doesn’t mean long-haul work like that should be dismissed — it’s just that we should embark on it with open eyes.)
Museum professionals have to choose (because they are always choosing, even if they don’t notice it) between delivering on an identity and delivering on value.
Delivering on identity means creating exhibits and programs, letting people know about them, and telling stakeholders how great they are.
Delivering on value means choosing an outcome that matters to individuals, then creating experiences that support that outcome, letting people know about the results of those experiences, and showing stakeholders how your institution provides that outcome (ideally better than the alternatives that they may want to support with their funding).
MaP is no exception. Sometimes we just need to be understood quickly — ‘research firm’ is a handy label. But a simple identity limits our ability to provide value.
For example, consider the question “How do we decide who our museum is for?” That’s a question that matters to the organizations and people we support. If we deliver on the identity level — ‘research firm’ — then we limit the value we can provide because we do research-shaped activities like surveying audiences. But if we’re trying to solve the problem, we can’t decide who our museum is for, then we have to recognize that research is only a tool that can help in some ways. We have to acknowledge that a lack of knowledge or understanding of audiences is just one piece of the problem. There are many other aspects to it — things like: Our board is totally checked out so we can’t make any consequential decisions; The CEO wants a beautiful strategic plan she can hold in her hands, not a strategy that makes any hard choices because choices incur risk; No one trusts the data coming out of the evaluation department; The chief curator is here to advance his career and is fundamentally uninterested in the organization’s ability to provide value to the public… the list goes on.
Most of these problems are relational or about capacity, and data alone cannot address them. So, we have to devise solutions that don’t always mesh with the ‘research firm’ identity. The trade-off is that the museum director, shopping for research on a Tuesday afternoon, may not always think of MaP first, and sometimes things can appear rather scattered. At a glance, it’s probably not obvious that an experiment around synthesizing data or investing in community matchmaking infrastructure contributes to solving the same problem, but, again, what’s important is accepting tradeoffs with open eyes, not avoiding them altogether.
Similarly, if your institution wants to play a role in your community, not just proclaim a mission, you’ll find yourself steeped in the problem space that accompanies that role. If you believe your role should be to build social capital in your town or region, for example, then you’ll need to brace yourself for the uncertainty that follows — you can’t challenge your own categorical identity without incurring some sleepless nights. People will be upset by the choice. They’ll say that the institution is abandoning its duty to history or scholarship to be a social club, daycare, or senior citizens’ center. It will be hard because there’s a grain of truth to the objections. After all, those other venues and experiences are alternatives to the museum. But the truth is, they’ve always been alternatives; it’s just that the museum never owned up to it and made a conscious effort to distinguish itself from them. And, besides, a museum that can communicate its specific value and impact to diverse stakeholders is a museum that survives and thrives. The curator or educator who argues from the purist, traditional perspective is speaking from a place of self-interest. That’s not to dismiss what they say — just to acknowledge that it’s natural for experts to resist what they perceive as a threat to their identity. It’s a perspective we all adopt sometimes.
The shift from museum-shaped outputs to community-centered outcomes is possible, but it will challenge the catch-all identity of ‘museum’. The question, “How do we decide who our museum is for?” is an important step along that path, though, in reality, it’s a question that has to always be revisited. Still, to the extent that projecting linearity on non-linear problems is helpful, we can embrace a step-by-step view and say:
First, consider the idea that you might decide who your museum is for. And not only in the sense of demographics, but in terms of goals, because go look again at the list of outcomes here and tell me whether any of them apply only to people over 65, or only to lower-income households, or only to the well-educated. They don't. Outcomes don't sort by demographics — which means the demographic answer to 'who our museum is for' was never really an answer at all.
Then, once you’ve recognized how absurd and harmful the default demographic answers are to the question of who your museum is for, try to articulate your museum’s value in terms of outcomes. Try on an outcome like a pair of jeans — you want to see if it fits before you buy it. As an internal exercise, do what we do in the Value Articulation Intensive and search for those stakeholders who value some of these different outcomes. Try communicating the value of the museum on terms that would resonate with them. Which outcomes feel like they fit better? Which ones generate resistance among colleagues and which ones resonate?
Next, do a little calibration. You’ve found some good candidates, but does the internal reality mesh with what your institution’s participants actually experience? Is there an opportunity here? Research helps.
Once you have a good candidate or three, run an experiment. Bring together a few departments and ask them to bring their expertise to bear on the problem. “We’re interested in the social value of our museum. We want to see what happens when visitor experience, membership, marketing, education, and curatorial work together for three months to produce a unified experience for museum members, visitors, and donors that cultivates a sense of connection with people outside their own group. Using the knowledge and tools at your disposal, how would you measure improvement in this area? What evidence would you look for that would indicate people achieve this when engaging with our museum? Put together a plan. Our CEO will use the results to speak to our partners in October so she needs your help — your work on this will help determine her success.”
Evaluate the results.
I hear you — “If only it were that easy!” You read through that list and think of a million reasons why it won’t work. I don’t dismiss those obstacles, but would just point out that others have them, too, and they are working to address them. That’s one reason we’re investing in peer introductions — playing matchmaker at both the individual and small-cohort levels. We’ve been doing this manually, and it works. But it’s slow, and it depends on us knowing enough about what each person is working on to spot the connection. So we’re building something more deliberate — infrastructure that surfaces these non-obvious matches based on the challenges people are actually facing, not their job title or institution type.
If you’re curious what this looks like or want to be among the first to try it, reply to today’s newsletter with a thumbs up. I’ll add you to the list of people to get early access.