Strategy isn't just long-term planning. It's about making creative choices that reinforce and cultivate unique value. Museums can become so focused on proving their excellence — jumping through accreditation hoops, satisfying peer expectations, maintaining “best practices” — that they risk optimizing themselves into uniformity. It's good to have high standards, but without a shared understanding of an institution's unique value, standardization can take hold. In striving to become an excellent museum, the institution forgets to ask if being an excellent museum is enough or even what’s needed.
On New Year’s Eve, I asked our members a simple question: “What standard museum practice makes institutions replaceable?”
The responses reveal an uncomfortable truth about how museums undermine their own strategic potential. I’ll share two that cut straight to the heart of this challenge.
Rosie Siemer, Founder and CEO of FIVESEED, challenges our basic approach to understanding audiences:
… museums typically find themselves in an echo chamber, only hearing from a small group of people who are already bought in and who have the time and interest to fill out a survey […] without hearing from new audiences, you're not going to be able to evolve and be proactive in meeting them where they are.
Alexa Magladry, North America Director at MHM, builds on this idea:
What makes museums replaceable is collecting community or audience feedback as a token gesture. For example, having a guest book or a comment wall in your lobby without any intent of doing anything with the responses collected. [You] might put a couple of cute ones on social media, but there's no active listening to what your community or audience wants, and you have no intent of bringing that feedback to the rest of the organization and seeing what you can do about it.
If you find yourself nodding along as you read these observations, I'd challenge you to consider how you'll actually address practices that might be limiting your museum's impact. What will you do this year to push back against performative listening habits?
Last week, Meaghan Patterson, Executive Director at the Royal Alberta Museum, shared something that captures this tension perfectly (shared with permission, emphasis mine):
… My team is excited by this opportunity as it is in alignment with some of the work we are doing and the changes we are hoping to make. I would be naïve to think there isn’t some nervousness around staff capacity and our readiness to dive into this, but I’m a believer that there will never be a perfect moment to take action.
Meaghan's team just joined The Value Realization Collaborative, committing to a year of deep listening and strategic research. Her point about capacity resonates across our sector. Many institutions are already stretched thin, making it tempting to stick with familiar practices rather than risk precious resources on new approaches. But, as Meaghan points out, waiting for perfect conditions means waiting forever. The key isn't to do everything at once, but to start somewhere meaningful.
The perfect moment to transform how we understand and support our communities will never arrive. We have to create that moment.
The solution isn't to stop collecting feedback while waiting for better conditions. It's to fundamentally shift how we think about community input right now, even if we're not sure we're ready. Instead of asking “How engaged are our visitors?” we can ask “What progress are they trying to make in their lives?”
This shift isn't just semantic — it's the difference between being replaceable (another organization measuring generic satisfaction) and being irreplaceable (an institution that deeply understands and supports the goals of its communities).
Take a close look at three specific practices in your museum:
How you collect visitor feedback: Are you gathering data that actually reveals what progress people are trying to make, or just confirming what you already believe?
How you measure success: Do your metrics reflect genuine community impact, or are they primarily focused on institutional outputs like attendance and member satisfaction?
How you decide what programs to offer: Are these choices driven by understanding your community's goals, or by what similar institutions typically provide?
For each practice, ask yourself: Are we doing this because it serves our unique community's goals, or because it's what museums are “supposed to do”?
I’m not suggesting any museum should try to be different just for the sake of being different — this is about being sustainably relevant. Museums that deeply understand and support their communities’ goals create irreplaceable value. Those that default to standardized practices risk missing opportunities to create distinctive impact.
At tomorrow’s season kickoff gathering, we'll explore this question further with more recorded insights from Micah Parzen (Museum of Us), John Falk (Institute for Learning Innovation), Sarah Jencks (Every Museum a Civic Museum), and others. They'll challenge our assumptions about standard practices and push us to think differently about strategic differentiation.
I hope to see you there,
Kyle Bowen
MaP Founder