The Reference Garden

Curated frameworks, diagnostic tools, and synthesized concepts for museum strategy work.

• Action Gaps vs. Information Gaps

  Action gaps arise from missing trust and shared ownership, not data scarcity; relational capacity must multiply informational value to enable organizational action.

• Assumption Mapping

  Assumption mapping reveals critical insights by categorizing beliefs about desirability, viability, feasibility, usability, and ethics, enabling practitioners to prioritize assumptions for testing based on their importance and evidence.

• Implementation Intentions

  Implementation intentions transform goal achievement by linking specific behaviors to anticipated situations, effectively delegating control to environmental cues and enhancing completion rates, especially for challenging tasks.

• Institutional Isomorphism

  Isomorphism drives museums toward similar structures and practices, often at the expense of their unique missions, as coercive, mimetic, and normative pressures shape organizational behavior more than evidence-based effectiveness.

• Revealed vs. Stated Preferences

  People often misjudge their decision-making criteria, revealing a significant gap between what they say they value and what their actual choices demonstrate, highlighting the importance of examining real behavior over stated preferences.

• Solution Aversion

  Solution aversion reveals how organizations, like museums, often deny problems when addressing them requires challenging core beliefs, ultimately worsening issues that could be resolved through reframing and expanding solution options.

• Strategic Decisions as Bets

  Strategic decisions should be treated as bets, where assigning probabilities to outcomes exposes assumptions, improves judgment, and clarifies resource allocation, ultimately transforming uncertainty into disciplined decision-making.

• The Value Realization Cycle (Falk)

  The Value Realization Cycle argues that museums must transition from merely stating their value to systematically validating the actual benefits experienced by visitors, ensuring a tangible connection between claimed outcomes and real-world impacts.

• Thirteen Structural Variables for Gathering Design

  Label conventions hide the real design levers; thirteen research‑based variables expose the structural choices that actually drive gathering outcomes.

• Value of Information

  The Value of Information framework emphasizes that research should only be pursued if it can meaningfully impact decisions and if its costs are justified by the potential improvement in outcomes, shifting focus to efficient information gathering.