This post is by Robert Weisberg, the author of the blog Museum Human. I have had the pleasure of talking to Rob about museums, museum problems, and how we can do better. Last week, he shared my post on “Museums as Workplace Communities” on Museum Human.
A little more about Rob: Robert J Weisberg (he/him/his) has worked at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York for nearly 30 years. He began writing online in 2012 in a shared blog about digital publishing for museums; as he wrote more about the growing organizational culture movement, he began his own blog in 2015 about the organizational culture of cultural organizations, which eventually became the free-subscription-based Museum Human. He lives in New York City with his wife and a host of interdimensional entities. Find him on social media at Mastodon and Bluesky.
His credo, to paraphrase Winona Ryder in Heathers, is, I just want my workplace to be a nice place.
How can different groups in the museum agree on impact?
Museums—and their departments and workers—are increasingly concerned about impact beyond the institution. But can museums have impact externally when they may not agree on just what it means—or how to get there—internally?
What is impact?
There is an old saying, often miscredited to Mark Twain: “Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.” A museum-field version might be, “Everyone in museums talks about ‘impact,’ but no one agrees on what it means.”
Museum practitioners often agree on how to achieve impact, however. Randi Korn’s masterful Intentional Practice for Museums: A Guide for Maximizing Impact doesn’t appear to be concerned with defining impact; rather, she focuses on how museums can be intentional once they’ve decided what they want to achieve with the public.
In a 2020 writers roundtable with Korn for Kyle Bowen’s Museums As Progress group (still called, at that time, SuperHelpful), 30 museum professionals circled around the real-world truth that impact only exists where there is alignment. What are the steps that align the museum’s desires and work – across departments, exhibits, and programs – to the audiences’ (and communities’) needs?
Perhaps noting a trend towards treating museum outcomes as social phenomena, this article from the American Alliance of Museums defines “social impact” as:
“the effect of an activity on the social fabric of a community and the well-being of the individuals and families who live there. … Social impact addresses how museums may strengthen a community through education and lifelong learning, helping visitors understand multiple perspectives, and emphasizing the importance of personal and community well-being.”
Circular views like this are echoed in articles like this one from Blooploop, with a similarly fuzzy concept—impact is what museums do when they matter to some group, whether audience or community. And Dr. Lynda Kelly had a recent blog post with a host of definitions from social and economic impact studies, including measures from the Australian youth-focused organization ReachOut: reach, engagement, and outcomes.
These valuable works by esteemed museum professionals beg the question: do museums have a shared definition of impact? Are attempts to have consistent and pervasive definitions tied up in internal museum dynamics and disagreements between various departments and professions?
Personally, I’m partial to one view, courtesy of my wife, that the purpose of museums is (or should be) to inspire current and future artists, historians, scientists, and thinkers to rebellion. That may be antithetical to the usual way that museums define themselves, but I certainly believe that museums need a more pointed role in a society in the throes of collapse, to quote Robert R. (Bob) Janes.
Differing understandings of impact
To follow up on Korn’s point, is the importance of impact in its intentionality and practice—the process and practice of alignment, rather than the impactful goal itself? I’ve learned from colleagues in many museums about the differences in vision and priorities among people from various parts of their institutions and different levels of the org chart.
Some of this is to be expected—museums are filled with different people, backgrounds, perspectives, and skill sets. (Though this diversity can continue to improve.) A version of this disconnect can be seen in the core values exercises that museums have undertaken in recent years, often as part of the process of developing strategic plans.
These explorations can surface fundamental differences in how departments and workers view themselves in their institution and how they extend this identity to their audiences. While core values are different than strategy, mission statements, vision, or priorities, it’s not always made clear to staff just what these differences are—or why they matter—and these exercises can leave staff with the persistent sense that their input was performative.
These core values endeavors are also usually top-down, starting from the leadership playbook of well-established organizational terminology: words like “excellence,” “customer-centered,” “community,” and now “DEI” (I prefer the term ABIDE) figure prominently.
The process is rarely worker-centered, and therein lies the problem with institutional alignment: the workers who make the most impact—often the ones, such as front-of-house staff, who are busiest with just plain working—are least represented in discussions about values. These discussions are helmed by leaders (or their immediate team) or outside consultants who can cherry-pick staff with particular outcomes in mind.
Curatorial, education/interpretation, visitor experience, digital, external affairs, and publications teams, just to name a few, truly experience the work of the institution in varied ways. This diversity of experience affects the way that goals and vision get interpreted by different departments in the museum. For all that organizations like to say we’re all in this together, the reality can be very different. This variety can be okay; it’s useful to have a diversity of outlooks and mindsets. However, organizations rarely acknowledge these differences nor consider them in evaluating the workplace.
Attempts to align an understanding of institutional impact can be further hampered by staff differences—not just in broad generational groupings like boomers, GenX, millennials, and GenZ—but in career experience, digital familiarity, and, especially, marginalization and trauma.
How workers pushing back affects impact
Controversies over pay transparency, equity, and compression are perfect examples of this. Organizational leaders may have the best of intentions in making pay more fair around the institution, but decades of job-description decay, unclear career pathways, and cost-of-living increases turning into merit-pay rewards have undermined the ability to compare any two jobs in an organization. These, and other issues with the current museum business model, can also hamper alignment around the institution towards impact—overworked and under-resourced staff can’t be consistently effective.
Just as importantly, there is also a measurement gap when it comes to impact and outcomes. (A great read on the importance of measuring outcomes is DEI Deconstructed: Your No-Nonsense Guide to Doing the Work and Doing It Right by Lily Zheng, which I wrote about here.) What exactly should museums be trying to do, and what does success look like? And the gap is multi-dimensional, both between leaders and staff and between different teams around the museum.
Zheng’s book discusses the organizational culture that surrounds ABIDE efforts and spends considerable time differentiating organizations based on trust levels in the institution. Without delving too deep into Zheng’s argument, they analyze high-, medium-, and low-trust organizations, and I believe that strategic plans and vision statements, developed by leaders, passed through managers, but imposed upon workers who rarely feel these values in their everyday work, contribute to the lack of trust.
There’s no regular mechanism for keeping workers, managers, and leaders aligned, whether around strategy, core values, vision, or impact. Remote and hybrid work, for all of their positives for many people, have exacerbated the disconnect between the C-suite and workers. This isn’t to say that a return-to-office mandate would make alignment issues go away, but increased flexibility requires more active communication from leaders and managers to keep everyone reading from the same page.
There is also an increasing cultural difference between managers and workers, whether emerging professionals or long-term staff outside of senior management, as described in the Museums Moving Forward report Workplace Equity and Organizational Culture in US Art Museums (which I wrote about here). Museum unionization drives are compelled by US labor law to reinforce that worker/manager dividing line. Adding to all of this is one of the central paradoxes of the museum field, that many workers toil in the expectation of low pay while donors and board members are extremely wealthy.
More workers are calling this legacy out, as are more activist groups in the cultural sector. While some leaders in the field do see things differently, their hands may be tied by the museum business model and the prerogatives of the majority of leaders and important staff who have different political views, or at least different views about the moral dimension of great wealth.
What this means for impact—assuming we can finesse the definition of what impact is, and stick with Korn’s emphasis on it requiring institutional intention—is perhaps the primary challenge of our field at the moment. Leaders bring in visions of different exhibitions and programs, or better community relations and ABIDE, but they may not understand, appreciate, or address the everyday work of the museum.
Impact is a process that should involve everyone in the institution, and it starts with aligning staff around communication, which increasingly is about data and documentation. We know what might happen if a gallery or wing is poorly maintained or past its prime, but what happens if archiving practices are outdated, whether historical documents or computer files? What if there are too many technology platforms and communication preferences within the institution? Do workers get asked about and acknowledged for what they can contribute to these questions? In the end, workers feel that no one wants—or listens to—their input, leading to defensiveness, cynicism, and resentment, and all of these blunt the potential impact of a museum.
Many museums have upped their data game, but it’s not clear that this is being communicated throughout the organization or leading to aligned outcomes. Do different departments share the data that’s most important to them and their understanding of what outcomes are really desirable? Without time for respectful conversation, it’s unlikely that impact will be a shared endeavor.
Why impact matters
Impact needs to be a collective narrative and a shared understanding. Desired outcomes need to be developed and explained thoroughly and consistently in order to generate, if not complete agreement or even consensus, at least consent (willingness to acknowledge and abide by decisions they may not agree with) among all staff that these are a set of current priorities. Workers should also have an opportunity to explain their work to manager and leader levels, as well as other groups around the institution.
What are some ways that good outcomes can be developed jointly? What do they mean to colleagues, visitors, even non-visitors? Each museum can and should have their own goals and outcomes, and these need to be more a part of everyone’s work than just all-staff meetings and emails. This takes time and attention, as does giving workers more of a say in impact. Some portion of everyone’s day has to be spent on impact: telling stories and sharing narratives of things they do that relate to institutional impact. The idea of work and productivity needs to change.
Alignment is a slow and difficult process, but it’s as important as being a customer-centric workplace. Museums need everyone on the same page, while allowing for different readings of the text. It’s what makes every museum special.
Museum Questions 