Value is at the heart of museums

In Museums and Public Value: creating sustainable futures, Lisa Conolly’s chapter on ‘Measuring Public Value’ raises the question ‘does size matter’? In this blog, Lisa shares some personal reflections and provocations on whether ‘size’ is a meaningful measure of public value. She questions ‘size’ in relation to museum buildings, collections and web statistics and finds that ‘size’ is a slippery measure.

The Museum Cathedral

Most museums provide a physical space to be visited. Over the last four decades, huge sums have been invested to establish and refurbish museums throughout the world. Are the size of these investments in monetary terms and the size of the resulting buildings an indication of how much we value museums?  If increased capacity means that a museum is capable of welcoming more visitors, does the size of our attendances mean that a big museum is valued more than a small one?

Grand Collections

In a statistical survey, size matters because the wider your coverage and the bigger your samples the more sure you are about your understanding of the population and the validity of your results. For a museum, does a large, representative collection equate to greater validity, more authority and, therefore, more public value?

If a “collection” has a defined scope and coverage and a representative sample of relevant content, what measures do we apply to assess the significance of smaller, specialized collections where it is not the size but the uniqueness or the special selectivity (representing, for example, a particular historical period) that matters.

Virtually Everything Matters

We are all busy counting hits and downloads. Internet interactions can generate big numbers. But what does it mean? Thousands of hits and downloads may be generated by machine to machine communication. People can hit websites inadvertently while looking for something else. Are numbers of hits a valid measure of value?

Thousands of hits may represent thousands of website users but how do we assess the value to the public of these engagements? As a self confessed museum lover, I confess that my searches on museum web sites usually disappoint me. Virtual tours give a small – too small – sample of artworks or objects. I may be a ‘unique user’ but I often come away dissatisfied- I am seeking greater value than I am getting.This is a case where I believe size matters in a different way. Personally, as these exhibitions and collections are a public resource, I would like to see a much bigger virtual presence of our public museum content. If entire museum collections were online, counting the searches and downloads might give us meaningful indications of the public value of these collections.

Size does matter. But is it always a meaningful measure? What do you think?

Museums and Public Value: creating sustainable futures http://www.ashgate.com/isbn/9781409446439

The contributors to the book, ‘Museums and Public Value: creating sustainable futures’ come from a variety of countries. This week, Marsha Semmel from the US discusses ‘why public value matters for US museums’

Thank you, Carol, for the opportunity to participate in this blog.

I first learned of Mark Moore in January 2003, when I began work at the Institute of Museum and Library Services, a U.S. federal culture agency. My boss, IMLS Director Robert Martin,gave me a copy of Moore’s Creating Public Value: Strategic Management in Government and urged me to read it. Later, I heard Mark present at the annual meeting of the Urban Libraries Council.  I got a deeper immersion in his work when I participated in a multi-year public value project Mark did with 13 U.S. state arts agencies under the auspices of The Wallace Collection (Creating Public Value Through State Arts Agencies, 2005).  

For me, the power of Moore’s strategic triangle model was—and remains--its recognition that every institution functions in a dynamic environment, with the continued challenge of maintaining effective equilibrium in response to this fluid context.  The model acknowledges the necessity of attending simultaneously to external and internal forces, with “public value” playing an essential role in an organization’s success and survival.

The public value debate is alive and well in the United States today, with passionate and divergent views on causes and remedies for such issues as income inequality, the appropriate role of government at all levels, employment and job skills, health and well-being, the quality of education, access and privacy, and the impact of technology. Underlying many of these debates are different –and passionate--perspectives on community, values, and the future.

How can museums navigate –and add value to – their publics on these and other issues? I believe that museums can ‘make a difference,’ for individuals and for communities, in support of our missions, but not without intention, adaptation, and collaboration. Many U.S. museums are already addressing such pressing challenges as early learning, digital literacy, civic engagement, environmental awareness, nutrition, creativity, and personal “meaning making” and fulfilment. They are customizing programs to individual interests and preferences, leveraging the learning power of mobile devices and tablets, co-creating programs and projects with their publics (and thereby enriching their own knowledge and content), and joining in community-wide collaborations to systematically achieve and document “collective impact” in meeting a specific educational or community development goals.

These museums seek to understand their communities and work with others (individuals and organizations) to strengthen their roles as responsive community anchor organizations.  Their leaders and boards are recognized throughout their communities for their authentic engagement in –and commitment to--raising the bar for all community members. They understand and transform their core mission and strategic plans in order to expand public access to their offerings and become more essential to communities.

They make the necessary internal structural, budgetary, operational, and staff changes (including recruitment and training) that respond to their community’s (audience’s) public value needs and changing authorizing environment.They recognize the importance of imagination, experimentation and innovation, and they understand that this is a long-term commitment--a marathon rather than a sprint.

So where are our concerns?

These museums exist, principally, as isolated examples.

Too many other museums remain mired in old models, fearful of or reluctant to change, unable, as emcArts CEO Richard Evans notes, to “leave the shore” of the familiar for today’s new terrain.  In order to move forward, it will be necessary for museums to (1) adapt and embrace the current environment of learning, networked collaboration, and evolving public interests; (2) document and articulate their impacts to current and potential authorizers, publics, and partners; (3)  undertake the necessary leadership, governance, and operational changes that will be required to thrive in today’s global knowledge society.

This week, we welcome our guest bloggers, Mark Weinberg and Kate Leeman.

Thank you, Carol, for the opportunity to add a few words about the public value cycle. Both the strategic triangle and the public value cycle offer a visual representation of strategic leadership. However, whereas the strategic triangle provides a platform for mapping out strategic relationships, the public value cycle describes strategic process, the on-going activities of thinking, acting and learning necessary to ensure that the organization effectively responds to changes in the internal and external environment.  I was pleased to see that Randi Korn offered a similar depiction of this process in her discussion of the cycle of intentional practice in Chapter 3 of Museums and Public Value.

Whatever one calls it, this focus on strategic responsiveness is critical because no organization operates in a static environment, and therefore strategic leadership is always dynamic and iterative. In 1995, Mark Moore encouraged public managers to think of themselves as “explorers commissioned by society to search for public value” and to do so with “initiative and imagination.”[1]  The need for this explorer mindset has seemed to further escalate in recent years, as Public Management Professor Jean Hartley now describes the context for public leadership as “one of profound, systemic, political, economic, social and technological change.”[2]  In the private sector, Columbia University’s Rita Gunther McGrath and others go so far as to argue that the era of sustained competitive advantage is over and that businesses must now focus on constant innovation to stay ahead.[3]

However, innovation is inherently risky.  Some projects fail, and even those that eventually succeed often require several rounds of experimentation and alteration to work through kinks or manage unintended consequences. Further, whereas the private sector at least agrees upon profitability as the primary measure of success, this is not the case in the public sector, where the value to be created and methods of evaluation are often political issues and subject to debate.  Several prominent museums have made the news in recent years for financial crises brought on by a combination of recession and failed innovation. 

So public sector managers must walk a fine line – being responsive to change while managing the inherent risks of innovation.  How is this best achieved? An examination of the public value cycle suggests the key is to:

Think: Become comfortable with the innovation tools that can help you think through your strategy such as the strategic triangle, public value cycle and the cycle of intentional practice as well as private sector innovation tools such as Lean Sigma and Lean Launch.

Act:  Provide leadership by developing a compelling value proposition, attracting talented professionals and inspiring them to achieve this vision.

Learn:  Collect and analyze the data you need to figure out what works, what doesn’t, and what to do next.