What are the conditions needed for an organization to prioritize value to its users? There are the big three — champions, directors, and time — but another may be connection.
Connection can be good or bad. When you feel like you belong in a group, you feel a degree of safety. Stress is reduced. In theory, it's a state conducive to creativity, flow, experimentation, and, ultimately, better results.
But when we feel connected to a group of people, we can also feel subtle pressures to adhere to certain standards or norms — often unspoken and imperceptible. For example, as a museum professional who wants to do good work, you adopt practices that other museum professionals approve of. What's 'good' is what's legible to others like you, which may have little to do with what the museum's users value. If you did want to understand what users value, you might, as a person who feels a sense of connection and belonging within the sector, create a survey to ask users what they value. This, too, is a legible action that wouldn't be challenged if you were to share it with others in the professional community. It's so natural, in fact, that you might not even really consider other options, like having a live, face-to-face conversation with an actual visitor. That would be unusual. Others might ask if it's the most efficient way to collect feedback, or if it wouldn't be better to ask five hundred people online rather than five people one-on-one, or if, while we're at it, we might also gather their zip code, find out if they think museums should be 'for everyone', and ask what they had for lunch yesterday so we can learn if the cafe menu should change.
This is the downside of connection and 'belonging'. When you belong to a group, you are making decisions inside a bubble.
I've always thought that the answer to the problem was to try to burst the bubble. Exposure would help — if only museums could develop feedback loops and new habits to, if not pop the bubble, at least make it more porous.
I still think that's important, but maybe it's just as important to leverage the need for connection and create a bubble within the bubble. I still don't know what it takes to make people feel like they're a part of a 'community' — that they belong to a group where it's normal to try things like deep listening, which would appear not normal inside the larger Museum Field bubble. Research by sociologist Damon Centola showed that a new behavior reached 54% of people in the overlapping groups (think: connection to a few small cohorts), against 38% of those with scattered ties (think: individual connections on LinkedIn), and spread four times faster.
The research suggests that what matters isn't how big the network is so much as hearing about a new habit from more than one person in your circle. This gives me hope for the "create a bubble within the bubble" approach to augment the "try to pop the bubble" approach.
So, a fourth condition that may support museums' shift from outputs to outcomes may be connection, defined by a few overlapping ties, which, for a museum leader, could mean a few colleagues inside their institution or a few they've come to know from others. If it's true that the threshold or bar is lower than I might have assumed (e.g., "We need a lot of members, doing lots of things!"), then small interventions that are highly personalized might be enough to help people develop more effective learning loops.
If all it takes is a few people to build an effective bubble within the bubble, then the field doesn't have to change. It can't be just any few people, though — it has to be the few who are trying it too. We may only need to build connections between tiny groups of people to normalize museums that define 'good' as valuable on users' terms rather than award-winning on the sector's terms.
Have a good weekend,
Kyle