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Author: Ellice Engdahl
When Seema asked me to write a post “taking
stock of the industry,” I started to run through all the things that have
been bouncing around my mind since the world changed. There were many, covering
the personal and the professional (which, as this community knows well, is also
personal), but I kept looking for some elusive grand unified theory to tie them
all together. At last it came to me: balance, informed by empathy.
It’s human at times of great upheaval to want to just react,
moving all the way to one side of the spectrum on any given decision. Even in
physics, every action has an equal and opposite reaction, right? But I’d argue that the best way to proceed is
the middle path. Cultural institutions aren’t always the best at this—we are
often all in or all out.
But the world is in a different place now than it was just a
few months ago. We’re all starting to see the gaps and fragility in
institutions and systems we may foolishly have believed were rock-strong, or at
least unlikely to be tested so vigorously. A recent episode
of the podcast On Being discussed how people who’ve encountered deep
suffering lose the ability to distance themselves from suffering in others,
quoting Pema Chödrön’s When Things Fall Apart:
“This kinship with the suffering
of others, this inability to continue to regard it from afar, is the discovery
of our soft spot, the discovery of bodhichitta. Bodhichitta is a
Sanskrit word that means “noble or awakened heart.” It is said to be present in
all beings. Just as butter is inherent in milk and oil is inherent in a sesame
seed, this soft spot is inherent in you and me.”
If this is true, multiple months into this pandemic, we may
all have discovered our latent noble heart.
In coming weeks, months, and even years, we should use our bodhichitta
to move us forward in a balanced way. Here are a few of the ways we might try
this, to behoove us both during the current crisis and beyond it.
·
Find the balance between managing your budget
and taking care of your staff. Megan Smith incisively covered the sad state
of staffing in the museum industry pre-coronavirus, as well as her fears for
staffers post-coronavirus, in a previous post for Museum
2.0, so I won’t belabor this one. We clearly need to find the balance
between keeping our institutions financially viable and treating our workforce
as it deserves to be treated. This wasn’t easy before and it will be even
harder now, but as attention to labor concerns increases and our understanding
of who “essential workers” really are shifts, now is the time.
·
Strike a balance between “real” value and
perceived value. Which staff now seem the most critical to your
institution? Is it the same ones you thought it was before the pandemic? Who
isn’t laid off, furloughed, or let go? Which planned projects seem worth the
staff time and dollars you had allocated to them, and which don’t? Are you just
setting these aside with the idea of returning to them all later, when funding
is available, or is a larger re-evaluation merited? What really moves your
institution forward, and what is unnecessary whiz-bang?
·
Establish a fair balance between the global state
of emergency and individual professional concerns. It’s easy in these
unprecedented times to be willing to set aside your “normal” professional
concerns—professional development, say, or treatment at your institution that
doesn’t seem fair or equitable. I’m not saying that you shouldn’t apply some sensitivity,
given the scenario we all find ourselves in, but now is not the time to be
unnecessarily selfless or accommodate away fair treatment—especially for
marginalized groups and women, who are often quick to give things up for the
greater good, or let them go because accommodation seems like the only option
for career advancement. We should all be giving back now, in whatever ways we
can, but the burden of selflessness shouldn’t fall on the same shoulders it
always does. This goes both for yourself and for those around you, who likely need
your support now more than ever.
·
Balance your assumptions and your audience’s
needs. I’m finding it interesting how often lately I hear people talking
about what they personally need in this time (vis-à-vis digital content,
virtual experiences, physical safety, comfort, etc.) as if that is what
everyone needs. The old “people don’t want x, they want y” declaration by an
oblivious product manager or development team is a long-standing bugaboo against
which ideas like user personas, co-created content, and design thinking have
fought back. Still, we should keep at the front of our minds that right now,
human needs and wants vary as widely as ever—if not more widely—and your museum
shouldn’t take for granted that it knows what will work for everyone. Make some
assumptions, but prove those out by asking your audience(s) and examining their
reaction to what you’re doing.
·
There must be a balance between your mission
and your messaging. This is a corollary to the above: What parts of your
mission match up to what your audience(s) really need right now? What parts
don’t? If you are communicating without doing this analysis, you run the risk
of appearing tone-deaf. Bring your bodhichitta to your brand.
·
Reassess the balance between
slick-and-produced and real-and-authentic. This is a corollary to the above
corollary: In an era where we are all becoming accustomed to seeing the
bookshelves, bedrooms, children, and pets of our coworkers and public figures
alike, I’m hoping we’ll reassess how much fit-and-finish is truly needed to get
our institutional messages across. Sometimes quick-and-dirty does the job
better than a slick puff piece ever could.
· Balance conscientious preparation with
agility. It’s been informative to see the range of museum responses to a
world in which people cannot physically visit our campuses. Some museums have
had robust digital programs for years, and pivoted easily (or seemingly easily)
to a digital-only presence; others have not made digital a priority and are
scrambling to adjust; and then there’s every degree in-between. It’s hard to
ding any cultural institution for not preparing for a future so few of us saw
coming, but there’s always been a need to pivot when unexpected things happen.
Right now, we have to continue to prepare for the future we anticipate, but
also constantly readjust and switch things up as the world changes around us.
One lesson I think we’ve all learned (or had reiterated): Having fundamental
documentation of your collections and your physical space opens up
near-infinite possibilities to build upon. (See the note above about what moves
you forward vs. whiz-bang.)
At the risk of sounding like the hippie-at-heart that I am,
I think using our newly-awakened hearts to bring balance to our institutions
has never been more important—or more possible.
Let’s do it.
Ellice Engdahl is Digital Collections & Content
Manager at The Henry Ford, where she manages ongoing collections digitization
work and facilitates storytelling on the web. She knows from experience that
life is damned hard, so spends a lot of time thinking about how to make it
better for herself and others. You can find random thoughts from her on Twitter and Medium.
From 2006-2019, Museum 2.0 was authored by Nina Simon. Nina is the founder/CEO of 