But What if it FAILS? Using the FMEA Tool to Analyze the Potential Effects and Impacts of Failure

You know the feeling.

You think your plan will work.
You present confidence to everyone around you.
You fire up the crowd, energize supporters, and rally the troops.
But at the same time, you're terrified you might fail.

I've spent many days hustling and nights stressing over projects that seemed just on the edge of falling apart.

Then, I went to an amazing training led by Becky Margiotta, and she introduced me to a tool that helped me focus during the day and sleep well at night.

That tool is called Failure Modes and Effects Analysis (FMEA). FMEA is a quick, systematic way of analyzing:

• which parts of your plan could fail
• which of those potential failures are most likely
• which of those potential failures would cause the most severe consequences 
• which parts of your plan you should focus on strengthening to avoid likely, severe failures 

FMEA comes from the worlds of systems engineering and the military. It's used in many industries where failures can be catastrophic (i.e. hospitals, nuclear power, aeronautics). But it can also be useful in any situation where you want to get a clearer understanding of what failure might mean and how you can avoid it. For example, we share it at OF/BY/FOR ALL bootcamps to help cultural and civic professionals identify and address fault lines in their plans to involve new communities. You can use it for anything.

Here's how you do it:

1. Make a list of all the possible ways that your plan could fail. These are your failure modes.
2. Assign each failure mode a score from 1-10 for "likelihood" and another score from 1-10 for "severity."
3. For each failure mode, multiply the "likelihood" score by the "severity" score to get the total score.
4. Sort your failure modes by score. Focus your energy on finding ways to mitigate the high scoring failure modes. Don't let yourself be distracted by the low-scoring ones--they are either so improbable or so minor in impact that they are not worth sweating.

Here's a silly example we made up at the last OF/BY/FOR ALL bootcamp. The plan in question was to create a parade of 100 giraffes down the main street of a small town. As you can see, while bootcampers came up with several ways the parade could fail, there was only one ("can't get 100 giraffes") that would be both likely and severe enough to sink the project. So we focused our mitigation energy on getting the giraffes.

Here's a more serious example that our OF/BY/FOR ALL staff team created one month before we launched the Change Network program. Here, you can see that there were two failure modes we honed in on (1B and 3). Based on this analysis, we decided to focus on ensuring that videocalls would work and that we had enough staff time to support our First Wave teams. We acknowledged--but didn't sweat--the other stuff. 

I love this tool because it lets you get all your anxiety out on the table and then empowers you to realize most of your fears are either highly unlikely or do not have severe consequences. It generates clarity and confidence - fast. You can focus on what matters and put unreasonable fears in their place.

Here's a PDF template of the FMEA tool you can download and use if helpful to you. If you try it out, let me know how it goes. And if you have other tools that help you focus and remove stressful distractions, please share them in the comments.

From Risk-taker to Spacemaker: Reflections on Leading Change

Fifteen years ago, my boss kicked me under the table. I was a small fry at a big museum, volunteering for a project I had no business taking on. My boss and mentor Anna often encouraged me to stretch the limits. She protected and supported me in leading projects far beyond my job description. We had a push-pull relationship; I’d ask for opportunities, she’d say yes but also help me understand how far I could safely go. And when I went too far over the edge, she’d give me a well-placed kick.

I didn’t have the words at the time to identify what Anna was doing. She was being a spacemaker for me and for other creative risk-takers on her team. I learned this terminology later, from Beck Tench, who studies, mentors, and leads institutional change in public space. As Beck once put it, risk-takers need "space-makers" to provide them with the support, the creative license, and the encouragement to try new things, fail, and get up again.

As a young professional, I identified as a risk-taker. I was proud to be seen as a maverick. Success to me looked like taking bigger and bigger risks, and being recognized as the person who had created the project or made the initiative happen. My ego was tied up with making the thing and forging the path.

It was only later that I started to feel that the greatest impact comes when you stop focusing on what you can create and start imagining the space you can make for others to create. I didn’t want to blunt my activist energy, but I did want to find more effective ways to channel it. I realized my potential—if limited to my own creative abilities—was finite. But if I used my abilities to empower and make space for others, the opportunities were infinite.

It took three things for me to change my perspective on this. First, a deep and growing conviction that community participation is valuable—that every person can make a meaningful contribution to an effort if given a well-constructed space in which to do so. Second, growing confidence in myself—that my achievements would not be belittled nor diminished by the participation of others. And third, recognition of the privileges I enjoy, and the sense that it is my responsibility and joyful opportunity to share those privileges and related power with others.

When I think back on the work I’ve been proudest of over my past eight years leading the MAH, the projects that come to mind are those where I made space for others to lead us to new heights. In some projects, like Abbott Square, I was in the driver’s seat but invited hundreds of community partners, large and small, to take a turn at the wheel. In others, like the Community Issue Exhibition process, I was there as a fundraiser, networker, and sounding board for our brilliant team as they went deeper and further with community than I knew how to go.

In all these projects, I had to take a risk. I had to put my own credibility on the line. I wasn’t leading from behind. I was leading to clear space. As time went on, I felt more and more confident doing that to empower others rather than doing it for myself.

My favorite moments at the MAH are small, immediate surprises. I walk in on a day off and there’s something weird and wonderful happening that I had absolutely nothing to do with. A bonsai festival. A harp concert. An empathy fair. I know these things are happening because of our amazing, generous, risk-taking staff and community partners. And I know I have a small part in it as a spacemaker who carved out room for the idea that it was OK for a museum to be all these things to all these people in our community.

I’ve come to think of spacemaking as a form of allyship we can all practice with anyone whose growth and creativity we want to support. We make space when we ask, “Maria, what do you think?” We make space when we say, “I‘ll back you up on this no matter how it turns out.” We make space when we find the money and the materials and the partners to make someone’s big dreams real. We make space when we define its limits, with a helpful redirect here or a kick under the table there. And we make space when we hold the hands of risk-takers, take a deep breath, and step over the line alongside them.

Generative leadership isn’t about the person in charge generating all the ideas. It’s about the leader creating the conditions for new ideas and projects to keep bubbling up from many voices and perspectives. When we make space for others, we make space for possibilities beyond our imagining.

Who are We Protecting?

I remember the exact moment when I snapped. I was at an informal talk by a visitor research professional from a large American art museum. The presenter was a few minutes in, setting context about a recent rebranding effort at her institution. "Our real challenge," she said, "was how to attract new audiences while protecting loyal patrons."

My eyes locked on that phrase on her slide, "protecting loyal patrons." I couldn't let it pass. I asked her: "what are you protecting them from?" A colleague of mine helpfully added: "who are you protecting them from?" The conversation went downhill from there.

I'm grateful to this presenter. She put in black and white what goes unsaid in so many talks and press releases. Cultural institutions are willing to change to attract new audiences. But not at the expense of the pain or discomfort of loyal patrons.

Some people might argue that protectionism is the natural political position of a collecting institution. These institutions exist to protect heritage. To protect artifacts from harm. To protect and preserve that which would otherwise be discarded or destroyed.

But when it comes to people, protectionism is problematic. Loyal patrons don't need protection--even if they may be the people who gave us those artifacts. Loyal patrons get most of our attention, assets, and appreciation. And they already have most of the power. They are, on average, wealthier, whiter, more educated, and older than the general population. They are, on average, people with privilege. They may feel that their privilege is at risk, or fragile. But that doesn't mean they don't have it.

For people with privilege, protection is a waste of resources that demeans their agency. Loyal patrons don't need to be wrapped in archival tissue paper. They need to be engaged in change processes. They need invitations--to participate, to be part of the new, to embrace the unexpected alongside the familiar. Just like new audiences, loyal patrons need to be welcomed into institutions full of different people, experiences, and opportunities.

When the MAH was changing aggressively, we embraced Elaine Heumann Gurian's idea of "the museum of and." We didn't want to reject some people and anoint others. We wanted to build a truly pluralistic institution.

Most of the time, this strategy works. When confronted with a conflict between two groups, or two ways of experiencing the museum, we choose both. We bring them together. We build bridges. We choose "and." But when we have to decide--and sometimes we do--we try to stand on the side of those who have less power in the given conflict.

For the MAH, siding with the less powerful is part of our work and our mission. When an institution protects powerful people, it hobbles its ability to involve new people and grow more diverse. Organizations often protect powerful people at the expense of the very same new audiences they seek to attract. Protecting power means protecting the power structures that put whiter, wealthier, more educated, older people on top.

This incident happened at the same time ICE started separating families at the southern border of the U.S. My colleagues at the MAH were working with local organizers on the Santa Cruz #FamiliesBelongTogether rally (which ended at our museum). My colleagues were working with partners in the Latinx community who were receiving overt threats. These partners--who represent audiences we have recently worked to attract--were afraid for their loved ones. Their rights and safety were at risk.

Who are we protecting?

Is it OK to Smash That? The Complications of Living Art Museums

Every day for the past two months, a man has entered the largest gallery in my museum. He takes a crowbar out of a Swiss Army backpack. He smashes a sculpture of an animal.

This is not a crime.

The man is artist Rocky Lewycky, whose work is part of a group show of visual artists who have won a prestigious regional fellowship. His project, Is It Necessary?, blends sculpture, repetition, and ritual performance in a political statement about the genocide of animals in factory farms.

Sometimes, Rocky lets visitors join in on the smashing. It's a powerful experience for those who participate. It also complicates the question of what is acceptable in a museum. If an artist can come into a museum and smash stuff, what does that tell visitors? If visitors can smash stuff when anointed to do so by an artist, but not otherwise, how do they understand that action?

I thought about all of this when reading about the recent incident at the Perez Art Museum Miami, where artist Maximo Carminero smashed a vase by Chinese artist Ai Wei Wei in an unauthorized act of visitor participation. The vase was itself an appropriated/ritually-vandalized object: a centuries-old vase that Wei Wei had dipped in commercial paint. One of Ai Wei Wei's most well-known pieces was a performance in which he dropped a Han Dynasty urn, smashing it to pieces.

While some in the art world are heralding Carminero's act as expanding the role of art to disrupt and make political statements, I feel that this is a pretty straightforward issue of a criminal act. It is not acceptable to walk into a museum and destroy another artist's work of art. Period.

But does the fact that Ai Wei Wei smashes work himself complicate the issue? Definitely. Do I worry that a visitor might see what's happening in Rocky Lewycky's project at my museum and be confused about our museum's approach to protecting artwork? Absolutely. Is all of this confusion worth it? Yes.

These performances and incidents are artifacts of a shift in art museums towards being "living" institutions. Art museums have often been criticized by some for being mausoleums for art, with conservators serving as unctuous morticians. A practice-based artist once colorfully described art museums to me as "places where art goes to die."

But art museums are coming back from the dead. They are hosting performances, exhibitions that morph over time, artists who work in practice-based media, who break the fourth wall with the audience, who invite participation, and who deliberately disrupt museum conventions.

All of these developments are exciting to me. But these shifts come with necessary questions about how to scaffold the visitor experience in a "living" space so people understand what the heck is happening, how they can participate, and what is out-of-bounds. Whether it's a "please touch" label or a gallery host who invites you in and sets the ground rules, the scaffolding is essential. I've seen participatory artworks that lay untouched by visitors because the invitation to participate is not explicit enough. I've seen other projects that are so hemmed in by fear of "what visitors will do" that they can't bloom.

Unfortunately, instead of clear scaffolding, what I often see are institutions shirking their responsibility, closing their eyes and letting visitors figure it out. It's unreasonable to imagine that visitors will intuitively understand which rules apply to which areas and artworks. The rules of museum-going are already opaque. Throw in a few participatory elements, and suddenly you have visitors trying to arbitrate amongst themselves. I've seen visitors yell at each other for participating in exhibitions in ways that the institution was actually trying to encourage. I've seen visitors watch each other participate with confusion, wondering if that other person was "getting away" with something they too would like to try.

All of this confusion is harmful and unnecessary. Scaffolding can both clarify new opportunities for engagement AND define the limits of that engagement. It doesn't have to be complicated or involve release forms. It just needs to be clear. I know I could do a better job of making sure we scaffold the more unorthodox projects at our museum. Some of my biggest mistakes have come when we didn't scaffold and contextualize enough. We keep thinking about what we can do to help people understand what is happening and what is possible with clarity and confidence.

In the best cases, art museums are able to "live" in ways that honor the diversity of creative expression and ways that artists engage with their artwork and their audiences. This requires acknowledging and engaging with the messiness of the work, anticipating the challenges, and communicating new opportunities. This kind of scaffolding won't eradicate destructive criminal acts. But it will open up the possibility for participation and experimental work with less fear.

Do You Empower People to Take Action? Thoughts on Zoos and Charity:Water

Last week, I learned that ninety-six elephants are killed every day in Africa.

I learned this at a conference for directors of American zoos and aquaria (I was there to give a talk). I was blown away by these zoo directors' collective focus on a singular mission: ensuring the survival of animal species worldwide. The whole day was spent in passionate discussion about research projects, international crises, and serious, cost-intensive efforts for zoos and aquaria to take action to improve the fate of elephants and other species at risk.

I would guess that most people have no idea that this work is happening at zoos. I certainly didn't. I had a vague sense of how conservation fit into their educational missions, but I didn't realize the extent of the direct advocacy and activism happening every day.

And so, rather than talking about community participation in the context of zoo visits, I asked these directors: how can you involve your 180 million visitors in this important conservation work? How can you invite them to participate alongside you to save species?

In museums (and zoos), we frequently stop the conversation with visitors when it comes to action--especially political action. We give people content and then we say, "you decide." This may make sense in strictly education institutions, but it is ridiculous to stop there in organizations that are already engaged in activist work. If you are taking action to save species, why not invite visitors to join you?

We often stop at the educational message out of a sense that it gives visitors agency to do what they want with the information provided. But that means we also stop ourselves from inviting visitors to join us in the work that matters most. It devalues their potential contribution. It robs them of the opportunity to make a difference--and robs us of the opportunity for increased impact and change.

A clear example of this can be found in the difference between the 96Elephants campaign and that of charity: water.

The 96Elephants website is a dramatic educational site created by the Wildlife Conservation Society, which runs the zoos and aquaria in NYC. The site provides a powerful statement about the slaughter of elephants in Africa, supported with rich media and educational text. But when you get to the part with the call to action, there are two things you can do:

1. "explore the crisis" by reading more about elephants and humans on the site
2. sign a pledge to avoid ivory products and encourage a moratorium on ivory products

These are not exactly life-changing actions.

In contrast, check out charity: water, a non-profit that works to ensure safe drinking water for people around the world. The homepage has three prominent options: 

1. sponsor a water project (which involves making donations of $6,000 - $20,000)
2. start a fundraising campaign 
3. learn about the water crisis

It's no accident that only one of these three is a "learn" box. The first two are opportunities to immediately get involved, either by donating money or raising it. charity: water is incredible at empowering regular people to make a difference. You can donate your birthday to raise funds for clean water. You can track exactly where what projects your money supports. Paul Young, the Director of Digital at charity: water, explains: “We are trying to build a movement of passionate people who are going to form a relationship with us for years…. We want our donors to be advocates. We want them to share content, we want them to feel really connected to their impact and we want them to represent that to all their friends and family.”

A lot has been written about how charity: water stands out online. Just surf through their beautiful site and you'll see how they empower people as participants in raising serious funds for their cause.

Zoos have an entry point that charity: water lacks: the visit. Zoos have millions of visitors--millions of people who care about animals, who are interested in them, and who show up to learn more about them. Some of those visitors, looking at the majestic African elephants, are ready to take action to ensure their survival. They are ready to do more than learn about the crisis and sign a petition. If charity: water can do it for drinking water, surely zoos and aquaria can do it for animals.

Fundraisers often say that "it's an honor to be asked." This can sound disingenuous. But it's true. When we invite people to share our greatest passions, when we invite them to support our most important work, we empower them to be meaningful, powerful participants. That's what building a movement is all about.

Guest Post: Restoration Artwork

This is the last of the guest posts offered during this fall season, and it dovetails with last week's post about opening up collections access nicely. George Scheer is the director and co-founder of Elsewhere Collective, a fascinating "living museum" in a former thrift store in Greensboro, NC. Elsewhere is at the top of my list of places I would most like to visit. In this post, George grapples with the challenges of balancing the care for a museum collection with that of contemporary artists-in-residence who are constantly reinterpreting it.

Every Saturday, the curatorial team at Elsewhere, a living museum in downtown Greensboro, NC, reviews the project proposals of its artists-in-residence. Proposals involve sculpture, performance, participatory-projects, videos, and installation that use and respond to the museum’s collection.  This past July, artist Guillermo Gómez proposed to restore a piece of art.  

Restoration is a formal gesture for most museums. In this post, I hope to bring out some of the complexities of the idea of restoration as it occurs within an experimental museum supporting both a collection and the practices of emerging artists.

Elsewhere is a living museum, set in a former thrift store once run by my grandmother, Sylvia Gray, from 1939-1997.  During this period, she amassed a vast collection of inventories, filling the three-floor store, including a former 14 room boarding house, and third floor workshop.  In 2003, collaborator Stephanie Sherman and I “re-discovered,” the former store, declared nothing for sale, and began inviting artists to create works using the set, or collection of objects.  From the outset, we imagined an infinitely re-arrangeable puzzle, a three floor installation composed and recomposed from only what was at hand.  Both objects and art-objects would be part of this continuing transformation and evolution.  The objects, artworks, and the traces of past experience are all part of an unfolding continuum of the living museum.  

The artwork to be restored is a piece called the Glass Forest, (2009) created by Agustina Woodgate, composed of glass and brass cabinets and mirror-etched bark patterns.  The Glass Forest was itself an act of restoration. It re-set the room’s contents of glass mirrors and significantly restored the tired tongue-and-groove floor. Curiously, Guillermo is the current studio assistant of Ms. Woodgate, and is intimately familiar with Woodgate’s work, process, and thinking.  

The proposal was as much to restore an artwork as it was to “take back” the artwork, because after 4 years of slight interventions, film shoots, and an “unsuccessful” effort to create a new work that changed the tone, composition, and material content of the piece, it was determined a restoration-reset of the Glass Forest was in order. During the proposal it was discussed that certain elements of previous works and interventions should remain in the restored Glass Forest and it was further noted that Ms. Woodgate’s work undid a previous work, Mr. Stag’s Hosiery Museum, by Lucy Steggals, a period piece of an imagined hosiery salesman. At every moment the question of restoration was countered with the preservation of traces.

The restoration, which was championed by the curatorial team, has sparked an interesting debate about the intersecting challenges of making work in and from a museum collection, and the occasional incongruity with artists’ creative needs and formal structures of residency program itself.  

Elsewhere’s residency invites artists to use the museum as site, resource, and concept to create new artworks. Artists are explicitly asked not to have proposals before they arrive, but rather immerse themselves in the museum, its community, and collection. The artists’ challenge after a short three days on the ground is to design a response to the museum, press their experimentation with materials, and transform both object and artwork. To this effect the curatorial team works closely with each artist to support the process, guide the careful use of collection, push a continual reflection on site specificity, identify past histories, and ensure a relation to the various publics that the museum serves.  

Sometimes a work just doesn’t work, or the challenges of the residency don’t connect with the artist’s practice, or the timeframe for response is too short to fully engage the complexity of the museum’s context. While there is a strong resistance toward “fixing” a work, Elsewhere’s curators are all artists and view their role as collaborators in the overall creative development of the museum-as-artwork. They maintain a creative autonomy and intimate relation with the museum and its collection that empowers them to play with and transform the visual environment. Most importantly, the conversation about restoration brought to light the contingent values that support a site-specific, museum-based, experimental practice with a collection.  

As a guardian of a collection, Elsewhere breaks a marker of tradition by allowing art and object to be transformed. However, extreme purposefulness and resourcefulness are applied to the tiniest plastic bead, antique cloth, and wood scrap left from a cut made to century old lathe. “Successful” artworks draw out qualities in the collection, reflect material histories, and show the artists’ process and conceptualization. Each moment of material use is collection use, and represents an ethical and aesthetic decision for resource potential and the way we advance and perpetuate Elsewhere’s meaning to its artists and publics.  

Like other museums, Elsewhere is an interpretive space, constructed to secure and invest in cultural meaning, cultural objects, and creative expression. We willingly transfer this interpretive responsibility from the institution and its curators to the artist at the artist’s most precious, fragile, and critical moment of creative process. This demands that awareness and responsiveness be deeply embedded in the artist’s practice and thought. For curators, it means they must act as guides for the artists, supportive and challenging, but willing to continually reflect on the museum’s own institutional reflexes, aesthetic tendencies, and precious instincts.  

As I write this post Guillermo’s restoration remains in mid-process. Strangely, I am the only one on the team who saw the Glass Forest in its original inception, and I’ve remained quiet about small details that are different between Guillermo’s actions and what I remember to be Agustina’s original intent. Nevertheless, in those gaps of document, memory and intervention, Elsewhere evolves. Each artist brings a restorative and disruptive process. We welcome that. They often place pieces into the puzzle that unhinge whole sections of the picture, but they also restore and evolve the visual environment and the museum’s meaning. It is a living process, a deeply artistic process, and an exciting part of the museums’ imaginary--that a restoration is always already a new work of art.

Hack the Museum Camp Part 2: Making Magic, Reality TV, and Risk as a Red Herring

We did it. Last week, my museum hosted Hack the Museum Camp, a 2.5 day adventure in which teams of adults--75 people, of whom about half are museum professionals, half creative folks of various stripes--developed an experimental exhibition around our permanent collection in our largest gallery.

We now have a painting hanging from the ceiling that you can lie under and experience in 3D. We have a gravestone with a Ouija board in front of it so you can commune with its owner. We have a sculpture in its crate/prison cell, unwrapped and unexhibited since its acquisition thirty years ago.

We also have 75 new friends, slightly bleary from the experience, which felt like one part intense work project, one part marathon, one part hallucinogenic love-in.

I'm not going to write too much about the process here--please check out Paul Orselli's blog post for his perspective as a counselor, Sarah Margusen's Pinterest board for her perspective as a camper, or Georgia Perry's article for the Santa Cruz Weekly, which provides an outsider's view on the process. You can also see a ton of photos on Instagram, and I highly recommend the Confessional Tent videos for sheer silliness (more on those below).

Here's what I got out of Hack the Museum Camp.

It is amazing to actually DO things with colleagues in professional development situations instead of just talking. In 2009, after we hosted the Creativity and Collaboration retreat, I wrote a post about ditching "conferences" for "camp" experiences. Four years later, my appetite for these kinds of experiences hasn't changed. It felt great to once again be working with people--brainstorming exhibit challenges, editing label text, even just messing around on the player piano together. As a floating camp director, I got the best of this (interaction with all the campers) and the worst (no intense team time). I felt lucky to be able to dip into the various project teams, though that also gave me a completely aberrant perspective on camp. I was impressed by the extent to which the teams seemed to gel and people appeared, for the most part, to be happy spending the majority of their time here with a small group of teammates. There's always a balancing act between team project time and everybody time. If we do this again, I think we will swing towards a bit more everybody time so people could learn from more of the diverse and fabulous campers who were here.

I was surprised by the extent to which reality TV culture imprinted on the experience. People talked about the camp as Project Runway for museums. I'd give a team feedback and they said it was like Tim Gunn had blessed their project. As a forest-dwelling hippie, I know very little about reality TV, but it's clear that the model of "do an ambitious, wacky project really fast" is now tied closely to a slew of shows about everything from cooking to art-making. There were some ways we deliberately played with this--MAH staff member Elise Granata created an ingenious Confessional Tent where campers could make hilarious first-person videos about their experience--but there were other ways it really surprised me. Teams were more intense than I anticipated. Every team completed an exhibit in the time allotted. I assumed that at least one team would fizzle out, erupt, or just decide not to fully engage. Instead, everyone was focused and intent on creating something fabulous. I'm not sure how much reality TV affected this, but it was clear that people had internalized the "rules" of camp and were ready to play, and play hard. This mindset also impacted perception of everyone's roles in the camp. While it was completely hilarious to hear that "this is not Nina Simon best friend camp," it was also a little sad to realize that in the framework of something like reality TV, the camp director doesn't get to really jump in in an authentic, casual way with campers--I was expected to play the host role.

Diversity isn't just nice to have--it's fabulous. We selected our campers from a fairly large pool of applicants; about 1/3 of those who applied were invited to attend. During the selection process, we prioritized diversity--of experience, of geography, of gender, of perspective. Then, when we put together teams, we again tried to break people up such that every team would have a blend of individuals across several axes. Several campers commented to me that their favorite part of camp was the diversity of the campers' backgrounds and frameworks. If we were to do this again, I would ask one additional question of applicants: age. We had a good mix of people in their 20s-50s with a smattering of outliers, but it was clear that the most effective teams had age diversity within a team itself. Many of the oldest campers were "counselors"--seasoned exhibit designers I've known and respected for a long time--and we didn't have enough counselors for every team to have one. I'm not sure how important it is for every team to have a designated counselor--interestingly, in early feedback, many campers wanted leadership whereas counselors wished there had been a more even playing field. I do think that no matter what, it is valuable for every team to have a mix of ages and experiences.

The idea of "risk" is often a red herring. This was probably the biggest surprise for me - yet it shouldn't have been. We framed this entire experience around "creative risk-taking." Throughout the camp, I pushed teams to make sure that their projects truly challenged traditional museum practice. While this probably did inspire some teams to do some weird and wonderful things, it was also problematic for two reasons:

• For campers who are not in the museum field, it was confusing. Everyone's definition of risk is different, and while museum professionals may share a common language around the topic, that commonality breaks down when you involve artists and technologists and game designers and performers. The whole point of bringing in non-museum professionals was to expand the dialogue around what is possible, and in some ways, the "risk" framing limited those possibilities.
• More importantly, I've discovered again and again that when you are actually doing what others categorize as risky, it doesn't feel like risk at all. When I hosted a panel on risk-taking at AAM in 2011, all of the panelists agreed that we don't see our work as "risky"--we just see it as the work we are compelled to do (scroll down to the second part of this post). Once each team got into their projects, they were just cranking to make it happen. Sure, they might have decided to present an art object in a confrontational and opinionated way. Or they might have chosen to make up a fictitious narrative around history artifacts. Those are risky decisions in the broader museum context. But in the context of Hack the Museum Camp, they were just the starting points for projects. I wish we had focused more on a theme like "make an exhibit that is completely delightful and surprising" and less on "make an exhibit that takes a risk."

On the other hand, it was also empowering for some campers to experience how doing things that are "against the rules" can generate really wonderful levels of creative output. I know that our staff and members are really excited and energized by the exhibition that this camp created. We'll open the exhibition formally to the public this Friday, but already, we've had great response from donors and visitors who have wandered through. Yes, the exhibition is chaotic. But it is also full of surprises and vitality, and it showcases a very wide palate of approaches to collection objects. While the timing isn't great given my upcoming maternity/blog leave, I'll try to write a post at the end of the exhibition run sharing some of the reactions to the exhibition itself from visitors.

What questions do you have about camp? What would (or wouldn't) make you want to participate in something like this? I also encourage campers and counselors to share comments here, though I know that you represent a tiny subset of the folks reading this.

In closing, a quote from one camper's evaluation of the experience:

I like to say that if I am not afraid every day, then it is time to move on to another job. There were several moments during camp when I was felt a surge of anxiety, trepidiation, self-doubt. What is amazing about being with such a great group of people, is that they carry you through it. ... By the end of this week I will probably forget the sound of the player piano, the feel of the hard floor, or the carpal tunnel setting in my fingers. But I won't forget the many individuals who were so generous and tenacious; so honest and proud.

Thanks for all the memories.

One Small Step for Detroit, One Giant Leap for Museum Ethics (Maybe)

Over the past three years, the Detroit Institute of Art (DIA) has served as the museum poster child for the debate on the public value of the arts. Last year, the DIA was saved from financial crisis by voters in its three neighboring counties who elected to take on an additional property tax to support the museum. And now, in the past month, Michigan's Attorney General and State Senate have blocked the emergency manager of Detroit from seizing the DIA's collection to pay off the city's debt.

Like last year's tax, this newest development is an important step for the DIA, but it has even greater impact on the field overall. From a non-museum person's perspective, it's a little mysterious.

What's Happening in Detroit

Detroit is in serious trouble financially. The city's emergency manager, Kevyn Orr, is pursuing many options to avoid bankruptcy. One option he put on the table in May is to sell off the DIA's multi-billion dollar collection of art. The DIA and its collection are owned by the city, which makes it a city asset.

Museum supporters and art lovers were up in arms about this proposal, arguing that these "cultural gems" are held in the public trust and should not be shed to pay off creditors. But this argument for the public value of the art is tough to uphold in a time of severe challenges. Detroit's city leaders are looking at a host of tough choices, and it's hard not to be sympathetic to the idea that a bunch of artwork matters less than emergency services, schools, parks, and any number of other city programs and assets that might be slashed to avoid bankruptcy.

For museum wonks, there's a more specific ethical reason that the DIA's collection should not be treated in this way: we don't see museum collections as assets on the balance sheet the same way Kevyn Orr does.

The American museum profession has an ethical standard that says "in no event shall they [funds raised by deaccessioning collections objects] be used for anything other than acquisition or direct care of collections."

In other words, in the museum world, if you sell artwork, you must put the proceeds into a restricted fund to either purchase or preserve other artwork in the collection.

Of course, Kevyn Orr doesn't see it that way--he sees the DIA's artwork as assets, and that's not unreasonable. This DOES come up when museums go bankrupt, at which point collections can be seen as assets by creditors. However, in this case, it is not the DIA that is going bankrupt but the city. If the city (or state) forces the DIA to violate museum ethics to satisfy city debts, it will have grave consequences for the museum and for the museum world.

Think of Artwork like Organs

Here's a weird but apt analogy: organ donation. For large organs like the heart and lungs, there is a national body that governs all organ donation and distribution in the US. All organs are given voluntarily without compensation (usually by dying people), and then the national body manages a list with complicated algorithms to determine who receives which organ.

Imagine if Detroit's largest hospital had an organ donation program, and Kevyn Orr required that the hospital violate medical ethics by selling any large organs received to the highest bidder. This could be a significant income stream for the city and help settle debts. At the same time, it would likely lead to that hospital and its surgeons facing grave consequences in the medical world... just like the DIA will face if the city forces it to violate museum ethics.

I know organs and artwork are different, but the situation is functionally the same: a professional field with a particular code of ethics whose rules may or may not be recognized by government bodies. That's why it is so significant that the Michigan Senate voted to take on the American Alliance of Museum's code of ethics regarding collections - it functionally means that the state is acknowledging and abiding by the professional standard in the museum field.

Complications and Ethical Dilemmas

But let's not start cheering just yet. There is an ironic sidenote to this "victory" for museum ethics. At the same time as this controversy is playing out in the public arena via Detroit, museum professionals are in the midst of debate about whether the ethics of deaccessioning still apply. A recent article in Museum magazine (published by the American Alliance of Museums) talks about the ugly realities of how a collection may be sold if a museum goes bankrupt. The Center for the Future of Museums, which is also run by the American Alliance of Museums, has been hosting a virtual "ethics smackdown" on its blog about the ethics of deaccessioning over the past several weeks. Only a small percentage of museums are formally signed onto the AAM code of ethics. While deaccessioning may be a museum sacred cow, it is not broadly considered our field's most important challenge.

I feel conflicted about this whole question. On the one hand, it drives me nuts that the ethical rules around deaccessioning force museums to protect objects in a way we do not comparably protect other core aspects of our work. There is no requirement that if you cut an educational program that you have to use the funds saved from that to fund other educational experiences. I've worked with museums that have hefty collections and restricted acquisition funds but are closed to the public because all of their dollars and assets are wrapped up in objects and none in public service or access. I can also see the argument that it actually makes museums MORE relevant if our assets are considered fair game in a situation like Detroit's--just as important and just as endangered as other core services.

On the other hand, I feel strongly that as arts are generally misunderstood and marginalized in the public eye (and funding sphere), it's important for us to do whatever we can to help people understand WHY artwork is like organs, and why these objects remaining in the public trust matters. In an offline conversation about Detroit, Margy Waller, who is brilliant at framing the public value of art, put it this way:

The arts are already pretty much ALWAYS seen as a low priority among things of public value. In fact, they're (I want to say we're) often seen as a private matter -- and not a public good at all. 

The arguments about sale of DIA art strike me as forming inside that frame. And if it happens, I worry that it would reinforce what is already the dominant way of view of the arts --- and set back our case-making: that the arts create places where people want to live, work, invest, and visit -- all things Detroit desperately needs right now.

Memo from the Revolution: Six Things I've Learned from our Institutional Transformation

This past weekend, I had the opportunity to give one of the closing talks at the Theater Communications Group annual conference in Dallas. TCG is the industry association for non-profit theaters, the way AAM is for museums. Given TCG's multi-year Audience (R)evolution initiative, I took the opportunity to write a new talk about what revolution has looked like at our small museum in Santa Cruz.

This is not a transcript of the talk - just the highlights that I hope will be useful for you. You can download all the slides here.

First, a quick recap on our revolution. Over the past two years, the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History has undergone a significant transformation of program, audience, and resources. When I came to the museum in May of 2011, we were on the brink of closure financially. At the same time, our community relevance was limited. There was a small, dedicated group of people who knew and loved the museum, and then a larger community that barely knew we existed.

With our backs against the wall and a new vision statement positioning the museum as a "thriving, central gathering place," we started a revolution. Our revolution is predicated on three big ideas:

1. Art and history are something you do, not just something you learn about. By inviting people to actively participate with us in co-creating programming, we empower them as creative agents, cultural producers, and people for whom the museum is a relevant, compelling partner.
2. Being a strong community hub requires bringing people together across difference, encouraging bridging experiences instead of targeting a specific audience. When we work with diverse collaborators, from opera singers and ukelele players to knitters and graffiti artists, we catalyze new partnerships and relationships that make our community stronger and more cohesive.
3. We believe in fearless experimentation. It is only by trying things out, challenging our assumptions, and analyzing the results that we can adapt and thrive in a changing world.

In our first year of this new approach, we had extraordinary results. Our attendance more than doubled. Our busiest day more than tripled. And we went from five years in the red to running a generous surplus that got us on the path to financial stability. Best of all, the response from our community was incredible--a diverse range of individuals and local press is effusive about the new vitality, public value, and engagement in the museum.

Here are six things I've learned from this transformation that might be helpful to other would-be revolutionaries.

A revolution is not an exercise in concentric circles. Imagine you run an organization with a small set of resources (purple circle) and you want to expand to a larger pool of resources (yellow circle). When an organization grows in an evolutionary way, it primarily focuses on expanding its resources. More audience. More money. This kind of work is not risky because the center of it--the programmatic core--doesn't necessarily have to shift. You just get bigger. In contrast, in a revolution, the center of the circle shifts, often quite dramatically. Even if your new resource pool includes most of the people and funds that you originally had, the programmatic core of the transformed organization is likely way outside of the original purple circle. You have to be willing to jump off the ledge and recenter your programming where you believe your future audience and resources will reside. This is often the hardest part of institutional transformation--being willing and able to listen to the voices that are NOT inside your organization. If someone has been turned off by your organization or is not engaged, incrementalism won't reach them. You have to start where they are, with a whole new premise, to get them involved.

Focus on what matters. Why do political activists hammer on singular, simple messages? Because focus wins the day. If you are starting a revolution to make your facility more welcoming, your programming more edgy, or your audience more diverse, you have to focus JUST on that. Pick one or two goals and repeat them ad nauseum with your team. Don't let secondary concerns delay you from moving forward aggressively to make these things happen. A simple example at our institution had to do with making the facility more welcoming. We heard again and again that the museum was cold and uncomfortable. So we started getting couches donated. The couches didn't match. They looked junky. But they gave visitors a comfortable place to sit, and we started hearing that people felt welcomed in a way they hadn't before. Over time, we are getting more attractive couches that reflect a unified design aesthetic. But we weren't going to wait to solve people's comfort problem until we had the money or the design. We started with couches.

Be rigorous. Especially when working in an experimental or unorthodox way, it can be easy for it to look like you don't have a coherent strategy behind the work you do. Why are there these ugly couches? Why are you holding a pop up museum in a bar? In our case, we've gotten very focused on developing strategic frameworks to back up our approach to community participation, social bridging, and experimentation. We use a clear logic model to relate our activities to their intended outcomes and impacts (here's more about what a logic model is). This allows us both to explain ourselves to external funders and to have clear internal criteria for how we plan and evaluate our projects to ensure that we are moving towards our big institutional goals and vision.

Exploit your size. There are unique advantages to every budget level. Big organizations seem comfortable with this--they make big plays based on their scale. But many small organizations seem to spend too much time trying to emulate big organizations rather than exploiting the opportunity to be more personal, more idiosyncratic, and less bureaucratic. No one opens a small coffeeshop and thinks, "we'll really be successful if we are just like Starbucks." The whole point is to not be Starbucks. Instead of apologizing for the "lack of professionalism" of small institutions, we should celebrate the ways that our programming can lead to stronger engagement on an individual level. My first year at the MAH, I would often say that we are a "no money, no bullshit" operation. We may not have funding for your project, but we won't tie it up in red tape either. You want to have an artist collective sleepover at the museum? Sure. Want to give visitors sledgehammers and invite them to help make a giant metal sculpture? Sounds great. Want to give free admission spontaneously as a gift to visitors who need it? No problem. Just as a large organization can exploit its resources, we can do the same in a different way as a small organization.

Help it spread. At some point, you may personally feel like you no longer want to be a revolutionary, that your time as a risk-taker is over. That's fine. At that point, consider becoming a "space-maker" who provides other people in your organization with the support and the cover to be able to take risks to further the work. I occasionally meet creative directors who note that "all the new ideas have to come from my desk." When I hear that, I realize that those are leaders who are not ready to make space for other risk-takers on their team. The only way that a revolution can shift from a personal goal to a movement is by making space for lots of people to get involved. I first learned about this paradigm of risk-takers and space-makers from Beck Tench, and it has helped me as a manager ever since.

Remember why you got into this. The reason that we do this revolutionary work is in service of a bigger mission--in my case, to help people transform their lives and our community through active participation with art, history, creativity, and culture. Whatever your personal focus, it's worth thinking about whether you are working on a problem that you consider to be truly important. I have been inspired in this thinking by a brilliant speech by mathematician Dick Hamming about what it takes to be a great scientist. Hamming commented that, "The average scientist, so far as I can make out, spends almost all his time working on problems which he believes will not be important and he also doesn't believe that they will lead to important problems." Selling tickets is not an important problem. Building a building is not an important problem. Find a problem that is truly important, and you will find a revolution worth fighting for.

Open Thread: Your Stories of Risk and Reward

What's the biggest professional risk you've taken? What happened after you took the risk? 

In three weeks, Kathleen McLean and I are co-hosting a freewheeling talk show at the American Alliance of Museums conference. The theme is "risk and reward," and we plan to explore both individual and institutional relationships to risk-taking. 

Kathy and I have each spent a lot of time advocating for experimental practice and risk-taking in museums, both as consultants and on staff. We've seen the mixed results--lots of excitement, lots of push back, some progress. For me personally, risk-taking has led to incredible professional opportunities, for which I feel lucky and grateful. I'm particularly indebted to Anna Slafer, my amazing boss at the Spy Museum in the mid-2000s. Anna would kick me under the table when I shared ideas out of turn, yet she also fiercely defended me (and our whole team) so we could do creative, risky work.

But many organizations don't have an Anna. Many people struggle with fears of punishment or marginalization for taking risks. It's hard for me to evaluate the extent to which these fears are well-founded, and whether the climate for risk is changing in the arts sector broadly. 

So I'm curious: what is your experience? Did you or your institution take a risk that got rewarded? Punished? Ignored? 

Please share your story in the comments. 

And if you're coming to Baltimore, please join us on Wednesday May 22 at 10:15 for a lively conversation informed by your stories. 

Seeking Clarity about the Complementary Nature of Social Work and the Arts

When we talk about museums or cultural institutions as vehicles of social and civic change, what does that really mean? Last week I had a conversation that changed my perspective on this question.

I was with two close friends who work in social service organizations focusing on homelessness and criminal justice respectively. We all work for nonprofits. We all care about making a difference in our community. And we each have specific interests in increasing access, connection, and empowerment of marginalized people.

But when you switch from the "why" to the "what" of our work, the similarities end. Here are some of the big differences we noticed:

• Their work involves life-or-death situations. Museum work is mostly non-contact. The consequences of risk-taking and experimentation are incredibly different.
• There is infinite demand for their services, whereas we struggle to generate demand for ours. There will never be enough meals for hungry people or mental health facilities for those who need them. Meanwhile, arts industry leaders worry about "oversupply" of organizations in the face of dwindling demand. 
• Social service providers often find themselves working in a reactive stance to unexpected incidents. Arts organizations can operate on their own timelines and internal values. Those that want to be more relevant often have to push themselves to be work responsively to events outside their domain.

These differences made me realize that even as we talk about arts organizations as vehicles for civic engagement or social change, we have the opportunity (and the necessity) to think of our work in a distinct way. This may sound obvious, but the rhetoric about cultural organizations working in the social sphere often ignores our inherent differences. We champion a historic house museum for hosting a soup kitchen, a children's museum for tackling family wellness in low-income housing, or an arts organization for writing poems with convicts. We talk about these projects as if they were analogous to the work being done by a social service agency, and we wonder where the line between cultural and social work blurs.

This is the wrong analogy and the wrong question. Instead of asking whether we are focusing too little or too much of our attention on social work, we should be asking HOW we can approach the work of community development in a distinctive way.

Looking back at the bulleted list above, every one of the differences between arts organizations and social service organizations presents an opportunity for us to do really interesting, specific work. We CAN take risks with more flexibility than social service agencies. We CAN devote some of our resources to reaching communities with incredible demands. We CAN develop programs that are visionary and unusual because we are not wading in crises to which we must respond.

When the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum hosts a monthly soup kitchen, they are doing it to open up conversations about social justice around food. When the Boston Children's Museum initiated the GoKids wellness program, they did it to empower families to co-create meaningful shared experiences that emphasize health. When my museum brings together homeless and non-homeless volunteers to restore a historic cemetery, we do it to encourage people in our community to look at history and each other with respect. I admire all of these projects, and I also acknowledge that they achieve different goals by different means than social service agencies do.

Cultural organizations have the luxury to do work that supports community development in ways that are more creative, experimental, and yes--supplemental--than social service organizations. The very fact that the work we do is "extra" shouldn't be a downside. We're doing it because we have the unique capacity to do so. We're doing it because we care. We're doing it because that's what "adding value" means.

Facing My Fears with the Work in Progress Exhibition

This is a picture of the largest temporary exhibition gallery in the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History. Our next exhibition is opening in here in two days. And no, we are not about to embark on a Herculean 48-hour blitz to fill it with exhibits. This is pretty much what it will look like when we open on Friday.

Needless to say, this is a scary thing. And even scarier? We planned it this way.

This winter, my museum is trying an experiment called Work in Progress. We're turning over the whole museum to projects that invite visitors to connect with the behind-the-scenes in the making of art and historical research. Our goal with the project is two-fold:

1. To help visitors engage with the creative process as well as the end result. Research shows there is a lot of interest in how art gets made, and we don't often dive into that in museums.
2. To create an installation that changes. I've always been interested in the "perpetual beta" approach, and this project embodies that. We're also curious to see if an evolving project draws people to come back again and again to see how it grows over time. 

I feel great about both of these goals, and I feel even better about the amazing artists, innovators, and historians we're working with to make it happen. That said, this project has really challenged me to question my own expectations and assumptions about how an exhibition "should" look and function.

There are three big worries on my mind:

1. What will visitors think when they walk into an empty gallery? Will they think we are conning them, or that we're lazy, or that the museum has stopped showing anything interesting? Is this a project that is highly appealing in documentation but confusing or unappealing in real time?
2. How do we plan for spaces that will evolve over time? One gallery is opening half-full, with the expectation that additional work with be added over time--but we have no idea of what that work will be or how much space it will take up. It's surprisingly hard to design a space that looks decent from day 1 but can accommodate growth over time.  
3. How do we facilitate visitor experiences in these spaces? What different kinds of tools do our volunteer gallery host and visitor services staff need to help visitors engage and enjoy the process of art- and history-making as opposed to its results?

It's been really good for me to slam up against some of these concerns--especially the first one. It makes me more sympathetic to anyone who is nervous about taking a risk or making a big change. I've known about this project for months, I advocated for it to happen, and I'm still scared. I had to laugh at myself when I got freaked out in a meeting with an artist last week, waving my hands around the gallery saying, "we can't just have NOTHING in here when we open!" Fortunately, he smiled and reminded me, "of course we can."

Of course we can. It's a good feeling to lean into the things that scare you. I feel lucky to be able to do it.

I'm curious what you think about this particular project--ways you think we should be documenting or sharing this work, and ways you think we might communicate with visitors about it. I'm also curious what risks you've taken that you had to confront head-on like a bad morning in the bathroom mirror. Thanks in advance for sharing your comments!

Defining Impact Beyond Attendance Numbers at the MCA Denver

I've always been a bit confused when people talk about the impact of a museum or arts institution as being about "more than numbers." I understand that there are shallow and deep experiences. I understand that some museum offer extraordinary, intimate programs. I understand online vs. onsite. I understand that some shows draw more people than others.

But at the end of the day, attendance is a completely reasonable measuring stick for engagement. Low attendance is often a sign of tepid community involvement or interest. When someone says, "it's not about numbers," I hear "our attendance is inadequate and we want to distract you with this other thing we are doing." In my experience, organizations that are doing well and are proud of their work don't feel the need to justify or compensate for their attendance.

But. Two weeks ago, I had an experience that made me understand and respect a different approach to numbers and impact. I was visiting with Adam Lerner, Director and Chief Animator of the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver. The MCA Denver has had a big impact on the art world with its fresh approach to programming, and it is located in a large city with a vibrant art scene. So I was surprised to hear its annual attendance is about 50,000.

Because Adam's a friend, I could be impolite and ask him about it. He told me the overall goal of the museum and its impact is not so much about attendance inside the building but the extent to which the museum itself is a creative producer whose work infuses the city. Adam and his colleagues are more like a conceptual art collective than arts administrators. They produce work, and they measure success by the extent to which it is seen/discussed/debated/loved/hated--both by people who directly experience it and those who do not. Adam encourages his staff to develop programming as "tight stories that can be shared, even with those who won't attend."

For example, when I was visiting, the MCA was about to host Art Meets Beast, a two-day festival of bison butchering, meals, and lectures that slams together contemporary art and the spirit of the American West in an original way. Adam told me he cares just as much about people who hear about Art Meets Beast and associate with MCA as people who actually attend. It makes sense. His goal is for people to have a new idea about a museum, or art, or the West. He doesn't care what kind of engagement has to happen for them to get the idea.

Adam described his vision for the MCA Denver's impact this way:

I often think about a performance I attended at my college when I was studying in England in 1990. It was early in the school year, email had only recently become available and I had just spent a couple of hours in the college computer lab with other foreign students corresponding with friends back home, composing DOS messages in glowing white text on black screens. In the evening, I walked across the plaza to the auditorium for the performance along with all the other foreign students who had nothing else going on. The show was billed as a comedy and it started off more or less like a stand-up comedy act. But the performer gradually became more and more active and theatrical. He also became increasingly lewd and at some point began shouting manically at the audience, building up to a finale, where he turned his back on the audience, dropped his trousers and bent over so that only his bare, white behind was visible under the spotlight on stage. Then, as if trying to prove that he was capable of going far too far, he took out a Roman candle, shoved it in his butt, and lit the fuse, so sparks and flares began flying out towards the stupefied audience. 

While this was happening, all I could think was that those white flares flying through the air would become hundreds of email messages launched from the computer lab the next day. The association was instantaneous, as if the recurring bursts from his butt were electronic messages themselves containing the words: “You wouldn’t believe what I saw last night…” And the insight I had at that moment stayed with me. 

Now, over twenty years later, I think about that event as a kind of ghastly myth at the origin of what I am continually trying to create at the museum. I am interested in the way that art and every other creative act have the power to ignite stories. Beyond the visitors who directly experience the art and the imagination of the museum, I care as much about the people who are see our signals from a distance, who are thereby inspired and energized by the sense that there is something extraordinary happening here.

It sounds unorthodox. It sounds wild. But it also sounds like a logically consistent reason NOT to focus on attendance.

I wish there were more organizations like MCA Denver, with thoughtful and powerful definitions of success that may or may not include attendance. What drives me crazy is the folks who say "it's not about the numbers," but don't have a Roman candle metaphor or other set of criteria for how they define their goals. If you are really about kids growing up with your museum, measure frequency of attendance over time. If you are about adults reenergizing their lives through creative play, measure happiness and workshop attendance. If you are about people getting in touch with local history, measure archive research requests and visits to local historic sites.

This whole experience got me thinking about how we measure success at our museum in Santa Cruz. For me, attendance is a big factor. Our vision is to be a "thriving, central gathering place." Accomplishing that goal requires many diverse people who actively participate in our space with each other. It means people becoming members and feeling community ownership. It means producing dynamic programming that is relevant to Santa Cruz County.

But we also have a social mission to build social capital through bridging experiences at and beyond the museum. For us, the crux questions are often, "did you meet someone new [through a museum experience]?" "Did you encounter something that surprised you?" Those questions address our goal of bringing people from diverse walks of life together. And one of my jobs is to find a way to describe, measure, and trumpet that as much as we do attendance or membership figures.

What's the Roman candle metaphor for your measure of success?

Four Unusual Professional Development Events in 2013

Ever wish for a low-cost, energizing professional development experience where you can work intensely with diverse colleagues in a risk-tolerant environment?

I'm involved in four upcoming events that I'd love for you to consider attending. Three of them are being hosted at my museum, and one at a mystery location.

1. You Can't Do That in Museums Camp - July 10-12, 2013. I've always loved helping run events where participants can really work together on something meaty and challenging... and this one is going to be awesome. In July of 2013, the MAH will host our first You Can't Do That in Museums Camp (or better name to be suggested by you), inviting 80 creative people to collaborate on an experimental exhibition. This camp will be a 2.5 day event at which participants work in teams with pre-selected permanent collection objects to create an exhibition full of intriguing, unusual, risky experiences. If you've ever wanted to design an object-based exhibit that really pushed the boundaries, this is the event for you. Registration will be $150 and by application only. We will also offer a half-day series of workshops on July 10 for a wider audience for $50. Yes you can sleepover at the museum to heighten the insanity and reduce the cost. No you don't have to be a museum professional to participate. Yes you can apply now. Please do.
2. The Arts Dinner-vention Project - date TBD. This one was cooked up by Barry Hessenius, former director of the California Arts Council and public art blogger extraordinaire. Barry is asking the universe to send him names of "unheralded arts sector leaders" to be considered for an all-star dinner party in 2013. I'm on the small committee of folks who will be selecting the winners based on your nominations. Barry is accepting nominations through November 20, and anyone who submits names will be entered into a random drawing for a free trip to join in on the fantasy dinner party. Read more about the project and how to participate here. 
3. Ze Frank Weekend - Jan 12-13, 2013. We're working with participatory online artist Ze Frank on an exhibition at the MAH this winter that features the missions, creations, and explorations of his current web series, A Show. Because this work is evolving and involves people creating stuff all over the world, we decided it would be good to have a weekend where that wildness can find a home at our museum. I know very little about what will happen on this weekend, but rest assured it will be strange and geeky and very different from a typical museum gathering.
4. Loyalty Lab workshop - Jan 29, 2013. We have been working for a few months now on a project called Loyalty Lab to deepen our relationships with frequent MAH visitors. On Jan. 29, we'll be holding a workshop in the afternoon to discuss our experiments to date and brainstorm with participants about how we can all find creative, low-tech ways to reward and celebrate our visitors. We would love to share that conversation with anyone in the museum/arts/culture world who has an interest. We will have some whip-smart game designers on hand to push our thinking. We can accommodate about 25 people at the workshop - please email me if you are interested in participating. 

Here's to a new year full of experimenting, learning, and sharing. And by "new year" I mean year six of Museum 2.0. I know; it's crazy.

Dreaming of Perpetual Beta: Making Museums More Incremental

When I started this blog in 2006, I made a multi-media introduction to the concept of "museum 2.0" based on Tim O'Reilly's four key elements of Web 2.0:

1. Venue as content platform instead of content provider: the museum becomes a stage on which professionals and amateurs can curate, interpret, and remix artifacts and information.
2. Architecture of participation with network effects: each person who participates contributes something meaningful and lasting. Visitors' interactions allow them both to personalize their museum experiences and to engage with other visitors through their shared interests. The museum gets better the more people use it.
3. Perpetual beta: the museum is always in flux, incrementally releasing new versions, refining procedures, and responding to audience desires.
4. Flexible, modular support for distributed products: inviting people to plug-in their own creations, whether those be DIY audio tours, pop up events, or co-created exhibitions.

From 2006-2011, I focused almost entirely on #1 and #2, playing with ways to invite visitors to actively participate with professionals to co-create powerful experiences around museum objects. 

But in the past year and a half as a museum director, I find myself increasingly interested in #3 and #4. In a lot of ways, our successful turnaround at the MAH has been driven by both embracing incremental change and opening up clear opportunities for community organizations and individuals to "plug" their cultural brilliance into our space. We're using #3 and #4 to achieve #1 and #2 in the Museum 2.0 playbook.

At first, our enthusiasm for incremental change and flexibility was a reaction to a tough financial position. When I started at the MAH last May, we had absolutely no money. We also had a vision to be a thriving, central gathering place for our community. The only way to reconcile our resources with our goals was to start doing whatever we could to start nudging in the direction of our dreams. We scrounged for free couches. We invited local artists and community groups to perform. We designed events and interactive exhibits on ten dollar budgets. We experimented with everything--hours, front desk staffing structure, community programs. We knew we weren't doing everything at the desired quality level. But we got it going anyway.

A year and a half later, we are in a much more stable financial position... and we've tried to internalize a mindset of perpetual beta and modular support for community collaboration. As things got better financially, as we learned more about what worked and didn't, we replaced furniture and enhanced our exhibitions. We upped the budgets and the scale of the projects while maintaining an iterative approach that relies on prototyping and low-tech experiments.

I feel strongly that as long as we have a social mission and a strong desire to fulfill that mission, we should do everything we can every step of the way to attack it, even if that means starting with something simplistic, messy, or uncertain. We make room for interns and artists and people who walk in the door with crazy ideas. There are plenty of times I have silenced the exhibit designer in my brain who wanted everything just so, or the museum director who wanted to make our visitors happy all the time. If we're going to move forward, we have to be able to try things in a risk-tolerant environment.

One of the things that often made me uncomfortable as a consultant was the extent to which museums, and their funding vehicles, often make perpetual beta an impossibility. The exhibit is planned for years and must open perfect on day 1. The grant is for a three-year educational program whose curriculum has to be locked in from the start. If we can't have a perfect couch designed by Frank Gehry, we won't give visitors couches at all.

The result is damaging for museum professionals and visitors alike. For museum professionals, it creates a falsely elevated sense of risk and stress around projects that, let's face it, don't have to be perfect out of the gate. No one is going to die if you change a label a few days after opening. No one will be seriously injured if you invite a dance company in and they do something strange. No one will suffer if you put out a prototype--or two, or ten--before finalizing a design. We need to build experimentation into our work processes if we want our work to evolve over time.

For museum visitors, the damage is even worse. How many brilliant sparks of ideas never get to the public because we falsely assume it will take too many resources to get them off the ground? How can we show people that we truly care about making our institutions welcoming, or challenging, or fun, or creative, if we need two years and eight approvals to put out some couches and paintbrushes?

I'm not suggesting that museum professionals shouldn't strive for excellence. What I've seen--in Web 2.0 and elsewhere--is that real excellence comes from incrementally pushing towards a big audacious goal. If you can get it right on the first try or with the resources you have, then your dreams may not be big enough.

What are you working towards, and how you are iterating and experimenting to get there?

Voting on Art and its Surprising Consequences

What happens when you let visitors vote on art?

Let's look at the statistics from three big participatory projects that wrapped up recently. Each of these invited members of the public to vote on art in a way that had substantive consequences--big cash prizes awarded, prestige granted, exhibitions offered.

• ArtPrize, the grandaddy of visitor voting, just completed its fourth year in Grand Rapids, Michigan. This citywide festival showcased work by 1,517 artists competing for a $200,000 top cash prize awarded by public vote. An estimated 400,000 people attended the event over two weeks, of which 47,000 cast at least one vote. Voters had to register to vote, but there were no restrictions on how many artworks a voter could "like."
• The Brooklyn Museum just finished the public stage of GO, a "community-curated open studio project." GO invited people to visit artists' studios throughout Brooklyn over one weekend and to nominate up to three favorites; the top ten will be considered for an upcoming group show at the museum. 1,708 artists participated. An estimated 18,000 people attended, of which 4,929 nominated artists for the show. Note that in this case, people had to register to vote AND check in at at least five studios to be eligible to nominate artists for the show. Full stats here.  
• The Hammer Museum recently awarded the first annual Mohn Award, a $100,000 prize that will be awarded biannually to an artist in the "Made in LA" biennial exhibition based on public vote. Five artists out of sixty in the show were short-listed by a jury. 50,000 people visited the exhibition, and 2,051 voted for their favorite artist of the five. Fascinating (and long) article about the Mohn Award here.

In each of these examples, the press and public dialogue mostly revolved around the idea of public voting for art. But when it came to the actual experience, the vast majority of participants and attendees did NOT vote. In Grand Rapids, 12% cast a ballot. In Brooklyn, 27% made it through the voting process. In LA, only 4% voted. 

What's going on here? Why are hundreds of thousands of people flocking to Grand Rapids for ArtPrize but not choosing to vote? Why did the Hammer Museum have record summer attendance if people weren't coming for the thing that was being flaunted--the opportunity to vote?

There are surely some people who didn't want to go through the hassle of registering and learning the rules of voting. There are others who may not have felt "qualified" to select winners and losers. But my sense is that the biggest reason people didn't vote is that for most visitors, voting wasn't the point. The point was to be part of an exciting, dynamic, surprising new way to engage with art.

Or at least, that's what I experienced when I went to ArtPrize in 2010. I was blown away by the social experience provoked by the unorthodox format. Voting on individual artworks turned each one into a social object worthy of lengthy conversation. Talking with Shelley Bernstein at the Brooklyn Museum, it sounds like GO comparably sparked a huge number of community conversations in artists' studios around Brooklyn. When the public is invited to decide, they may not take on that power and responsibility... but they may show up in droves to see what the fuss is about.

This leads me to two conflicting perspectives on voting in exhibitions:

1. Voting on substantive outcomes (money, exhibitions) is good because it provokes engagement with objects, artists, and fellow visitors. Whether you tick the ballot or not, the opportunity to do so opens up a conversation about what's good, what's bad, and what's art.  
2. Voting on substantive outcomes is dangerous because not enough people participate to make serious decisions in good faith. The Hammer is reconsidering the public vote component of the Mohn Award after only 2,051 people determined who would win $100,000. And in Brooklyn, Shelley Bernstein noted that the data generated during GO was insufficient to generate statistical significance in a "wisdom of the crowds decision-making" format. In the case of ArtPrize, founder Rick DeVos has explicitly said that the event is a creative act designed to engage people in "conversation" about art. And yet they have added juried prizes alongside the public ones to diversify that conversation.

How do you weigh the positive engagement that comes with community dialogue against the ethics of voting for outcomes that matter deeply to the artists involved?