Sustaining Innovation Book Discussion Part 1: What Does it Take Innovate Naturally and Frequently?

This is the first in a series of posts about Paul Light's book Sustaining Innovation: Creating Nonprofit and Government Organizations that Innovate Naturally. This post is my review of the book. Next Tuesday, we'll experiment with an "open thread" post, in which you are encouraged to share your own experiences (positive and negative) with innovation in organizations.

The longer I consult with museums and cultural institutions, the more time I spend peering into people's eyes, wondering: do folks here feel able to innovate? Is this a place where staff members are comfortable taking risks? What divides an organization that is ready to experiment from one that is not?

Sustaining Innovation is a thoughtful, comprehensive book that has helped me think more concretely about these questions and their answers. It's an atypical book about organizational innovation for two reasons:

1. It focuses on non-profits and government agencies instead of for-profit companies.
2. It focuses not on single acts of innovation, but on the organizational conditions and management strategies that support natural, frequent innovations.

What differentiates innovation in non-profits and government agencies from that in businesses? Light argues that while in business, any new idea that generates revenue can be an innovation, a new idea or technique is only valuable for a non-profit organization if it contributes to that organization's ability to deliver on its public mission. He suggests that it's often too expensive (and distracting from mission) for organizations to get on the hamster wheel of pursuing new ideas for their own sake. Instead, Light defines innovation as "an act that challenges the prevailing wisdom as it creates public value." It only matters if it matters.

To write the book, Light selected and studied 26 innovative non-profits and government agencies across Minnesota during the mid-90s. Some are primarily "what" innovators--changing the prevailing wisdom about what their organization should do or whom it should serve. Others are "how" innovators--using unusual techniques to accomplish traditional goals. All operate "just beyond the possible" to achieve their missions and serve their clientele. Of the 26, two are museumish: the Minnesota Zoo and the Walker Art Center, and three are arts organizations: Artspace, In the Heart of the Beast Puppet and Mask Theater and Theatre de la Jeune Lune. The rest are schools, mental health facilities, housing, social justice, economic development, and environmental organizations.

Because the focus of the book is on organizational structure and not on specific acts or events, Light spends almost no time describing each organization or its particular innovations. Instead, he uses illustrative examples from each to support broad theses about leadership styles, internal structures, and operational strategies. These pick-and-choose examples can feel a bit disorienting and manipulative, since it's hard to draw your own conclusions with little context about the organization being mentioned. But overall, I found his approach effective and strongly preferable to the common alternative--an anthology of case studies devoid of connections or overriding conclusions.

So what did I learn?

There should be an entire book about innovative failures. By far the most educational stories in the book concern the Phoenix Group, a housing/economic development non-profit that imploded over the course of Light's research. Part of me wonders whether the organization was actually built to "sustain" anything (it may have been a deliberately unsustainable business model). Phoenix was an over-innovator: they said yes to everything, intentionally ignored or eschewed basic accounting and management principles, and pursued flexibility to the extreme. They were highly exposed to risk, and when one project failed, it took down the whole organization. Great food for thought about the negatives of treating internal structures (especially related to finances) as unrelated or adversarial to "real" mission work.

Innovation is for everyone. Light hammers again and again on the fact that the capacity to have good ideas is not limited to designated "creatives" or executives. Much of the book focuses on how to cultivate good ideas throughout an organization. Many of the institutions profiled have formal processes for inviting ideas from across the institution, including innovation investment funds in which promising new ideas can receive some startup money to get going. In a few of the schools and community organizations, this openness to ideas extends to students/clients/audiences who are given significant opportunities to propose, evaluate, and pursue new experiments.

CEOs of innovating organizations are not grandiose heroes; they are visionary structuralists. The leaders Light profiles work tirelessly to push authority downward and cultivate innovation at all levels, creating structures that reward good ideas with clarity and transparency. They find ways to budget, schedule, and structure organizations so that management is an asset rather than a hindrance. These managers, directors, and leaders spend their time encouraging internal collaboration rather than furthering their own pet projects. They shepherd the mission, make clear decisions, attend to outside forces... and they go home for dinner.

Trust and follow-through are really, really important. Empty promises about collaboration, risk-taking, or permission to fail are far more dangerous than no promises at all. In a surprising turn, Light comments that organizations in which leaders and staff talk about "faith"--in each other, in the mission, in a higher power--seem particularly effective at supporting each other through the stresses of innovation. But where faith isn't discussed, frequent cross-departmental communication suffices. Leaders in innovative organizations "communicate to excess" with staff, especially in encouraging, rewarding, and celebrating innovative practice. For example, the Minnesota Zoo has a comprehensive system for responding to staff suggestions and complaints, with a specific timeline for acknowledging, considering, and acting on the ideas (all while maintaining the employee's desired level of confidentiality).

The hardest thing for an innovating institution is figuring out "how to say no and why to say yes." This was my favorite takeaway from the book. As Light puts it, "the challenge for an innovating organization is to distinguish between compassion and loyalty to its employees on the one hand and toughness toward the ideas they produce on the other." It's difficult to cheerlead staff and make rigorous decisions at the same time. The best internal investment fund programs have formalized internal vetting systems in which diverse members of the staff (and sometimes, clients) are able to evaluate and prioritize new ideas. Light calls out four common questions used to evaluate new ideas:

1. Is this faithful to who we are? (mission)
2. Can we do what we plan? (capacity)
3. Will what we do actually make a difference in outcomes? (impact/workability)
4. Can we get the dollars we need to act? (resources, secondary concern)

Light notes that the fourth of these is a distant follower to the other three. If it's a good idea that's right for the mission and for the organization, leaders at innovative institutions don't tend to worry about getting the funds to make it happen.

The challenge of "how to say no and why to say yes" applies to funding as well as ideas. Both when desperate and very successful, organizations may be offered funding that is not in the best interest of the core mission. I was really impressed by the stories of organizations that said no to grants that would either lead to program creep or come with strings attached that might unproductively constrain the organization. Notably, one organization, Chicanos Latinos Unidos En Servico (CLUES), gives back leftover grant money when their projects come in under budget to keep their focus tight and their funding relationships disciplined.

Merit pay does not promote innovation, and may be generally unfit for non-profits and government agencies. Light closely examined merit pay and pay-for-performance programs and found no correlation between them and innovation. From his perspective, these programs don't work in non-profits for a few reasons, but the primary one is practical. The money available for merit pay programs is usually pretty small and often threatened by outside, non-performance-related events like salary freezes. If you can only give someone a 5% bump for their creative merit, that may not be enough to have significant impact, especially if that person isn't in it for the money. Instead, Light suggests it is more important that organizations measure outcomes and frequently celebrate innovative acts--both successes and failures.

Innovative organizations are stressful places to work. An innovating institution is relentlessly, sometimes thanklessly, pushing against the status quo. It can be fun and exciting, but it is rarely an easy place to be. Light notes that it's less stressful to work for a "how" innovating organization than a "what" innovator, since "how" innovators aren't trying to change the core principle of the mission, just accomplish it in new ways. For example, the Dowling School, a "what innovator" that transitioned from being a school for children with disabilities to being an integrated magnet, has to constantly fight to demonstrate that children of all kinds can get high-quality educations by working alongside students who are diverse in physical and mental ability. In contrast, Cyrus Math/Science/Technology Elementary School is a less stressful "how" innovator whose innovations primarily focus on how the school is governed and how teachers do their work. Many organizations transition in and out of being innovative over time, and staff stress tolerance and fatigue can be a big contributor to how long an institution sustains innovation.

In the end, Light says it takes four characteristics--trust, honesty, rigor, and faith--to sustain innovation. It's not about money. It's not about size. Light profiles organizations with all kinds of disfunctions--executive turnover, bureaucratic stagnation, chaotic funding, competitive market forces. You don't need to be perfect to be innovative. You just need to focus on mission, support the heck out of your colleagues, and make clear decisions. Easy, right?

Open Letter to Arianna Huffington, Edward Rothstein, and Many Other Museum Critics

Note: This post is written in response to recent articles about museums by Arianna Huffington (on museums and new media) and Ed Rothstein (on museums and ethnic identity).

Dear Mr. Rothstein and Ms. Huffington,

It's not about you.

I appreciate that you write about museums, and by doing so, publicize their work and efforts. I appreciate that you write thoughtfully about changes in the cultural sector. But I'm a bit frustrated by the short-sightedness of your vision with regard to the role that museums serve in society. In short, I think you focus too much on your personal experience and preferences, not acknowledging the fact that you represent an incredibly small and rare slice of museums' intended audience. It's not about you. It's about culture, learning, and community space--for everyone.

There are two basic assumptions you've made lately that I think are flawed:

1. the idea that (art) museums are fundamentally for a contemplative experience, and that techniques that distract from classical forms of contemplation are therefore bad.
2. the idea that it's ok for (American) museums to have a Euro- and white-centric approach to interpretation, but not ok for them to center on minority identities or approaches.

Myth #1: Museums are about contemplation.

In October, Rothstein bemoaned the way that mobile phones have distracted people from looking at art. Last week, Huffington mused on the same question with regard to social media, worrying that museums might lose their power as secret gardens of idle aesthetic pleasure in a world overrun with media.

While both these articles have some reasonable points in them, the underlying argument reflects a bias about what museums are for. Museums are not fundamentally for "contemplation" any more than they are for "celebration" or "exploration" or "challenge." Looking at the data on museum use, very few visitors come alone to sit in quiet reverence and soak in the beauty. As John Falk's research has shown, these "spiritual pilgrims" represent a much smaller percentage of museum audiences than those who come for social experiences, to learn something, or to have novel experiences.

When critics coo over museums as aesthetic temples, I get nervous. These same folks prefer their galleries sparsely used and quiet. They are nostalgic for a type of museum experience that is frankly both endangered and dangerous to the long-term future of museums. They remind me of Catholics who miss the old days when everything was in Latin and ignore the fact that the antiquated rituals they long for also led to serious erosion of use and value of the churches themselves. This nostalgia threatens museums' abilities to engage younger, more diverse audiences. I understand why connoisseurs of classical museum experiences can feel threatened--but that doesn't mean they get to arbitrate what makes a quality museum experience in an age when museums have gotten serious about universal access, inclusion, and diverse learning styles.

New interpretative techniques don't threaten the fundamental value of museum experiences; most of these tools thoughtfully create new opportunities for access, enjoyment, and understanding. I've heard many people rant about how "no one looks at the artifacts anymore! They just snap photos through their phones!" but you could equivalently argue that these digital memories help people form relationships with artifacts and images beyond a single fleeting visit. I appreciate Huffington's argument that we should avoid "social media being the point of social media," but I also worry when she writes that "the wrong kind of connection can actually disconnect us from the aesthetic experience." I have a very hard time imagining that anyone, even an incredibly knowledgeable media-maker such as Huffington, can fairly arbitrate what is and isn't the "right" kind of connection. If you gasp when you see an artifact, I snap a photo, and another visitor texts her friend about the experience, is one of us doing it wrong?

It's time to put to rest the idea that there is a basic adversarial relationship between technology and quality museum experiences. The important thing is not that a museum employs these tools or those. What's important is that museums relentlessly pursue strategies that allow them to be as relevant, useful, and essential to their communities as possible.

Myth #2: White-centric is OK, other-centric is not.

This myth is primarily put forward in Edward Rothstein's recent rant about identity museums, though its bias is reflected in Myth #1 as well (since the contemplative temple vision of museums is innately wrapped up with a Euro-centric vision of what museums are for). Rothstein criticizes a show on Muslim scientific discoveries and others for being ineffectual, revisionist messes. While there's some validity to his argument that exhibitions that scream, "Me!" are often uninteresting, Rothstein seriously understates the extent to which the majority of European and American museums have an unrelenting, white, wealthy "Me!" encrusted on their walls.

Rothstein admits that "even the great imperial museums of Vienna, London, and Paris .. reflect the power and grandeur of their creators." I'd argue that he should replace the word "even" with "especially." Imagine being a young woman walking into a science museum in which Marie Curie is the only female name chiseled into the wall of heroes. Imagine being a member of an indigenous tribe that is treated solely as ancient history in an anthropological museum. Imagine being poor, or an immigrant, or anyone who isn't part of the great colonizing story of most museums and historic houses. It would get pretty damn tiring seeing all those "Me!"s that belong to someone else.

I'm not suggesting that we move to a world in which we have a rainbow of identity museums for every background and interest group. Instead, I think it would be incredibly useful if we would acknowledge the inherent biases that come with any design process and figure out how to transcend them. I'm thinking of projects like Dialogue in the Dark, in which blind guides lead visitors through a pitch-black, multi-sensory environment, or places like the Wing Luke Asian Museum, which strikes an incredible balance between telling a uniquely ethnic story and welcoming non-Asians into it. I'm thinking of the tensions and lessons that come when an institution authentically engages with new audiences, as in the St. Louis Science Center's YES program or the Glasgow Open Museum. I'm thinking of places like the American Visionary Art Museum, whose educational mission is to "expand the definition of a worthwhile life."

So, my professional, critical, and museum-loving friends, let's get beyond these out-of-date ideas about museums as temples to the past and start figuring out how to make them even better for the future.

Happy New Year! Two Free Books! And Watermelon!

Dear Museum 2.0 readers,

2010 was a big year for me. I published The Participatory Museum in March (with help from many of you!) and spent the rest of the year traveling to give workshops and presentations related to its content. While I did learn a ton from my experiences, especially in far-flung places and small museums, it was also exhausting. Thank you so much for hosting me, picking me up at airports, taking me to karaoke bars, showing me secret parts of your museums, helping me find vegetarian food, and sharing your ideas, dreams, and schemes for the future.

A quick top five list of amazing experiences in no particular order:

1. ArtPrize, the democratic art festival in Grand Rapids that blew my mind
2. Taiwan. Everything about it. Especially the stinky tofu.
3. Workshop with rural librarians in Pendleton, Oregon. Fascinating and fun to stretch out from museums for a bit.
4. The Brazos Valley African American Museum in Bryan, Texas. A community museum with serious heart and essential value.
5. Explora (Albuquerque, NM). The most peaceful, personal, emergent science center I've ever visited.

For those who are interested, the book has sold 2,300 copies, and 17,000 people have read some portion of it online in the free edition. I'm excited to see how the book helps people move from ideas to action (and I sincerely hope it isn't languishing unread on too many shelves).

As a thank you for all of your friendship, inspiration, and support in 2010, I'm giving away two copies of the book. They have slight water damage on the back cover from a plant in my house. I prefer to think of this as "personalized character." If you feel the same way and you'd like one of them, drop a comment here and I'll pick two people at random in the next week.

My husband Sibley and I have a tradition of making silly New Year's videos to share our lives with friends, family, and colleagues. This year's video tells the story of The Participatory Museum's sequel and exposes some deadly secrets we uncovered this year in the worlds' museums (Denmark! Taiwan! Barcelona! Milwaukee!) and at ArtPrize. I hope you enjoy it. Here's to the start of a year in which I hope we will all move a little closer to our wildest dreams.

Improving Family Exhibitions by Co-Creating with Children

Every once in a while I come across a project I wish I could have included in The Participatory Museum. Shh... it's a Secret!, an exhibition produced with schoolchildren at the Wallace Collection in London, is a lovely example of co-creation that demonstrates the multiple benefits of inviting audience members to act as partners in arts organizations.

Here are the basics. For one year, a group of twelve schoolchildren age 9-11 were invited to work with staff at the Wallace Collection to develop a family-focused exhibition using the museum's artifacts. With the support of museum staff, children developed the exhibition theme, selected the objects, designed the space, developed interpretative materials (including interactives), managed the budget, raised sponsorship, created press and marketing materials, put on the opening party, led interpretative tours, and trained museum guides. The exhibition was open for 54 days and was visited by 14,000 people. You can read a full report on the exhibition process, including lots of quotes from the young curators, staff, and educators involved, here [pdf]. You can also watch some lovely footage of the children showing off their favorite objects along with staff reflecting on the process here.

Pouring through these materials, I was struck by several key elements of this project that made it work. While the staff who led the project cheerfully commented that they didn't know what they were doing when they started, the process they ended up with bears remarkable similarity to other successful co-creative efforts, like the Wing Luke Asian Museum's community exhibition process or the Oakland Museum's Days of the Dead project.

What made Shh... it's a Secret! a success?

• It started with a real institutional need. The Learning Staff wanted to develop a family-friendly exhibition, and they couldn't figure out what to focus on. They decided to ask children, and the project was born. The exhibition had a real story and theme determined by the young curators. It wasn't just "here's what kids like at the Wallace Collection"--it was a real exhibition designed by the community it was intended to serve.
• The process was professional. My favorite part of the report is the clear expectations set out for the students, museum staff, and the school (page 7). While the staff did guide students through the exhibition development process, the students had serious responsibilities and lived up to professional expectations. Even without knowing exactly how the process would go, the museum staff set themselves up for success by treating the young curators as respected partners.
• Everybody learned something. While the exhibition report disproportionately focuses on the learning value of the experience for the children involved (reasonable considering they developed the exhibition during school hours), the staff at the museum learned quite a lot about designing for and with children. As Learning Director Emma Bryant commented, "The exhibition is much more subtle than I think we would have done if we had done it by ourselves for children."
• The project wasn't isolated to one department of the museum. Because the children were organized into teams (design, interpretation, finance, marketing), they intersected with many staff members across the museum. This created opportunities for institution-wide learning about working with children and understanding family audiences. A curatorial assistant, Rebecca Wallis, reflected that "their creative imaginations allowed me to see the collections in a new light. From the interesting objects they chose, not the usual well-known pieces, to the way they described them in their own words, not museum speak!" The exhibition report includes both successes and challenges of the project from multiple perspectives--children, staff, parents, teachers.
• The exhibition reflects the particular interests and abilities of children while maintaining high quality. Judging from the videos, the exhibition was well-designed, well-lit, and generally in keeping with others at the Wallace Collection. This was not a poor man's "community gallery;" it was a real show. From the limited view on the Web, I found the artifacts novel (who doesn't love a desk with secret compartments?) and the interactives that connected to the objects smart and appealing. These young curators really made 18th century design, art, and armory accessible and intriguing. I loved the mannequins you could use to understand the relative positions of people in a complex painting, and the hats you could try on to feel what it was like to wear a hidden metal protective cap under your fashionably floppy chapeau. As a lover of audience participation, I was particularly taken by the "souvenir tree," which invited visitors to emulate a woman in a painting carving a message into a tree by writing their own secrets on postcards and putting them in a box on a graphic tree on the wall.
• The partnership was a manageable starting point for future collaborations. The museum worked with St. Vincent's school because it was just down the road from the museum, making it easy for the children to meet weekly throughout the year at either site to work on the project. While the museum and the school didn't have a strong history of collaboration, this project seemed reasonable enough to try. The project was carefully designed to achieve related but different goals for each institution--for the museum, to learn more about children and generate an exhibition, and for the school, to support children's educational development through a novel opportunity. The museum and school are now planning future projects together, including a youth advisory board for the museum and some shared professional development opportunities across museum staff and teachers at St. Vincent's.
• The project was well-documented. The Wallace Collection folks did the little things that matter--shooting photos and video throughout the process--as well as the big things--writing a report that included multiple stakeholders. While the exhibition report could certainly be more rigorous in terms of evaluation, I appreciated the focus not only on the children's experience but that of museum staff, school staff, and parents. To me, the group most lacking from the report is the general audience. While there is some reporting about audience numbers and visitor comments, there isn't a lot of content about how people responded to the exhibition. There is an appendix with the full visitor survey, but it was administered with only a handful of folks.

Rather than write more, I urge to you to read the Wallace Collection report and enjoy the story of an institution thoughtfully engaging with community members as partners for the mutual benefit of everyone involved. Here's to many more such projects!

And by the way, I learned about this project through a blog comment by Maria Gilbert. If you know about great projects we should be discussing, please share!

Six Museum-Related Blogs You Might Not Know About That Are Really Good

Need some new inspiration in your feed reader? Here are six little-known blogs I've enjoyed reading this year. I believe that the museum blogosphere is still underdeveloped and there's lots of room for people to share their inspiration, experience, and ideas. I hope next year at this time, all six on this list will still be going strong and accompanied by a chorus of new voices.

1. Asking Audiences. For a year now, Peter Linett and his friends at Slover-Linett Strategies have been blogging thoughtfully about connecting with arts audiences in new ways. While this blog started by focusing on audience research, topics include subjectivity, participation, innovation, and culture shifts. Peter is a fabulous writer, and this blog has become one of my favorites. It's a pleasure to read and it always gives me something to think about.
2. Jumper. This is a new blog written by Diane Ragsdale as part of the Arts Journal suite. Diane is still getting her "blog legs" and the posts are a bit haphazard, but she's one of the most brilliant minds in arts innovation, and I can't wait to see where this blog goes. If you need a good reason to read her blog, sit down for an afternoon with this incredible talk she gave in 2008 at an arts marketing summit and prepare to be blown away.
3. Useum. Want something a little geekier? When anyone asks me who's doing great work blending online and onsite experiences in museums, I send them to Beck Tench at the Museum of Life and Science. When anyone asks me who's being thoughtful and analytical about social media in museums, I send them to Beck Tench. When any wants to learn how to draw great stick figures... you get the idea. The Useum blog is more of an idea-dump than a public exposition, so it can be a bit confusing to read. But it's worth it for the opportunity to get inside the brain of a phenomenally creative person.
4. The Museum of the Future. Across the Atlantic in the Netherlands, Jasper Visser has been chronicling some of the truly exciting experiments he and his colleagues have been doing as they develop the national history museum for their country. The posts are infrequent, but where else are you going to learn about history vending machines?
5. Thinking about Exhibits. A new blog from an experienced developer, Ed Rodley at the Boston Museum of Science. There have only been a few posts thus far, but his humorous writing style, knowledge of the craft, and far-reaching influences will appeal to anyone interested in the exhibit development process.
6. Poesy-Praxis. One last new blog, this time from Jaime Kopke, the smart cookie behind the Denver Community Museum. Jaime's been pointing to intriguing design projects in museums and on the Web with short, informative posts. I hope she keeps it up--I know I'll keep coming back for a dose of the unusual.

What blogs would you recommend? I'm especially interested in those that might be under-the-radar or a bit out of the mainstream.

Parents Talking with Parents: A Simple, Successful Discussion Board at the Children's Museum of Pittsburgh

On a recent trip to the Children's Museum of Pittsburgh, I noted a discussion board in the "Nursery" gallery. The design is nothing special: a question printed on construction paper with a bunch of post-its and pens for visitors to respond. But the board is excellent, and I could see that instantly from a quick read.

What makes this discussion board stand out?

• The questions are specific, personal, and written to elicit responses that will be useful to other parents and caregivers.
• People take the questions seriously and write interesting, descriptive, diverse responses.
• People feel compelled to comment on each other's comments, writing things like "ditto" or "Get over it!" with arrows pointing to other comments.

The questions fuel the high-quality visitor response. The questions are written for parents and caregivers to share tips, ideas, and stories with each other. The question this month is "What are your tips for traveling with an infant or toddler?" Looking at the board, I saw several specific, unique suggestions like:

Use Google Maps to find a park(s) along the way. A short break to run/swing/etc. is good for all. Look for elementary schools just off highway.

and

Drive @ night: -go during their longest sleep time -split driving w/ someone and take turns napping -You'll be tired the next day but getting there faster is worth it!

This post-it had another one next to it with an arrow and a "Yes!" written on it.

There were also funny ideas, like "Grandma in the back seat," as well as a healthy debate about the merits of DVD players. I didn't see a single off-topic comment, and while the board wasn't overflowing, it was certainly well-used.

Yvonne Atkinson, the Early Childhood Specialist who runs the Nursery discussion board, shared with me a few favorite questions from the many years she's been running the board:

"What was the best conversation you've ever had with your child?"

"How do you feel about your child playing with toy guns or combative toys like swords and knives?"

"What have you found out about yourself from being a parent?"

"What's the oddest food combination you've ever seen your child try?"

Yvonne told me that some questions fall flat--those that are too involved and require a complex response, as well as some that just receive generic answers. She's found great questions from her training in early childhood development, parenting magazines, and the occasional visitor comment that can be translated into a new question. Yvonne has been collecting the questions and some of the best answers for the past eight years, and she keeps refining and adding new ones as time goes on.

I firmly believe that questions work best when they have a real "listener" on the other end. While I'm sure a board with a question like "What's your favorite thing about being a parent?" would receive some heart-warming responses, it wouldn't be as useful as this board is. I always ask staff members who are writing questions, "Who cares about the answer to this question?" In some cases, it might be the institution or staff. For the Nursery discussion board, it's other adult visitors to the Children's Museum. You get the sense reading the question that someone needs your advice, and if you've figured something out that works for you and your child, you want to share.

Every adults who takes a child to a Children's Museum cares about his or her identity as a caregiver. They want to do a good job of it; it's part of the reason they came. To me, this simple by-parents-for-parents board is a great way to serve an important constituency of the Children's Museum--adults.

This is a participatory comment board in a true sense. The institution facilitates the space and tools to allow visitors to provide information to each other. The information is as diverse as the adults who visit the museum, and different answers are useful for different readers. The museum doesn't have to have all the answers. It just has to host the space for the conversation.

What's the next step? The Nursery is changing, and Yvonne is using questions like "What's your favorite book on parenting?" to figure out what resources to stock in the Nursery's library in its next iteration. The staff members are also considering expanding the project in two ways: inviting visitors to share their own questions on a second, nearby board, and documenting some of these questions and answers online. They have eight years of archived content from this discussion board. I can't think of a more perfect starting point for a children's museum interested in encouraging conversation among its visitors online.

Note: for more on designing good questions for visitors response, check out these posts.

Participation Starts with Staff: The Ruru Revolution

Let's say you've gotten excited about some innovative ideas for your institution. You want to get some projects going, but you're not in any particular position of power. Where do you start?

Ruth Harvey has a brilliant solution to this problem. Ruth is a curator of pictorial collections for Puke Ariki, a museum/library/visitor center in the small city of New Plymouth, New Zealand. Last year, Ruth received a Churchill fellowship that allowed her to visit U.S. institutions that were doing innovative work in audience engagement. (We met when I sent her a list of offbeat places to check out.) She came back inspired and eager to get moving on some experimental projects at Puke Ariki.

But Ruth was really smart. After a meeting with staff members from across the institution, she realized this was an opportunity not just to engage with visitors in new ways but also to energize and connect staff from across Puke Ariki. Puke Ariki has about 70 full-time staff members, of whom 10 work for the museum, and the institution is pretty siloed. As Ruth put it, "There was the feeling that staff often stick just to their teams and didn’t see themselves as a part of a bigger Puke Ariki – people tend to refer to themselves as “library”, “museum” or “i-Site” staff rather than seeing themselves as a part of the whole."

So Ruth decided to start with a simple project in which she'd invite staff from across Puke Ariki to write first-person labels about favorite objects. It was a project anyone could participate in that would hopefully create a shared sense of purpose and excitement among staff.

But she didn't just ask people to write labels. With a few cohorts, Ruth started a group called "Ruru" (which means owl in Maori) and a blog called Ruru Revolution. Ruru Revolution is a staff blog (which, luckily for us, is also public) in which Ruth and her colleagues cheer each other on for participating in the personalized label project. Every time someone writes a label, he or she gets a badge (a pin featuring the Ruru mascot owl), a photo taken, and an energetic writeup on the blog. This entire first phase of the project is set up to encourage staff to participate and reward them for doing so. Even the way the labels are being rolled out--first for staff in a January scavenger hunt, and then later for visitors--promotes a sense of fun, buy-in, and a special experience.

This is really unusual and totally brilliant. I've known people who start new experiments by writing high-concept proposals about the reasons behind the ideas. I know people who organize small meetings and try to push things forward. But this is a direct cheerleader approach. The Ruru Revolution blog documents a group of people getting excited about doing something new. And it looks like it's working.

Perhaps the most notable and potentially silly part of the Ruru approach is the badges staff get for participating. Why on earth would people want to participate to get a pin? But the badges are a brilliant stroke that really fit staff culture at Puke Ariki. Ruth explained that staff at Puke Ariki wear badges of all kinds on their key fobs and see them as a kind of unofficial currency, so it was a natural choice for this project.

Ruth explained the Ruru approach this way:

We see ourselves (currently) as an underground group that is working to affect institutional change at Puke Ariki – we want to encourage different and better ways of working and of providing satisfying experiences for visitors. So the badge, in my view, is about identifying other ‘revolutionaries’ – it’s a talking point. It helps to keep the project fresh in people’s minds and gets people chatting about what people have done to deserve their badge. However, that said, bribery really DOES work! People have been excited to get a badge and I imagine it has been, at least to a degree, a motivating factor in getting their labels written.

But that reward has been coupled with a lot of energy spent encouraging people, keeping them informed and praising them for their participation. The blog has been a great way of keeping people informed and I have certainly spent lots of time asking people about what they plan to write about in informal settings (and I imagine the other Ruru group members have too). The badge, though, has been a good way to get to praise people who have contributed labels in person – when they email their label to me I take them a badge in person and tell them what I loved about what they’d written. I think that has really helped with making them feel integral to the whole project instead of on the periphery. I’ve also intentionally described the staff as “experts” throughout the project and I actually think that – when the individual’s talents are often overlooked in a big organisation and its hierarchies – being given the chance to prove what they have to offer is very empowering.

Read the blog, get inspired, and find a way to bring the Ruru Revolution spirit home in a way that fits your institutional culture!

And by the way, I learned about all of this because of a cold email from Ruth. If you're doing something special and participatory, for goodness sakes, let me know.

Next Book Club: Sustaining Innovation in Nonprofits and Government Organizations

There were so many fabulous recommendations for the next Museum 2.0 book club, in which we'll focus on a business book about innovation and organizational learning. After much perusing, I've selected Sustaining Innovation: Creating Nonprofit and Government Organizations that Innovate Naturally by Paul C. Light.

This book, suggested by Susan Wageman, looks like a fabulous, off-beat, and highly pertinent read for librarians, museum folk, and cultural professionals of all sorts. The author, then-director of the Public Policy Program at the Pew Charitable Trusts, studied 26 Minnesotan non-profits and government organizations in writing this book. It appears to blend high-level recommendations with specific case studies. Including one on Wile E. Coyote.

More importantly, this book appears to confront questions I've been hearing frequently this year: Now that we've tried a couple new things, how do we institutionalize innovation? How do we move from one-off experiments to something more sustainable?

It's time to figure out some answers to these questions so we can keep moving forward. Enter Sustaining Innovation.

This book club will work like the last one. Starting in January, on Tuesdays, the blog will features a mixture of my thoughts along with guest posts from you reflecting on how the book is useful in your own work. If you'd like to participate...

1. Get your hands on a copy of the book in the next couple of weeks.
2. Read it (or a large chunk of it).
3. If you are so motivated, fill out this two-question form to let me know you want to write a guest post or participate in a group discussion about the book. I'll be looking for guest posters who represent different types of institutions, countries, and approaches to the material. You don't need to be a museum or library professional to be eligible--just a good writer with an interesting perspective to share. In this case I'm particularly interested in people who are in institutions that are trying to "sustain innovation" in some way.
4. For four weeks starting in January, each Tuesday there will be a Museum 2.0 post with a response to the book. I'd like to write one or two of these at the most. The goal is to make the blog a community space for different viewpoints.

Happy reading!

Can You Make A/B Testing Part of Your Practice?

One of the things that fascinates me about comment boards is the extent to which design impacts visitor contributions. Each of us (and every visitor) has within us the capacity to be both profound and banal, and our choice at any moment depends not just on how we feel intrinsically but also what external prompts, tools, and motivations are provided.

It's not surprising that design impacts behavior, but many people want proof that visitors are capable of more than writing "I was here" in a comment book. How do I know that design impacts visitor participation? I've seen it in project after project. I've seen how a typewriter can silently encourage people to write letters. I've seen how a "bathroom wall" can garner graffiti.

But the simplest evidence I have for the statement that design impacts visitor contributions comes from a formative evaluation performed at LACMALab for their nano exhibition in 2004. In the report, evaluator Marianna Adams described a simple experiment in visitor response. LACMALab took one question--"What connections do you see between art and science?"--and created two ways for visitors to respond. In March, visitors were offered white 4"x6" notecards and golf pencils. In April, these were replaced with blue hexagonal cards and full-size pencils.

What did they find? From the report:

The percentage of "unrelated" responses for this question decreased from 58% (with the white cards) to 40% (with the blue cards), and "specific" responses nearly doubled, increasing from 28% (with the white cards) to 50% (with the blue cards). These findings strongly support Hayes (2003) research that while the question itself has an important effect on the quality of visitor responses, the physical design of the response areas plays a prominent role in eliciting richer responses and decreasing unrelated ones.

Does this mean that visitor response stations should always use hexagonal blue cards and full-size pencils? Of course not. This finding suggests that giving people unusual or special tools can increase their dedication and focus on the task at hand. Other studies comparing regular pens and silver pens have had similar results.

This kind of experiment is called an A/B test. The museum compared visitor behavior in setup A to that in setup B.

Most museum prototyping does not follow an A/B model. We test one thing, learn from how visitors respond, and (hopefully) reiterate for the next round. This may make sense if you are trying to see how someone explores a space or approaches an activity, but it's not nearly as useful as A/B testing if you're trying to figure out how to write a great label or design a good question for visitor response.

I use A/B testing all the time to write questions for visitor comment. I've been amazed to learn that "what's the best job you've ever had?" is a lousy question but "what's the worst job you've ever had?" is a fabulous one. I'll frequently test up to ten different questions around a single exhibit. It's easy to quickly determine that some questions really are better than others in terms of prompting desired visitor response.

Here are three reasons I want to encourage you to consider A/B testing in your next experiment:

1. It forces you to set priorities for what makes a "successful" project or visitor experience. When you compare different behaviors, you will naturally express preferences for one outcome over another, and these preferences can help you understand what you value and consider to be a "good" project.
2. It helps you communicate about what you've learned with others. When you mount an exhibition and study it, the typical report is a matter of degrees--how much did people like it, how long did they stay, etc. Unless your institution has clear marks of success (i.e. more time with the object is always better), it's hard to figure out where these projects fit against benchmarks. A/B testing lets you say: "X helped us accomplish our goals more than Y." This is good internally for talking with board and staff, but it's also great externally for helping advance the field.
3. It helps you make decisions that you can apply to future projects. A/B tests reveal theories that can help you make more informed design decisions, whether in ongoing development or for your next project. Instead of saying "people learned from this exhibit," you can say, "people learned more when we did X." Websites use A/B testing all the time to see how users respond to different visual styles and prompts and introduce redesigns that will be more effective at communicating desired content or prompting desired behavior. Designers put up multiple ads on Google AdWords or show users different versions of the same site and make decisions based on what's most effective.

I know there are a few museums playing with A/B testing (most notably, the Exploratorium). But I'd love to see a whole lot more, and I'd like to see museums doing it with everything from membership drives to exhibitions. These tests don't require fancy evaluative practices or expensive equipment. To my mind, we learn best as a field from A/B tests, because they allow us to compare the incomparable and glean new insights about visitor experience.

So how about it? How can you integrate A/B testing into your work?

Next Book Club: Your Recommendations?

Hi folks,

Seems like it's time for another Museum 2.0 book club, where we pick a book, read it, and then I and guest bloggers write about aspects of the book that intrigue and stimulate us. In the past, we've read about:

• museum theory in Civilizing the Museum by Elaine Heumann Gurian (eight posts)
• social media in Groundswell by Charlene Li and Josh Bernhoff (five posts)
• participatory projects in Visitor Voices in Museum Exhibitions edited by Kathleen McLean and Wendy Pollock (four posts)
• third places in The Great Good Place by Ray Oldenburg (six posts)

This time, I'd like to find a great book about organizational change, learning organizations, and or promoting a culture of innovation at work. The more I talk with cultural professionals about promoting experimental practice in community engagement, the more I hear that the obstacles are internal. If the problem is us, let's start 2011 with some ideas on how to change.

I've read a couple pop business books that haven't thrilled me, and I'm hoping you might have some ideas of where we might find something really worthwhile to learn from and discuss. Please share your suggestions and ideas in the comments and we'll start reading soon.