Normal isn't coming back
“Museum leaders now need to have a clear vision because ‘normal’ isn’t coming back. Planning won’t be that much help, but strong values and purpose can be your guide.”
The tough realities of the present
Over the last few months museum leaders have focused on finance and operations. This is perfectly understandable, even inevitable. First, they had to ensure their collections, buildings and staff were safe and could be sustained in the short term. Then, they had to begin to address the challenging financial implications of months of closure and deal with the programming and projects that had to be rescheduled or abandoned, almost always incurring increased cost and promising reduced income. Never have business plans become irrelevant so rapidly. Now, the operational priorities are finalising the practicalities of reopening and facing the medium-term financial realities.
But much is still unknown and will remain unknown. Even if a museum can reopen at, say, 20% of previous capacity, will as many as 20-30% of audiences return? Will anything but local tourism recover any time soon? Is there any point in trying to plan an events programme, or think about restarting school visits? Will it be feasible to organise any international loans for the foreseeable future? And, of course, the big question for everyone: will there be a second wave, or a third or fourth?
For many museums, a key uncertainty is the attitude of funders and parent bodies. Some university museums are finding themselves far down the internal pecking order as their parent organisations prioritise getting student fees next year and cutting costs. Arguably university museums could be facing significant funding cuts in the next year or two, even those in universities that don’t go bankrupt.
Every museum is different in terms of its audience-serving potential and its sources of funding. Some independent museums are lucky enough to have decent reserves, or alternative income from property leases for example, but even they will struggle with reduced visitor income and more competition for grants. Will grant funders back the financially stronger, or show preference to museums with weak balance sheets, leading to the moral hazard that those who have not been able to solidify their finances might be ‘rewarded’ for that failure?
There will be many more months, and possibly several years, of uncertainly in which it will be impossible to business-plan in the way museums are used to. Even after cutting fixed costs, annual budgets will be speculative at best. Museums will need to be much more fleet of foot, with flexible control of staffing costs.
Operational and financial challenges will dominate decision-making for years, which could cause organisations to slip unintentionally into taking numerous short-term actions to address operational crises or meet financial needs: to save money, or to get funding. The focus on operations and finance will reshape museums certainly, but not necessarily in a way that’s best for their audiences and communities.
Facing the future
“Some organisations and leaders have a great clarity of vision and this will serve them well. But many places operate within a fuzz of competing strategic aims, often reflecting the unresolved tensions within the organisation”
That is why museum leaders now have to find the space and the time to think about purpose, values and mission. Some organisations and leaders have a great clarity of vision and this will serve them well. But many places operate within a fuzz of competing strategic aims, often reflecting the unresolved tensions within the organisation. Aims that do not address the tensions between engaging with diverse communities and attracting high-spending cultural tourists. That pay lip-service to anti-racism and inclusion but uncritically display collections that are the product of colonialism and exploitation. That claim to care about the environment but anticipate a return to visitors travelling great distances. That give equal priority to the two hideously expensive activities of building and caring for a collection that is mainly in storage and running a community-engagement programme that is often disconnected from the collection, often because of the restrictions caused by inappropriately high standards of collections care.
When finances are good, organisations can evidently survive without addressing these sorts of contradictions. Many museums even survived the post-2008 austerity decade without having to really clarify what they were for and where they were heading, beyond the next capital project. Indeed, capital projects have often been the substitute for having clarity of social purpose, instead allowing organisations to simply tweak business as normal.
Museums have both benefitted and suffered from a lack of general agreement about their ‘core’ purpose. For some people the core task is engaging an interested audience, for others it’s collecting and preserving, for yet others it’s about having a beneficial impact on local communities. For some it’s their way of changing the world for the better and for others it’s about contributing to scholarly research. Now, the risk is that it becomes simply about survival.
To thrive as well as survive needs clarity of purpose and direction from the top to the bottom of the organisation. Firstly, museums need a clear purpose, but this is likely to be unchanging for decades because the purpose is, simply, the reason why the organisation exists and at that level things don’t change that much. But different aspects of the purpose will change in importance over time and according to context. This means that there also has to be a realistic yet challenging medium-term vision to give a clear sense of direction and priority within that long-term purpose.
Partly inspired by Michael Day, the former head of Historic Royal Palaces and Jersey Museums, I like the idea of the ‘misty vision’ and I visualise it like this:
To your astonishment you awake one morning in the middle of an enormous flat, empty plain. It’s dusty and hot, the wind’s picking up and you appear to have no shelter and only a little water. For the avoidance of doubt, there is no wifi or mobile coverage and you don’t have a satellite phone. Even more surprisingly you are surrounded by all your work colleagues. (Your friends and family are elsewhere.) You obviously need a plan, so everyone gets very operationally focussed and practical. They gather branches and rocks to make a rudimentary shelter, they dig a hole to reach the water table, and someone spells out SOS in huge letters made of stones in case a plane flies overhead. After a few days you realise none of this is giving you a sense of direction or a way out of the situation. You have to start moving. You summon all your visionary prowess and look at the distant horizon, a range of mountains perhaps 50-100 hostile miles away. After the briefest of consultations with your colleagues you point to a particular easy to distinguish peak that reflects sunlight in a way that suggests there may be buildings on it and you announce that is where you are all heading. You don’t yet know what the route is, or what hazards lie in the way, but everything you do from now on will be intended to take you closer to that destination. That is your misty vision.
You can send people scouting a few miles ahead to gather information and look for risks and opportunities. Luckily, some of your colleagues have useful hobbies such as foraging edible plants and berries, wild camping and hiking in hostile environments so you can draw on people’s knowledge, skills and experience to predict what you might face and think about how to deal with it.
So, you’ve got a basic sense of direction, you’ve got basic awareness of the external context and you’ve got basic experience, skills and knowledge. Is that enough? You’re used to working with a clear step-by-step plan (you know, that one with SMART objectives). But because you and your colleagues know so little of what lies ahead, you can’t make a plan here. What else can guide you? I think in challenging surroundings the other things that are useful are a set of values, or principles that can guide your decisions and actions. A little like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (or the Museums Association Code of Ethics) these can help you weigh up opportunities and solutions as you attempt to fulfil your vision.
My challenge to museum leaders is to be brave and to set a clear, if misty, vision and to stick always to organisational values, thus avoiding crisis management and short-term decision making that take their organisations away from their purpose and vision and contradicts their values. And my challenge to funders is to be strategically strong and actively seek out organisations with both need and clear potential to make a difference now and in the future.
Maurice Davies Cultural Consultant