Last week, I drilled down into the synthesis problem that museum professionals face — turning raw user data into something that actually supports decisions is a grind. If we want to help museums align internally around who they are for, reducing that friction is valuable.
It’s complex, though, because aligning around particular audiences or goals isn’t the full story. It’s not just deciding ‘who we are for’ — it’s also about redefining what serving those groups means.
More often than not, even when a museum determines a group they want to better support, they then operate in a very prescriptive way. We skip the part where we try to understand how we can fit into people’s lives and instead explain how the museum’s solutions are relevant to those people. It’s a top-down approach fraught with failure points and assumptions.
The prescriptive approach isn’t a policy problem — it’s a people problem. If teams default to “we know what’s good for you,” no amount of learning (research) will change that.
So, there’s a step that comes before user research: building teams that genuinely believe the public defines what matters. That makes HR an audience development problem.
Why alignment doesn’t have to come first
It’s tempting to say that everyone needs to be on board with both who the museum is for (which can and should change over time) and how those people should be supported (i.e., they should guide the solutions the museum creates because they are the experts on their own needs and goals — museum professionals are not).
But I want to be careful here because I don’t want to suggest that you need everyone to share the same priorities or a common idea of what a valuable museum should look like before you can begin understanding your users. As I’ve written before, thinking in terms of requirements rather than directions to move in is often problematic in ways we don’t imagine.
Consider what happens if you decide you need more internal alignment before moving forward on this path. What does ‘more’ mean? If we assume we’ll never reach 100% alignment among museum staff, what’s the target? 80%? 50%? How do we categorize people according to their alignment with this ideal? Is Sally in curatorial sufficiently ‘aligned’ to count toward our target? And even if we could achieve that arbitrary target of x%, how long will it take? Two years? Ten years? What happens in that time for all the people you’ve hired under the promise of working in an institution that supports this people-centric vision? They’re probably the same people who have the lowest tolerance for a conservative timetable.
Linear approaches to thorny change management problems can be a sign that we haven’t thought things through or that we’re telling ourselves a story to feel like we’re in control. Art teachers give good advice: Work the whole canvas. Meaning, if you’re painting a portrait, you don’t want to start with the person’s face and spend four hours getting it just right, only to find you need it to be four inches to the left.
Working the whole canvas
So, while we shouldn’t strive for any ideal degree of alignment before trying to understand the communities we want to support (‘Calibration’, if we’re speaking in terms of John Falk’s Value Realization Cycle), it’s fair to say that the more people in the museum who genuinely believe the public sets the agenda — not just say they do — the better. Full institutional transformation eventually requires deep buy-in. But you can’t wait for it, and you can’t manufacture it through alignment initiatives. You build it by hiring differently and demonstrating results.
That, in turn, means we need to start thinking of human resources as an audience development problem.
It’s a tall order. Many museums already struggle to spread user-centric thinking beyond education or engagement departments into curatorial, marketing, or development. Now, we’re talking about extending even deeper into the back-of-house functions. Still, if our logic holds, it may be better to bring departments like human resources and finance into the conversation before focusing on selling the vision to the usual suspects. After all, these are the folks closest to the problem, in a sense.
Institutions already doing this
There are institutions already operating this way. Conner Prairie baked well-being into their onboarding back in 2018, years before formal research made it a talking point. In our first VAI cohort this fall, CEO @Norman Burns pointed out what that foundation enables:
When you train new staff around these ideas from day one, new research doesn’t feel foreign — it feels like a natural extension of what we’ve already been doing.
What Norman is describing isn’t just comfort with the vocabulary — it’s a different mental model of what the museum is for. Same for board members. When evidence-based approaches like Value Realization appear, they feel like natural extensions of what the institution already believes — not foreign concepts from the outside. Norman’s advice to peers starting this work is to “use this kind of work as the catalyst and, in a couple of years, you’ll be that far along, and your staff will get it.”
And other institutions are taking a proactive approach as well. In fact, in conversations with John, we realized that MaP readers and community members may be a self-selected group that is most likely to be good candidates for recruitment by cultural organizations seeking to develop a pipeline of staff committed to this vision.
A concrete opportunity
A Chicago-area museum is putting resources behind exactly this kind of shift — moving away from a historic focus on “teaching” users about history and toward a future where history becomes the means for supporting visitors’ well-being. They’re looking for two people:
An American history expert — someone nationally engaged, but more importantly, someone who sees history as a vehicle for supporting the public’s needs and interests rather than a body of knowledge to be transmitted. This isn’t a traditional curatorial role. It’s a role for someone who believes the point of historical interpretation is what it does for people, not what it teaches them or the degree to which their work demonstrates expertise alone.
A Chicago-based project manager — someone who can provide on-the-ground coordination for a multi-year Value Realization process. This person will be the connective tissue between strategic vision and daily execution, ensuring that the cross-functional teams doing this work have what they need to succeed.
Both roles require something that’s hard to screen for: a genuine commitment to user-focused institutional change, not just comfort with the vocabulary.
If either role resonates — or if you know someone it might fit — reply to this email or reach out to John at [email protected].
And, if this is a challenge you’ve given some thought to, we’d love to hear how you’re thinking about it at your institution. Just reply with your thoughts.