Last week, @Avi Decter hosted a discussion on the challenges that professional expertise poses for museums that are trying to realize the shift from ‘outputs to outcomes’. You can find the full recording and transcript below. Rather than summarize the event, which you can do yourself if you like by simply copying and pasting the transcript into the LLM of your choosing, I’ll dive a bit deeper into one specific question that stood out to me in the session.
Our questions reveal our inner thinking
An attendee asked my co-presenters, “How do you avoid mission drift and stay focused on what your institution is really about?”
Joan had a good response, explaining that her institution doesn’t pick all possible outcomes. They pick the ones aligned with what they’re uniquely positioned to deliver and that align with their mission. Their collections, their expertise, their community relationships — these become means to specific ends, not ends in themselves.
Still, the question has stuck with me because it reveals so much about what I’m sure many in the webinar audience were thinking — something along the lines of: “Yeah, it’s great to support these visitor outcomes and all, but what about the mission of the institution?”
Beneath the question are assumptions about how museums should work:
visitor outcomes are separate from institutional mission
missions don't need to include outcomes
when outcomes work conflicts with the mission, the outcomes work (not the mission) is the problem
Under a different set of beliefs, the question might have been: “If you begin doing outcomes-focused work at your museum and realize that it’s drifting away from your mission, what’s the best way to revise your mission?”
Because the problem isn’t the work you’re doing — it’s the mission. Or, more precisely, it’s the past work you did in defining the mission. We sometimes forget that mission statements are things we make — they’re not handed down from on high. Mission, vision, and organizational identity are not fixed, even when they sometimes feel that way. These things can be changed — in fact, Amanda shared how they did just that at the Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art. They rewrote their mission to include outcome language. The outcomes aren’t separate from the mission — they are the mission.
Other topics covered
How Amanda’s museum used the “carefully pack up the China” approach to navigate major organizational change while respecting institutional history
Joan’s application of @John H Falk’s well-being outcomes framework to create a “local regenerative value creation model” that resonates with provincial government stakeholders
The role of trust-building in community partnerships, particularly Joan’s four-year relationship development with Indigenous communities, before collaborative exhibits emerged
Why helping visitors “close the loop” on their museum experiences requires staying connected over time, in addition to offering debrief spaces at the end of visits
Resources and links
Making Museums Matter by Stephen Weil
Simon Sinek’s Golden Circle concept — Start With Why
Both museums presenting in this session completed our Baseline Assessment early in 2025 to identify which outcomes they were uniquely positioned to support — you can learn more about the assessment program here.
Recording
Transcript
Avi Decter: Okay, folks, I think it's time for us to jump in and get underway. Welcome to MUSEUMS AND CHANGE, and thank you for joining us. Special thanks to Kyle Bowen, Amanda Boehm-Garcia, and Joan Kanigan for presenting today. I also want to thank Addie Gayoso, my partner in crime. She's the one who's sending you notes in the chat function and smiling right up there.
Our three speakers will talk about the need to shift from a focus on institutional outputs to community outcomes and what that shift might mean for strategy, stakeholder relationships, and resource allocation. This shift entails both changes in institutional structures and in individual habits. Both present fundamental challenges to our current professional mindsets and practices.
A few quick housekeeping details. The session is being recorded. We'll make a link available via the AAM open forum ASAP, probably tomorrow morning. Unless you are recognized to speak, please hit your mute button so we don't get noise pollution during the session. If you want or need captioning, please activate captions on your Zoom dashboard. If you want to share a question or a comment, please use the raised hand signal. You will go into a queue, and I will recognize you as quickly as possible.
Do use the chat function to make comments, post questions, and enter citations of relevant literature and so on. That way, we can manage a second parallel conversation. If you want to be added to our email list to receive direct notices of future sessions, please enter your name and email address in the chat or write to me directly via email. We'll happily add you to our list, and you'll get email notices in advance of each meeting.
Our next session will convene on December 11th, when Julie Ochs Dweck, chief curator of the Princeton Art Museum, will speak about rethinking the 21st-century art museum. Please plan to join us then. I'm speaking to you from Philadelphia, where I live on the ancestral lands of the Lenni Lenape and where the Lenni Lenape still reside. I believe it is our responsibility to learn about the Indigenous peoples who lived here before us and to share our knowledge with our colleagues, constituents, and clients. Kyle, the floor is yours.
Kyle Bowen: Thanks, Avi, and thanks, Addie, for inviting us to share with everyone today. I am Kyle Bowen. I am the principal at Museums as Progress. With me today are Amanda Boehm-Garcia from the Fred Jones Jr Museum of Art at the University of Oklahoma and Joan Kanigan, CEO at the Western Development Museum, which has sites in Saskatchewan. We're going to discuss a shift we're seeing among museums. This transition from outputs to outcomes and what it means for museum professionals and the expertise they offer.
Expertise is what makes museums special, but it's also what can hold them back. We recognize and appreciate expertise through the products and experiences that museums offer. These are familiar outputs like programs, exhibits, campaigns, appeals. Those are all outputs, but they're not where the value of the institution lies. The value for a museum's users and its communities lies in the well-being outcomes that all those activities support.
When a funder asks what difference did this make for your community or a board member wants to understand social impact, pointing to outputs as evidence of value will only persuade a minority, and that minority is largely people who are like museum professionals themselves, people who appreciate museums in what we might call traditional terms. Talking about a record number of visitors, high engagement scores, award-winning design, these kinds of output-focused results are really powerful proof for those who are invested in museums as we've known them and the expertise that makes them possible.
For those who are invested in the social, intellectual, personal, physical well-being of a community, which is probably a lot more people, they don't say that much at all. What are well-being outcomes? What do they look like? These are actual well-being outcomes that museums can support. You see here we've got these categories of physical, intellectual, personal, social. These outcomes were developed by our partner, John Falk, who's here today. You can click on this link in this slide if you'd like to get a full view of all the different well-being outcomes, as well as aggregate scores on how our MaP participants are, their results as they participated in our outcomes assessment.
You can see I've got some icons here of Joan and Amanda that actually indicates that these are outcomes that their respective museum staff feel more confident that they're regularly providing to visitors. When we talk about testing translation, I'm going to introduce you to Amanda and Joan, first, Amanda. These folks are people who have been deeply invested in this past year in realizing this shift from outputs to outcomes. Amanda is the head of museum experiences at the FJJMA.
Amanda is integrating outcome-centered practices across multiple departments, so curatorial, learning, marketing, visitor services. She and her colleagues are translating outcomes into operational changes in some pretty exciting ways throughout the institution. We'll hear from Amanda first and then Joan. Joan has been repositioning her institution's value to initial government stakeholders, moving from this kind of cultural preservation language to community outcomes language.
Both these museums completed our strategic assessment program early in 2025 to understand what outcomes institutions may be uniquely positioned to support. Throughout the year, they've been working in some advanced implementation work. Amanda through our value realization program and Joan through both the value realization and the value articulation intensive. Amanda is going to share first what she's learning, and then Amanda will hand off directly over to Joan. After they present, I'll share a few closing thoughts before we have some discussion. Amanda, how does that sound to you?
Amanda Boehm-Garcia: Sounds perfect. All right. I'm going to walk everyone through how we're making the shift to working with visitor outcomes at FJJMA. I'll do that by sharing some of the practical exercises we've been using as well as a basic framework for leading with change. Before I get started, I would like to give you a little context to the front.
Beginning in 2016 and through the pandemic, our museum experienced an overall 40% reduction in funding support from the university as well as a 45% reduction in staff. When you experience cutbacks that significant, it's almost like starting from scratch, which can be a little terrifying to be honest, but it can also be extremely generative and fertile ground for new ideas to take shape. One of the first things we did was to restructure the staff and to create a new strategic plan.
Next slide. A huge part of our strategic plan is about shifting to a visitor-focused institution. As you can imagine, this is easier said than done and requires not only a repositioning of the work, but also a mindset shift within your teams that has to occur as well. Next slide. When making any big change in any institution, whether or not it's outputs to outcomes or really anything else, there's a few ways you can go about it. The first option is the bull in the China shop analogy. You can come in and smash everything to bits, and in no time at all, you've cleared out the old system.
Certainly, there are times when this strategy may be necessary, but with the mindset shift like the one we're talking about today, this is not the best approach and not the direction we have taken at FJJMA. The second option is to remain the bull in the China shop, but to carefully tiptoe around everything. If you've ever seen Disney's movie Ferdinand, you can picture the scene with the bull trying very carefully to navigate the shop without upsetting or breaking any dishes.
The problem with this is that this strategy is too safe, and nothing really changes, and the status quo remains the same. We've opted for the third option, which is not to destroy, not to leave untouched, but to carefully pack up the China from the past to make room for the new. This allows for compassion for those that are still working in the old system and appreciation for the history that brought your institution to where it is now, even if that is on the precipice of great change.
Next slide. As you can imagine, we did a lot of work to pack our boxes, which is truly a whole other webinar, but we now have some space. There is certainly more to clear out, and we're constantly on the lookout for someone who might want to unpack a box and bring out a favorite old piece. Regardless, we're at a place now where we can stretch, imagine, and play. Next slide. We are still experimenting with different ways to work with visitor outcomes, but the three most important things we have learned so far are the following.
Establish a shared language with terminology everyone understands, do not put visitor outcomes into silos, everyone must share in this work together, and support yourself and your colleagues on the long road ahead. Next slide. Creating a shared language really began for us during our strategic planning process, and it's something we continually work on. We have bi-monthly all-staff meetings that include discussions about new terminology related to visitors and how these terms are being used and why. These all-staff meetings literally include all staff, from security guards to the front desk. It might surprise you to know that some of the most insightful feedback I've gotten has come from our security team.
Next slide. To keep outcomes from becoming siloed primarily in an education or learning department, we started incorporating visitor outcomes into exhibition development, partially because exhibitions stretch across all departments and divisions. Next slide. We have pictured here four visitor outcomes that could be supported by a specific exhibit currently in development at the museum. To give you an idea, a few of the outcomes are give users something to talk about with friends and family, and allow users to feel free from work or routine.
Each division is tasked with adding to the board how their exhibition work supports each outcome. This allows team members to think about their expertise and its direct relationship to our visitors. It's been really exciting to witness, especially for colleagues in finance or in the prep and installation team, who might feel separated from visitors, to see their roles from an entirely new perspective, with an impact that they might not have thought was possible.
Next slide. These are just a few of the many ways we are incorporating visitor outcomes into our work. There is still so much to learn and many more steps we need to take. Looking out from the place of the beginning, where we are now, the journey ahead can feel incredibly far, almost unreachable. In those moments, the way to keep momentum is to concentrate on the steps just in front of you, piece by piece, bit by bit, no matter how small the journey continues. With that, I will now hand things over to my colleague, Joan. Thank you so much, everyone.
Joan Kanigan: Thanks, Amanda. Thank you, everybody, for being here to listen to this today. One of the things that we've really been working on at the Western Development Museum has been not so much the program outcomes, because that's something our funders have been asking us for many, many years. My team is very used to talking about outcomes from a programming perspective. One of the things that I've really started focusing on is the idea of organizational outcomes, particularly because I've been really influenced by the work of Stephen Weil on Making Museums Matter, and Simon Sinek on the importance of knowing your "WHY."
An outcome focus is really embedded in the form of the governance model that our board has chosen to work with, because it emphasizes outcomes or what we refer to as an ends policy, which essentially defines what good for whom and at what cost. I have a board that's also very much focused on outcomes and ends over means. As an institution, outcomes are really about why we exist. There are attempts to articulate how communities and the people we serve benefit from the fact that they have a WDM location in their city or in the province. What we're doing for the betterment of the community. For us, this has really been the ends versus means, but it always starts with kind of that "why."
Over the years, I've used Simon Sinek's Golden Circle as a way to challenge us to think beyond what we do internally, as a museum, to describing the difference we're hoping to make in service to society. I will send the link if you haven't seen Simon Sinek's podcast on the Golden Circle. You just Google Start With WHY and Simon Sinek, because it really helps us figure out that bigger question of what we're trying to do. Certainly, in the beginning, these were not easy conversations, as getting past things like collecting being the ultimate importance of the museum was a little bit challenging.
To be clear, I'm not saying our collection isn't important. It's just that we don't exist solely to have a collection. The collection itself serves as a means to an end, which is the difference we're trying to make in our communities. I'll be the first to admit that our "why," which is made up of our vision and our aspiration, is fairly lofty. It could probably be achieved in many different ways, not all of them necessarily requiring a museum to be fulfilled. Now that we're in a time where government funding is shrinking, individuals have less disposable income, our being unable to quantifiably demonstrate the impact that we're having is presenting us with a real challenge.
It's become critical for us at the WDM to be able to link what we do to the collecting research programming exhibits of what we're doing. Being able to link to those specific impacts that we're having in terms of a real tangible way. For us, what was the lightbulb moment that went off was the connection we were able to make with John Falk's work on defining well-being specifically, because it's really given us a way to talk about what we're doing that actually resonates with people who aren't as passionate about museums as I am. Next slide, please.
We've taken John's well-being outcomes. We're looking at it as both an outcome of our work, but also a driver of local impact. We've been really focused because we have four museums locations within our province. We're really focusing on the hyperlocal of how we're serving the communities where WDM actually exists. Within that local value creation, and this is some of the language that resonates with our provincial government and funders, is what are we doing economically? How are we building relationships? What is the social capital that we're creating?
Being able to take those concepts and tie them into the well-being outcomes that John Falk has defined for us personally, intellectually, socially, and physically, we've been able to really start to create a solid link between this is what we're doing, and this is the benefits that it's having. The model that we've created for ourselves is a local regenerative value creation model, and it's become our strategic approach to strengthening communities, supporting local economies, and enhancing collective and individual well-being. It's also allowing us to start to figure out how to define and measure these in a way that we can have our funders and our government supporters really understand and be able to support.
An example on the cultural side, where we're trying to nurture identity and creativity and create shared meaning, the well-being outcomes that we're working towards are enhancing intellectual, cultural well-being through co-creation, representation, and mutual respect. What that means in practice for us is our ability to involve local voices in exhibit design and in exhibit interpretation. That comes from a nothing about us without us model that we've adopted, but we can actually start to measure this in a way of what is the percentage of co-curated exhibits that we've completed? What percentage of our programming features diverse local voices and stories?
We're still refining how we actually track and report some of these things, but it's really gotten us very excited to be able to talk about how we're not just a museum, but we are an essential cultural infrastructure in our communities. Being able to use these well-being outcomes as a way of measuring and determining that is making a real difference for us. Now I'm going to turn it back to Kyle.
Kyle Bowen: Thanks, Joan. Thanks, Amanda. It's a real gift to get to see this kind of work in progress. I know it is a work in progress. I hope that it sparks for some of you some ideas. Maybe you can imagine some of this work playing out at your institution in 2026. Neither of the museums, FJJMA or the Western Development Museum, are dismissing the expertise of educators and curators and marketers or designers or any of those other disciplines within the museum. Joan pointed that out quite nicely.
They are asking every day, expertise to what end? Expertise matters, but it really is a means and not an end in itself. As I think about this as a choice, museums can continue to optimize for outputs. That's things like peer recognition, disciplinary excellence, great exhibits. With that, you still have a museum, and it could be a great museum, but that is a kind of narrowing of the perimeter around what the museum or the institution can accomplish and who it can support.
The alternative is to use outcomes as an organizing principle, and that is different in that it's fundamentally expansive in nature. Joan and Amanda have shown us how they're really using these outcomes to expand capabilities to support the well-being of their communities. I hope you all will follow in their footsteps. I shared the link. You can use the chat here in Zoom, or if you want to use our board here, you're welcome to use that beyond the session as well. I'd love to open it up for discussion. What do you think, Avi?
Avi Decter: First of all, thank you all very much. This is very inspiring language that we're using here, very positive language. I very much appreciate the fact that you're able to make it concrete for us. These are not just abstractions, but actually guiding principles for everyday practice. The first question that I must say that occurs to me is that I've never seen an institution make any kind of change without pain and suffering, otherwise known as resistance. Sometimes that's a good thing, as in maintaining democratic norms, for example, but I'd like to hear from all three of you as to what were the most common or frequent forms of resistance and how did you address them?
Kyle Bowen: I feel like that has to be a question for Amanda and Joan.
Amanda Boehm-Garcia: Sure. I guess I'll go first. I think the most frequent, and I will say, to be honest, still heard of pushback, is I think there are some colleagues who may not understand their role as supporting these ideas necessarily. I think Kyle and Joan and I were talking previously about how the low-hanging fruit for working with outcomes is to shift this work over to an education department. That's where everybody thinks, "These are the people who work with these things," and I just do the paint on the wall. Why do I need to think about that?
It's trying to show people that there is actually a whole world of impact that they're having without even being fully aware of it. Actually, it was a little more resistance in the beginning, but now we're really starting to see people are getting excited for certain roles that might feel divorced somewhat from the front-facing experience to actually understand whether or not they see it every day, that they are really impacting everyone who comes into the museum. It opens up their own way of viewing their work in the museum. That's what I've seen so far.
Joan Kanigan: For us, I think the biggest pushback that I've seen has been more, that's great. We've got our vision statement. It's aspirational. I just need to do my job and start thinking about the work that we do in a different way in terms of measuring is probably the challenge that we're working with the most right now, because we've got our board and our funders on one side, pushing going, "Show us why you're important." Then we've got staff just wanting to do what they've always done by keeping it within that aspirational vision. It's a vision. We're never going to get there. Trying to be able to articulate the steps that get us there has probably been our biggest and continues to be our biggest challenge, but it's also the most fun to figure out.
Kyle Bowen: I'll throw in a wild card real quick, Avi. I'm obviously not at an institution. I'm supporting institutions, but I'm thinking of a different institution that we're working with now and coming at it from a little bit of a different angle in terms of resistance, or sometimes it's not overt resistance. It's more like, "I just keep doing what I'm doing." One of the things we're discussing with them is actually baking in this language. Amanda mentioned the common language, actually baking it into certain HR touch points. Talking about, as candidates come through, what does it mean for us to--
Right now, we're really focused on supporting these intellectual outcomes. What does that bring up for you? It's just a way of, I always think of it as softening the ground of the new generation of people who are coming into the institution. It goes back to that idea of it is everyone's work, even those deep back-of-house seats who are maybe not so back of house because they're feeding into those folks who will be frontline personnel.
Avi Decter: Thank you all very much. I want to point out that we have not only three hands up, but I see three wonderful questions in the chat function. I'm going to ask each of the questioners to keep your questions short and pointed, and the answer is short and pointed as well. Emlyn, you're on. You'll need to unmute yourself, Emlyn.
Emlyn: Great presentations. Thanks, Avi. I would like to suggest respectfully that there is an upstream point. Before we get to the why, how, and what, which is a very commendable approach structure, in a changing world in which museums strive to be in new ways, supportable, sustainable, meaningful, there is a world that, I think, has posing new questions that the museum sector should begin to answer. I think that the world needs museums to think fundamentally differently, if they could, about why they exist in the first place, which is upstream of even thinking about a collection. What is the purpose of the museum with respect to the world's environmental and societal problems? What can you back into?
Only with that upfront generative question, can you really begin to answer, then by what means and ends do you proceed? Obviously, for museums that exist already, this is a tough one, but for museums that are new, and there are new museums opening in the world, I wish that I would see more often that they're, first of all, being driven by a sense of in what way can the institution called museum that inspires inspiration be fundamentally about a new and important challenge that the world faces, and back into that with the means of the museum as a vehicle.
Avi Decter: Great. Will any of the three of you like to respond to that comment? Jeremiah, you're on.
Angela: There we go. Fabulous. I'm actually Angela. Jeremiah is my wonderful supervisor. My question is, this is wonderful, how do we bridge these conversations? How do we broach and then bridge these conversations, moving from outputs to outcomes, when we're talking about two stakeholders, one potential partners, where you're trying to get community groups or the community at large, to see the value in coming into your institution? Because oftentimes, the community doesn't think that their voices and their lived experiences will be reflected in a museum because it's about things that are far removed from them. Whether that's true or not, that is often a perception.
How do we move from those outputs to the outcomes in conversation? How do we begin those conversations? I know we talked about packing things up when we're talking about internally, but when we're talking about funders, and then potential partners in terms of creating visitors and trust there, how do we start those conversations?
Avi Decter: Thank you for that question. Folks?
Joan Kanigan: I'm happy to talk a little bit about what we've been doing, particularly around trust building. One of the things for us in Saskatchewan, we have a very young but also growing Indigenous population. We've really been working on having a lot of conversations and a lot of basically tea and coffee with people to find out what Indigenous communities would want from the WDM. It's fair to describe our founding as a colonial settler institution.
As we've been working particularly on inclusion and truth and reconciliation in our organization, we've really spent a lot of time just talking to people and listening and opening the doors, but not coming in with a, "we want to do something," more of a, "how can we help serve what your community needs?" Or "is there a place for us?" We've been fortunate to have a couple of projects. Our first project started as a photo naming project. We had all of these photos, that we didn't know who they were.
We went to the community, we built a relationship with the chief and council and the elders, and they eventually came to us and said, "We want an exhibit." We went, "Okay, but you're curating this exhibit with us. We're not going to tell you what your history is." That took like four or five years to get to the point where we finally had an exhibit, because that kind of a partnership, it takes a lot of time to build that trust. You just have to allow it to take the time that it needs. I don't know if that answered the question.
Angela: Thank you.
Avi Decter: Amanda or Kyle, either? Thank you very much, Angela, for the question, and Joan for the answer. Meghan?
Meghan: Yes, I noticed that when you put up the list for reasons why your staff believe that people attended museums, I didn't notice to have your perspective challenged. That's actually, in my work, transformative design. I see that coming up over and over again. People want a growth experience. They actually want to come out with something new that they've learned about, something that they feel has even a change of identity coming out of it. It's interesting because you're talking a lot about change here, but one part of it is the invitation to change.
I'm wondering if you have any clear examples of what you've done either with your staff, or I would love to know what you've done with your patrons to invite them into the space to be open to this invitation to change, or is it because they've had a change-based experience? It's an aspect of their identity, this museum, but to do that, we have to invite them into that space. I'm wondering what you've done in your work that is this invitation to people, the invitation to change and to be challenged. Thank you.
Kyle Bowen: I just want to jump in and say, I shared a link, actually, to the various outcomes. Meghan, I think what you're pointing to is really important. It's not one that I put up on the slides, but it's in there. I think what you're describing is related to an outcome called discover something new about themselves. Interestingly, this is something I want to explore more in writing and stuff, but that particular outcome is consistently the one that museum professionals who have participated in our assessment are the least confident that their museum provides, universally at the bottom. That's a really fascinating question.
If we can say that discover something new about myself is an educational outcome and museums are presumably operating in this kind of educational mindset and they believe that's so much of the value they provide, what does it mean that they're least confident? That is what they offer. I put that out there just to acknowledge what you're saying. It is accounted for, but it's definitely a wide-open sort of territory. I don't know if I answered your question or added anything to that. Joan or Amanda, anything that comes to you?
Meghan: If I could add just one suggestion is to have a debrief area. After they've gone through the experience of the museum, to have a space to collect that input from the people on what this experience was, how was it change-making for them and how was it change-making for them? I see what's missing in a lot of design is this idea of framing the experience for the patron.
The invitation to come in, the onboarding, if you will, the experience itself, and then the debrief afterwards, which is actually where people process what they've experienced. So many museums miss that, which is that space for me to process this entire experience and make sense of it and think about how is this going to apply to my life outside of this museum? When I walk out that door, how am I a different person?
Avi Decter: Thank you for the quick responses. John, you have an opportunity to jump in.
John Falk: Thanks for that comment, Meghan. What I would offer, the irony of this, is that given that by nature, people are self-oriented, one of the most common, if not the single most common outcome of a museum experience, is that people find out more about themselves because they're viewing this experience through their own personal lens and making sense of it through their own constructive processes. Museums actually don't help by helping folks close that loop.
The pushback I would suggest is the place for helping users close that loop may be at the end of that visit, but actually, it's more likely to occur if you stay connected and support people over time, because these experiences only can be appreciated over time as opposed to while you're in the box. It makes it more challenging, but in fact, the opportunity is there because, actually, that's what everybody's trying to do. We as a field have not been particularly adept at supporting people in coming to closure with that, helping them do that.
Avi Decter: Great. John, thank you for that comment. I'm going to ask Jason Harris, who posed a wonderful question in the chat, to jump in. Jason, would you care to put your question directly?
Jason: What I was thinking was, as you look at these types of outcomes and you implement them, how can we avoid mission creep and stay focused on what your institution is really about, rather than drifting on to what funders or others might see as beneficial outcomes?
Kyle Bowen: Oh, shots fired. What is the institution really about? Is the institution really about providing these kind of individual well-being outcomes for the people that it supports? If we can take for granted that institutions do provide all these different outcomes, but we may be able to provide outsized outcomes for people in our community, given what the alternatives are locally for people to pursue these outcomes, certainly more than one, but let's just simplify and say one or more of these outcomes is the business of the museum, it is the purpose of the museum. I don't know. What does that bring up for you, though, Jason? What do you mean when you say getting distracted, maybe from the purpose of the museum? What is it if it's not providing value to users?
Jason: I've worked at several different institutions, large and small, and I can see where being outcome-based like this is easier to do in some situations than it is others. Really, I'm looking at from the experiences with those who are on the panel, at their institutions, how did they negate mission drift and remain committed to their overall project goals and their overall mission as they built these out? It's not a giant step. It's one big step at a time to get in that direction.
Kyle Bowen: Joan and Amanda, are you drifting?
Amanda Boehm-Garcia: I would say not, but maybe I have colleagues who would say yes. No, honestly, because as I mentioned, where our museum is at right now, and the reason that was important is because we are really rebuilding everything, including our mission, we rewrote all of it, and our strategic plan. Our mission statement includes outcome-type language. That is our mission. That is what we're after. We haven't drifted from that as far as I can tell.
It doesn't come out in these really big ways. It's very small, incremental, little tiny things that you notice as you go. We're very much in the beginning stages of this. We may experience moments of drift that we just haven't gotten to yet, but I think it's important to remember that it's possible, but that the outcomes are a part of the mission, and we hang on to that.
Joan Kanigan: I think for us, I consciously think about mission drift all of the time because we get a lot of pressure from different funding sources to do things to match what they want to fund, whether it makes sense for us to do it or not, but we're really, really clear. We don't pick all of the outcomes that are possible. We pick the ones that make the most sense for us as an organization that's tied to what it is that we're really, really good at doing. We're not trying to do everything. We're just trying to pick outcomes where what we're collecting has a positive impact in our communities, what we're exhibiting, what our programs are. We try to avoid mission drift by being really focused in terms of what it is we can do versus everything that's possible out there.
Avi Decter: Meena Selvakumar posed an interesting question in the chat. Meena, would you care to put that personally? No response. Steve, I'm going to give you a chance to put--
Meena: I'm so sorry. I was unable to mute. Thank you, Avi. I was curious about trust and relationship building. Actually, interestingly, as we were talking about organizational change, both within the museum, as you're going through this change, as well as with your community, if your programs are working with communities, is that something that can be measured?
Kyle Bowen: I'm sorry. I don't think I quite caught the question. Can you say again, Meena?
Meena: Oh, sorry.
Kyle Bowen: I can hear you. Can you repeat it?
Meena: I was curious about trust and relationship building because when you are creating this kind of value, you are also creating different kinds of impacts. As I was writing that question, I was thinking mostly about how you would assess or measure what are the indicators of those outcomes with your community, but since we were also talking about organizational change, if that is something that can be measured internally as well?
Joan Kanigan: My short answer is we're still figuring it out, but in terms of community, and these aren't statistical measures that we can replicate, but we look at what is the level of trust that we have with the community that we're working with. When that community comes to us and says, "We want you to take care of some of our most sacred materials," we count that as a level of trust that we've built, but it's not something that we could do a survey on or measure. We're still figuring out that measurement piece of it. It's not easy to measure outcomes, unfortunately.
Kyle Bowen: I think I hear you alluding to, there's the internal and the external. Just as an interesting example of the internal, one of the things we're talking about with a new institution we're working with is an experience sampling method. One of the challenges that they're facing is they have a rather entrenched department of interpreters who believe that the museum's purpose is to convey facts. I think that's valuable to an extent, and that's what they want to do, but the leadership often finds themselves having to intervene and redirect. We want to go in this outcomes direction.
With the experience sampling, what we're doing is we're getting a before and after snapshot. Before we're going to be checking in at random moments with key leaders to get a more accurate view of how much time and resources they're actually spending on this redirection. Then we're coming in with an intervention, so a little pilot program, similar to this VRC that Amanda and Joan are in. Then measuring after doing that same sampling, are we actually spending less time on this kind of unsavory redirecting work? That's the process. We want to have objective measures, but to Joan's point, yes, it is an experiment. We have to experiment with different ways to figure this out, and it's not always easy.
Avi Decter: Great. Thank you very much for the question, and thank you for the response. Steven, do you care to throw it out while we've got two minutes left in our time?
Steven: How do the museums represented here invite and use public, however that is defined, in making decisions? It was touched on with the Indigenous community example, which I thought was terrific, but how do you define your public, and do you involve them in making decisions regarding the kinds of things you've been talking about today?
Joan Kanigan: I can talk a little bit about what we're doing. We're certainly starting to figure out how to involve a broader public in our conversations about our programming and what it is we're doing. We started our whole process with an internal assessment of where we were in terms of inclusion and truth and reconciliation. Then we started creating that as part of our strategic plan, identifying huge gaps in the stories that we tell and starting to identify and work with specific communities. We've been doing a lot of outreach to be able to do that. We're still looking at ways that we can get even broader input in terms of the things that we're doing, so I'm always open to ideas and suggestions.
Steven: You touched on that when you talked about funders telling you what they want you to do. You can ask everybody in the world, and everybody will have a different reason why you should exist. You have to define and settle into that and say, "Thank you very much. That's a great idea. We'll take that under consideration, but here's what we do." It's not easy.
Avi Decter: I would suggest, by the way, that somebody mentioned tea, or actually more nearly tea and sympathy. My own experience over a dozen years in Baltimore was a monthly brown bag lunch with 6 to 10 people from the community. The lunch cost was practically nothing at all, but we had people in our hands for an hour, an hour and a half. They got to know who we were, and we got to hear their perspectives on the museum. Some of them had never been. Some of them had been many times.
Some had very strong and decided opinions about what we should be doing, and others were open and were more in the question-learner mode. Those brown bag lunches became a regular feature, and they led in many cases to new programs, new exhibitions, new projects in the community, and most importantly, to new community alliances and partnerships. One of our measures of success in Baltimore--
Steven: Lost your voice, Avi.
Avi Decter: Can you hear me now?
Steven: Yes.
Kyle Bowen: Yes.
Avi Decter: Okay. One of our measures of success was how many partnerships and alliances our museum had each year. I didn't know another museum in Baltimore that counted those things. For us, they were very, very powerful devices. We're at the end of the hour. Kyle, I'm sorry, I will give you a chance for a benediction. A reminder that we will convene again in December to talk about new art museums.
By the way, for those of you who have not been to art museums recently, they are really, in many ways, at cutting edges, especially on diversity initiatives in their galleries, the representations in their galleries. This is a more universal thing and not limited to art museums. My thanks to everyone for joining us. Special thanks to Kyle, Amanda, and Joan. Kyle, if you would like to offer a short benediction, the floor is yours.
Kyle Bowen: No, I was just going to follow up on Steven's point. I was just going to say that how we frame or approach the question is so important. I think that it's quite common for us to say, "Hey, let's try to include the public deciding what the museum should do or where should it go or how we can better represent folks." There's a different way to approach this, which is to say, what are the outcomes that we think we can support? Let's learn how people approach those outcomes and then use our expertise to see where a museum might fit in a unique way.
The question isn't, "How can we represent you in a museum?" You're not a museum professional. That's not necessarily your job to know that. It is to go in and say, "Hey, how do you go about--?" I'll use our VRC participants. They are doing this study now. They're studying newcomers to their areas, their cities and regions. They're not saying, "Hey, newcomers, how can we make our museum more welcoming to you?" They're saying, "How do you go about feeling a sense of connection in your new home?" Then we'll do the work of figuring out how we might be able to insert ourselves meaningfully in your experience. Very different way of approaching it. Avi, thank you so much for having us.
Avi Decter: It is a pleasure to welcome you in the Museum as Progress posse here. I really do think that what you're asking us to do is to shoulder a kind of responsibility that we have managed to avoid for generations, and to really make Stephen Weil's question about who are we for, a really meaningful and powerful part of our everyday practice. Thank you very much, and thank you all for joining us. I urge you to look at the chat function because there have been a wealth of wonderful comments, suggestions, and questions in there, enough to keep us going certainly for another couple of weeks until our next session. In the meanwhile, take care. Be well.
Kyle Bowen: Thanks, everyone. Bye-bye.