Combining experiences at the helm of nature and science museums with insights from literature and courses on leadership, Emlyn Koster reflects on the corporate roots of this trend and its application to the museum sector.

An unfortunate paradox surrounds the subject of organizational structure. On the one hand, it is the primary tool for configuring the work of employees, any organization’s largest single investment. On the other hand, its absence as a session topic at museum association conferences implies that restructuring is an unimportant focus for shared learning. Perhaps this is because restructuring often conjures up unpleasant memories of surprising changes in position titles and responsibilities, reporting relationships, and office locations. Marilyn Ferguson, a guru in the 1980s movement of social and personal transformation, famously observed: “… Each of us guards a gate of change that can only be opened from the inside. We cannot open the gate of another, either by argument or emotional appeal”.

Successful Restructuring

Here are two insights from courses I attended in the 90s. One for business executives in Toronto likened an organizational structure to a wiring circuit diagram in which any faulty connection will cause a breakdown. A structure should map lines of managerial reporting, decision-making, delegation, and the most favorable pathways for cross-functional teamwork. Then a weeklong immersion for nonprofit executives at the Harvard Business School emphasized that between the boxes and lines of a structure, there may be ‘white spaces’ across which departments also need to often collaborate.

My early years of museum leadership also affirmed that any reorganization would be counterproductive if its draft rationale was not substantially strengthened by one-on-one consultations with those potentially most affected and all-staff feedback opportunities. At both Liberty Science Center and the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, I added a preceding major step. I circulated several drafts of a comprehensive situation analysis after the first 100 days at each CEO appointment to calibrate the state of the institution and to introduce the likelihood of structural adjustments to improve its efficiency and effectiveness—doing things right and doing the right things, respectively. This approach elicited many supportive reactions, such as “If we’d all walk a mile in each other’s shoes, maybe we wouldn’t be so quick to devalue the contributions of coworkers”.

When I read a Harvard Business Review (HBR) article about the Chief Operating Officer (COO) as the CEO’s second-in-command, I became aware of difficulties surrounding a COO appointment at a new science center. A board member who had been an executive at a nearby corporation was appointed CEO and soon hired a COO, necessarily from the private sector because this function was almost unheard of in the museum sector. The other executives reacted negatively to this new player who soon left, having evidently thought that he had a level of seniority between them and the CEO. In addition, his for-profit values seemed incongruent with their mission-advancing values. The conclusions of this HBR article included a need for COOs “to check their egos at the door” and to realize that such positions are “not necessarily in line to receive the kudos for a job well done”.

Recently, as the museum sector has been obliged to think and act in innovative ways, a new genre of restructuring—additional to the rippling effects of downsizing—shows signs of becoming common. In what could be perceived as an approach to transform organizational culture and capabilities, a variety of non-traditional functions are being inserted into the senior management of museums. Compounded by less-than-ideal recruitment approaches due to limitations of online interviews, this step—partly emulating the private sector and partly originating in the museum sector—involves new Chief Fill-in-the-Blank Officer positions which, in alphabetical order, include Commercial, Digital, Diversity, Excellence, Experience, Innovation, People, Strategy, and Technology. Makeba Clay and Cecile Shellman recently remarked on preparing a Chief Diversity Officer (CDO) for success that “… each institution must do extensive diagnostic work to identify and analyze their own challenges” and “institutions that believe they are ready for organizational cultural change [may be] unwilling to face the truth about where they are on their journey”. Concerning her former position of Deputy Director of Digital Initiatives and Chief Experience Officer, Shelley Bernstein clarified that such a position is “in charge of an idea”.

Two museum leaders who have shared their views on the applicability, or not, of private sector practices are Robert Janes, formerly of Canada’s Glenbow Museum who spoke at the Smithsonian’s 150^thanniversary symposium (see “Don’t lose your nerve: museums and organizational change), and John Wetenhall of The George Washington University Museum and Textile Museum. How the newly-styled Chief Fill-in-the-Blank Officer positions are optimally spliced into the structure of traditional senior functions is an uneasy task for CEOs to coordinate. As museums rethink their management and try to improve morale, what was a prescient recommendation of Dr. Janes may now be the right gearshift: “…a group of people at the top of an organization, with shared responsibilities and clear accountabilities, are developing strategies together, reaching decisions by consensus, and coordinating implementation of these decisions”. He introduced the leadership team concept of primus inter pares, meaning first among equals. Considering the weighty implications of this approach for the conventional reporting protocol between a museum CEO and her/his governing board, I am reminded of what transpired at the above-noted Harvard Business School course. Experimenting with its CEO-only tradition, board chairs were invited to join their CEOs midweek. What had been a collegially productive atmosphere instantly switched into an awkwardly formal atmosphere and the School soon abandoned its new approach.       

Professional Development

With instability around the traditional lone-CEO approach on the rise, the museum sector needs conference sessions focused on restructuring of leadership with insightful, humanly approaches. Meanwhile, it would be valuable for museums to follow trends of thought and practice about leading change across all sectors (some examples of these trends here, here, here, and here). In its 2016 report on human capital trends, Deloitte noted: “92 percent of participants saw a need to redesign their organization to improve employee engagement and retention and build a meaningful culture. This same survey found that 82 percent of respondents see culture as a competitive advantage, driving innovation, customer service, and employee behavior”. Its 2021 report, titled ‘The New Organization: Different by Design’, notes: “The “new organization … is built around highly empowered teams, driven by a new model of management, and led by a breed of younger, more globally diverse leaders”. Clearly, the design of structures and systems for how results are achieved is ripe for optimization.

About the Author

Emlyn Koster, PhD has been the CEO of Canada’s Royal Tyrrell Museum of Paleontology and Ontario Science Centre, Liberty Science Center in NJ, and the NC Museum of Natural Sciences. With the nature and purpose of leadership an ongoing focus, his recognition has also included Humanitarian of the Year by the American Conference on Diversity and founding chair of ICOM’s Anthropocene Working Group.  Current affiliations include the ambassadors circle for the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience, adjunct professor in Marine, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at NC State University, and the board of the International Big History Association. He is writing monthly op-ed styles pieces as a guest blogger for RK&A in 2021; find his other posts here.

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By: Rachel Nicholson

Having drafted new labels, we want to ensure our approach is actually meaningful to our audiences at the Nelson-Atkins before putting them on the walls. We’re currently in the process of evaluating our new labels to better understand their impact on visitors.

Our approach for label evaluations is usually to do random visitor interception. While the museum is open, Covid-19 makes this challenging because of socially distancing and wanting to ensure visitors feel safe and comfortable. We also wanted to focus on speaking to people from groups that may have experienced harm or could potentially experience harm in our galleries. This meant a more targeted approach to visitor evaluation.

Drawing from the strong partnerships that our Community and Public Programs and School and Educator Programs teams have developed, we reached out to community partners who have been involved with the museum in various ways including teachers involved with Race Project KC and artists involved with creating the Black Lives Matters murals throughout Kansas City. Each person we spoke to was a visitor to the Nelson-Atkins, meaning they had visited in the last year, and was over eighteen.

Alyssa Carr, our Evaluator on the team, and Jocelyn Edens developed the protocol for label evaluation. With the help of the museum’s graphic design department, they created new versions of the labels and placed them over the old labels, asking people to read and then reflect on the new version in the gallery. Questions included “What did the label make you think about? What are your reactions to the label? This can be about the objects or the gallery as a whole.” We began with the new label because we were most interested in people’s reactions to the stories shared and language used, apart from whether or not the new just felt like an improvement over the old. Of course, this comparison was important for us to understand if our approach was working to reduce harm and so after discussing the new label, Alyssa and Jocelyn removed the new version to reveal the old one. Here, questions were a bit more specific including “Did any specific words stand out to you in the labels? Do your feelings about the object change from reading one label versus the other?”

What are we learning so far?

For this first round of evaluation, we focused on six objects across the collection areas. Overwhelmingly, visitors reported that they preferred the newer labels (phew!).

In our last post Ariana Chaivaranon shared how she and curatorial colleagues reimagined the label for Shiva Nataraja, The Lord of Dance. Below are the old and new versions:

After reading the new version, visitors said the label drew them in to examine the object in new ways and that they paid close attention to the sculpture’s posture. The prompt to circle the object and the challenge to think about the object in its original context, in contrast to its display in the museum, both contributed to this reaction. After reading the old label, the majority of visitors also called out the use of the term “dwarf” and mentioned that they appreciated that the new label did not include this term.

In the case of the Offering Procession of the Empress as Donor with Her Court, from our Chinese Art collection, Jocelyn Edens shared that she and curatorial colleagues wanted to not only shorten the label from over 300 words to 70-90 words but also be transparent about how the work was reconstructed from many fragments, a very different focus than the original label that instead focuses on style and composition.

Once again, all those interviewed preferred the new version to the old, sharing that the old one contained a lot of information that was difficult to take in. One of our motivations with evaluating this particular label was to understand if the new approach would affect how people explored the other objects in the gallery. This, however, did not happen. Instead, people remarked on how the new label made them think about the Buddha as well as the connection to Kansas City Art Institute. While this particular label did not seem to have an effect on the interviewees’ overall experience with other objects, we’d like to continue exploring this question of how individual labels may influence visitors’ understanding of other objects.

One last example was new interpretation for an object in our European Art collection, Cassone, or Chest, from 1500s Italy, which depicts the myth of Apollo and Daphne. Apollo chases Daphne romantically and, in an effort to help Daphne escape from Apollo’s unwanted pursuits, Daphne’s father, Peneus, turns her into a tree. Much like in the case of Europa and the Bull (a label we are working on but have not yet evaluated), in the original label this myth was described as a romantic story. In the rewrite (both versions below), we explicitly called out the violent nature of this myth as a story of attempted rape.

When presented with the new label, interviewees noticed this explicit language of rape as well as how it asked them to think about attitudes towards relationships and gender dynamics both historically and today.  When presented with the old label, interviewees also shared that they were unfamiliar with phrases like “high relief” and “sculpted ornamentation”, reinforcing that we need to avoid art historical jargon. Everyone interviewed preferred the shift away from a traditional art historical approach to the new label that was more explicitly tied to a 21^st century understanding of the myth and gendered power dynamics. This one was particularly interesting (and exciting) for me, as it proves that people appreciate, and may actually want, culturally relevant discussions and transparent language in interpretation.

Where do we go from here?

Obviously, we still have a lot of work to do both in replacing current labels and in applying our agreed upon principles to all interpretive text. While this process started with the goal of harm reduction, it has pushed us to reimagine the content of all of our interpretation including the stories we do (and do not) tell and the language we use. Right now, the Interpretation and Curatorial departments are beginning to dig into specific parameters for inclusive language. Here, we are indebted to A Progressive’s Style Guide as a starting point for many conversations. We are gathering resources and sharing as much as possible, all in an effort to build a shared understanding and a common language.

Reflecting on the process, there are a few pieces I would say have been effective. First, this goal of developing a common understanding of harm/shared learning around what creates harm has made the work incredibly collaborative and fruitful. Rather than Interpretation dictating what we say and how we say it, this process has allowed us to build from the bottom up and create principles and values with our curatorial colleagues.

Second, throughout the process we have maintained that we are aiming for progress, not perfection. Those of us working in Interpretation know that once you start asking questions about labels, more questions appear. It’s easy to go down a rabbit hole or get so overwhelmed by the amount of work (don’t even get me started on credit lines and tombstone information!) that these projects die before they get off the ground. Committing to the principle that this is an ongoing process that will likely never be finished has helped us take it one step at a time. At the least, we’ve rewritten some outdated, harmful labels. At the most, we’ve developed new principles and values that will guide our work moving forward. While we still have a lot of work to do, we’ve made progress and tried to not let our perfectionist tendencies get in the way.

While this process has been effective in certain ways, there are, of course, still areas for improvement. I wonder, for instance, if starting with labels was the right place. In each conversation throughout this process, concerns and questions about other forms of interpretation have been raised, not to mention the need for small- and large-scale gallery reinstallations to reframe how we tell stories about objects. This is natural because labels support visitor experience and, as we all know, do not exist in a vacuum. While focusing on labels has enabled us to address some problematic interpretation and start amazing conversations with colleagues, I also worry it has overly focused us too much on one interpretive element. The question now becomes how do we open up the conversation to larger organizing principles that go beyond label text and get to the very root of planning and ideas in our projects. I don’t know the answer, but I think we’re on our way and I’d welcome any thoughts.

Thank you all for reading this series. It has been a pleasure to share our work and I hope it has been inspiring in a small way.

About the Author

Rachel Nicholson is the Director, Interpretation, Evaluation & Visitor Research at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art.  You can reach her at rnicholson@nelson-atkins.org. Every two weeks throughout April and May 2021, Rachel has shared her team’s efforts to rewrite the Nelson-Atkins’ permanent collection gallery labels through a harm reduction lens. Read her first three posts here.

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