Experts

Describing the management mindset at his (very major, national) museum, a friend said:

Current management is totally insane - totally risk adverse, incapable of making decisions without resorting to data collection, feasibilities, testing etc - all encouraging 'experts' in relevant fields to promote their own importance and agenda, and totally incompatible with other views and agendas - resulting in incomprehensible, unrealistic and unachieveable briefs and objectives.

Where is leadership, creativity and innovation?  

And where is coherence? External people always seem to 'know better' than the people in the business and pedal their own patent nostrums at the expense of coherence. Over-worked, brow-beaten and sometimes simply weak management give in and apply the solutions so that they can report that 'advice has been taken' - aka my bum is protected. 

The real pain is that the advice will have cost many times what it would have cost to have someone internal do the work or to have been allowed to form a view after taking advice. How much it costs in the long term is anyone's guess. We recently paid  for a charming marketing consultant to produce a marketing review and strategy for us. For much the same cost we could have employed a marketing person full time for four months. Value for money: I think not; but the money needed to be spent by a deadline (why, is a different story).

As to patent nostrums, over the last two months two different consultants have separately told us that the home page of our website should have 'the on-line shop' and 'the fund-raising message' in the most prominent position. And there I was thinking we had something to do with being a museum: making an offer, telling people what there was to say and persuading them to visit (and pay).

Consultants recommend consultants and contractors as the answer to an organisation's problems and a whole archipelago is growing up 'providing services' where we managers would much rather have dedicated teams that have watches and can tell the time themselves.

I suppose we should be reassured that things are no better at the top of the slag heap as they are at the bottom.  

Artistic flair?

An invitation arrives ...

'An international leader in his field. His work concerns the integration of art with contemporary ecological thinking and real world issues.'

'... is an artist whose work is informed by net art, distributed networks, healing, protocols and curating. ... 2013 sees the next phase of her ... which takes net art to rural locations.'

What does all of this actually mean? Where is the communication? It contains lots of words but we are struggling to find any sense. Is it us or is it, just possibly, them?

Tactful or what?

Why do we feel that this picture, which was the main picture in an e-newsletter, was not the most tactful choice for an article on Touch in Museums in the week in which a baby had his hand savaged by an urban fox?



They changed the image on their website.

Ah, those heady days

Trying to work out what we needed to do for a museum exhibition, recently I recalled the heady days when we used our nous. I made the mistake of asking a former colleague what he recommended. Here is his reply:

Surely today these imponderables would be resolved by commissioning a formative evaluation study, identifying audience needs, behavior, attitude, learning styles and preferences, through questionnaire and observational research, testing of conceptual and intellectual options with focus groups, followed by summative evaluation, using similar techniques on temporary/intermediate solutions and capable of being modified for the final interpretative offer. All actions would require a Project Execution Plan and, of course, Business Plan, with weekly management reports and a clear audit trail.

I would also recommend that this evaluation should not be done in isolation but as part of a wider study evaluating the effectiveness of all interpretative media available, either individually or as part of a mixed media platform. The study should also be perhaps wider to include the financial implications of required expenditure and anticipated income and meeting Brand objectives.

Oh joy.

E-bacc to be dropped

So nice Mr Gove has now decided to drop his idea for an E-bacc to replace GCSEs following opposition from advisers, teachers and 'business leaders'.

I doubt that he will learn the obvious lesson. Like most thwarted ministers, he will now go around saying it is impossible to get things done: civil servants/the system/time-servers/the unimaginative/people ... lack courage/the desire to change/the will to change/vision ...

Getting in a Pickle

How refreshing ... we have a new minister joining the fray: Eric Pickles has issued a list of 50 ways to save. This has the potential to be insulting, foolhardy or both.

One bright idea suggests that councils should lease works of art not on display. Many councils own art galleries and museums and have extensive collections which never see the light of day, but merely gather dust in storage.

The museums industry has responded that the suggestion is ill informed - don't you just love understatement: such an English form of criticism - and that there is no market for leasing art in this way.

We wonder who Pickles thought would be rushing forward to pay to borrow pictures from museum stores and how he thought they were going to solve the problem of insurance, handling and proper care. Insurers and curators are very protective of works of art. Would lessees be trained in picture conservation and care and then issued with white gloves?

The next headline might be 'Leased Pickle picture damaged by bread roll ... Shock!'