How leaders lead

I’m finally going to get off this current kick about leadership and vision… right after this post.  The past month has been so fruitful that I’ve generated piles of references that all bear on our work and I want to get some of the most germane out to you so I can move on.  Some of the most interesting reading I’ve done in the past couple weeks has all revolved around the qualities of good (and bad) leadership.

It’s not about you
Janet Carding from the ROM (@janetcarding) posted this tasty little tidbit from Scott Eblin (@Scotteblin) about one of my favorite attributes of a good leader; the ability to let go. Going from being the brutally competent doer of deeds to being the leader of a tribe of doers is a tricky adjustment that I’ve seen talented people mess up. Eblin, an executive coach, says,

 “To grow as a leader, you have to let go of being the go-to person and pick up the profile of being the person who builds a team of go-to people.

How do you do that? Here are some ideas.

•  Allow and encourage your team to become an expert in the things in which you’ve been an expert.
•  Raise your comfort level for letting go of what you’ve been doing and your team’s for picking up responsibilities by establishing regular check points.
•  Coach your team to come up with its own way of doing things rather than giving your team the answers.”

This relates back to my earlier posts on leadership, because this ability to let go I think has everything to do with having a vision that’s bigger than yourself. When a leader has vision, it’s too big for any one person to implement, so letting go becomes a necessity if the vision is to be advanced.  This is how vision propagates. It’s big enough that there is room for lots of people to explore it’s corners, find out new things about it, and feed those findings back into the work of the whole tribe. And when I think about the people I consider to be exemplary leaders, one trait they all share is their pride in discussing what their staff are up to, rather than what they’re up to.

All three of these tips apply to pretty much anyone doing experience development work, regardless of your position in the organizational chart. “Relax, let go, and be a fluid communicator.” Is pretty sound advice for anyone doing exhibition development, as I wrote about before. As someone responsible for content development, I am acutely aware of the delicate balance necessary to encourage other team members to explore the content themselves, rather than having me be the only conduit. It’s easy to fall into being too controlling or too lax, but the results are so much better when you can bring the rest of the team along with you.

Talk, talk, talk
The Guardian recently ran a profile of Performances Birmingham, the charity that runs Birmingham’s Town Hall & Symphony Hall, and some of their practices that they’ve developed to keep a large staff feeling informed and empowered to do the work of the institution. They are:

• Tell everybody the same thing
• Give your team a voice
• Never say nothing
• Encourage creativity
• Have fun on the job

The whole article is worth a read, so look at the specific examples they cite.  How well does your organization do in these five areas? Aside from “Have fun on the job” , all of these qualities would organically arise in a setting where a leader with vision, like the one described above, is working.  One can only let go by being an efficient and frequent communicator and a responsive listener. A shared vision encourages everybody in the room to be creative.  And the result of that, I’d argue, is workplace that is fun, without the need for mandated, official fun.

Managing well, rather than just managing
Eric Jackson had a very popular post on Fortbes recently that looked why people leave big companies. As an employee of a large institution (and someone who’s watched “Office Space”) I can resonate with most of these.

1. Big Company Bureaucracy.
2. Failing to Find a Project for the Talent that Ignites Their Passion.
3. Poor Annual Performance Reviews.
4. No Discussion around Career Development. (I’ve written about this before… 
5. Shifting Whims/Strategic Priorities.
6. Lack of Accountability and/or telling them how to do their Jobs.
7. Top Talent likes other Top Talent.
8. The Missing Vision Thing.
9. Lack of Open-Mindedness.
10. Who’s the Boss?

 The explanations of the reasons are well worth looking at, though they might be somewhat dispiriting if you’re working somewhere where these things are happening. You’ve been warned. The reason I include them in an otherwise upbeat post is because Erika Anderson followed up on this list with a further summation that boils that list down to one reason; “Top talent leave an organization when they’re badly managed and the organization is confusing and uninspiring.”  Her recipe for how to address these failings is interesting. Her two ways to keep talent are;

 “1) Create an organization where those who manage others are hired for their ability to manage well, supported to get even better at managing, and held accountable and rewarded for doing so.

2) Then be clear about what you’re trying to accomplish as an organization – not only in terms of financial goals, but in a more three-dimensional way. What’s your purpose; what do you aspire to bring to the world? What kind of a culture do you want to create in order to do that?  What will the organization look, feel and sound like if you’re embodying that mission and culture?  How will you measure success?  And then, once you’ve clarified your hoped-for future, consistently focus on keeping that vision top of mind and working together to achieve it.”

It’s really that simple. Not easy, but simple. Managing well takes work on the part of the institution, and it takes someone to articulate a vision.

The bigger picture
So how does this tie back into all the fascinating discussions taking place around digital technologies, technologists, and new media literacy and professional development? I think Rob Stein’s presentation at the Salzburg Global Seminar and his follow up, “Is Your Community Better Off Because it has a Museum?” are good refreshers on the bigger issues that these current debates reside within.

What is the value proposition of your institution? Can you answer why your community/ies are better off because of you? There are many ways new media and new technologies can help deliver value, but they all require you to A) have a clear idea of that value, and B) be structured in such a way that you can deliver.

Related Links:

Scott Eblin, “Want to grow as a leader? Let go of being the ‘go-to person”
http://smartblogs.com/leadership/2012/01/27/want-to-grow-as-a-leader-let-go-of-being-the-go-to-person/

Nick Loveland, The Guardian, “Arts organisations need to engage their own staff as well as their audiences”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture-professionals-network/culture-professionals-blog/2012/mar/20/arts-staff-engagement-internal-comms?CMP=twt_gu

Eric Jackson, Forbes, “Top Ten Reasons Why Large Companies Fail To Keep Their Best Talent”
http://www.forbes.com/sites/ericjackson/2011/12/14/top-ten-reasons-why-large-companies-fail-to-keep-their-best-talent/

Erika Anderson, Forbes, “Why Top Talent Leaves: Top 10 Reasons Boiled Down to 1”
http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikaandersen/2012/01/18/why-top-talent-leaves-top-10-reasons-boiled-down-to-1/

Rob Stein, “The Challenges and Opportunities of Participatory Culture for Museums and Libraries” parts I and II,
http://www.imamuseum.org/blog/2011/10/11/please-chime-in-the-challenges-and-opportunities-of-participatory-culture/
http://www.imamuseum.org/blog/2011/10/21/the-challenges-and-opportunities-of-participatory-culture-for-museums-and-libraries-part-ii/

Rob Stein, “Is Your Community Better Off Because it has a Museum?”
[http://rjstein.com/is-your-community-better-off-because-it-has-a-museum-final-thoughts-about-participatory-culture-part-iii/]

Opening up to new ideas

We’re in an interesting place in mobile media design for museums.  Technological issues and market penetration are finally getting to the point where we can design experiences that will reach broad segments of our audiences and deliver experiences and foster interactions that would be unthinkable in any other medium. Over the past year, tremendous efforts have been made to establish a level playing field in terms of open standards, led by Rob Stein (another person you should follow @rjstein) at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, and others.  The TourML standard currently being developed offers us the promise of not only being able to get out from under the old model of designing content for specific platforms or proprietary systems, but of being able to share open content across applications and even across institutions. Heady stuff!

To generate some thinking around this, a group of us will be running a workshop at Museums and the Web 2011 in Philadelphia, called More Than Tours: radical opportunities in mobile content design and social media.  You should totally sign up! It’ll be great.  Our current lineup includes Nancy Proctor, Sandy Goldberg, Koven Smith, Halsey Burgund, Dave Schaller, and Kate Haley Goldman. If I weren’t going to be helping run it, I’d certainly attend! Here’s the blurb:

Workshop

New mobile and social media platforms have hugely expanded the ways in which museums can interact with their audiences – and even with each other! Nonetheless, museum mobile experiences still tend not to stray far from the traditional audio tour in experience and content design. This workshop is designed to get us thinking “outside the audio tour box” to devise radical new approaches to mobile experiences for museum audiences.

Led by innovative mobile practitioners and museum experience designers, the workshop will challenge us to transform the relationship with museum audiences by engaging them in doing meaningful, mission-focused work, and being true co-creators of our cultural institutions. We’ll ask how content creation might be shared with audiences and among museums; how new tools like augmented reality and location-based gaming and social media apps can expand the mobile experience beyond the museum’s walls; and what research exists and is still needed to help inform our next generation mobile decisions. Outcomes will include both new paradigms for museum mobile experiences, and concrete solutions for building them.

So here’s my question. When you hear “radical opportunities in mobile content design and social media” what springs to mind?

Breathe! Creating Is Hard Work

One of the reasons  I started this blog was so I could use it as a way to synthesize and refine my thinking about my chosen profession. A lot of it has been metacognitive, thinking about how I think. Maybe it’s because the Museum of Science spent decades developing exhibitions on teaching thinking skills. Maybe it’s my natural inclination, I don’t know. What I do know is that thinking like an exhibit developer requires certain skills and habits of mind. Just in time for the Thanksgiving long weekend, here’s the first of several posts on thinking like an exhibit developer. What do you think are the most important habits of mind an exhibit developer needs?

NOTE: I will intentionally use the words “develop” and “design” throughout to refer to the same thing, not because I think my skills qualify me to apply for exhibit designer jobs, but because making exhibits is design. Small “d” design.

Breathe! Creating Is Hard Work

Thinking like an exhibit developer is all about being prepared for the unknown and being able to make good judgments.  Thinking like an exhibit developer requires not only the ability to live with uncertainty, but to befriend it.

An exhibit developer’s job is to create something complete and whole; an experience. A good exhibit developer needs to able to envision how to put the pieces together, to see the limited subset of pieces at hand as a complete and coherent whole.  Their initial vision is necessarily based on incomplete knowledge about smaller parts, but being able to use those to sketch in the missing bits is an essential part of exhibit development and design intelligence in general. Where someone else sees an empty gallery, a good developer sees a completed exhibition vaguely, and then more and more clearly until they have finished and made it.

Every design project is unique and requires the developers to be responsive to the work, attentive to the situation, and self-reflective as they figure out the process their particular project needs. Good exhibition design is not about finding the “right” way to do something, or coming up with the rules, or framework, or checklist that will apply to any situation and solve all potential problems. Being a good developer means being able to live with not knowing exactly what the final product is going to look like and being at peace with that truth.  Developers who make exactly what they set out to make aren’t paying attention.  They may still make something useful and beautiful, but I would argue they will never make something truly great, because that requires taking advantage of sudden opportunities, capitalizing on unexpected outcomes, and most importantly, being willing to fail quickly and fruitfully.

Making something new is hard work, and looking out into the void is often terrifying. It’s rarely dull. Making the same thing somebody else has made is easy, that’s why it happens so often. Especially in the science center field, “proven” ideas tend to proliferate like weeds. Making something new involves chance; it forces the developer to explore the unknown and create some new reality that even he or she can’t see clearly at first. Every time they begin a project, a developer will confront situations where they will have opportunities to see things they thought they knew in a new way, to learn new ways to do their work, and to resolve thorny dilemmas mindfully and straightforwardly. In other words, they will have opportunities to be creative while creating.

Exhibit development is neither a linear process nor strictly an iterative process. It is a dialectical process where the “big idea”, the current plan of work, and the specific tasks being done all influence each other continuously in a crazy feedback network.  Each new interesting fact requires the reflective developer to reassess the plan and the vision and decide whether to incorporate that fact and let it alter the vision, or keep the vision and lose the fact, or choose some other outcome. It’s a central tenet of prototyping at the Museum that, “Anything you fix usually breaks something else.” A good developer fixes and breaks and fixes and breaks. Working this way requires courage. It takes courage to avoid the simple solutions that others will take to save time or money or effort. It takes courage to challenge the prevailing understanding of the present situation and see it for oneself. It takes courage to oppose simplistic interpretations of how to solve that problem.

Dilemmas

I mentioned dilemmas above, and they need a little definition. A good exhibit developer must remember that a dilemma is not a problem in the logical sense of the word. 2x + 4= y is a problem. There are solutions, values of x and y that will solve the problem and there are values that won’t. The former are “right” and the latter are “wrong.”  Dilemmas don’t have any answer that solves every single need or want. With dilemmas, every possible outcome leads to something getting sacrificed. The developer’s job is choosing what gets sacrificed. That is the dilemma. Dilemmas are a central aspect of any design process and the place where most personal conflicts arise, because resolving dilemmas requires giving something up, and that’s hard to do, particularly when what someone is giving up is their idea or their vision of a potential future. In my experience, the hardest part of exhibit development is not deciding what the exhibition is about. The hardest part is deciding what it’s not about.

Reading back over this, I’m aware that readers may be thinking I’m a masochist from my descriptors thus far; responsibility, uncertainty, dilemma, terrifying, conflict, courage, sacrifice. Designing something new is hard and it inevitably involves pain. There are things a good developer can do to lessen the overall amount, but nobody can eliminate it entirely. Nor should one try to. Avoiding conflict may be a useful coping skill in other aspects of life, but it is the death of creativity. Judy Rand once said to me at the outset of a major exhibition project, “You can have your pain now, or you can have it later. You can’t not have it, and the longer you avoid it, the more pain you’ll have in the end.” My experiences since then have confirmed that statement over and over again.

The premise that pain is bad is false when it comes to design. Creativity thrives on tension, conflict, and pain.  Pain is necessary and beneficial to the final product. When you can resolve it gracefully, you often get startling, beautiful results. You walk around the finished product, and all the pain and conflict seem to diminish. A completed exhibition that beautifully balances experiences, meets visitors’ needs, and contains surprises is worth all the hard conversations and arduous decision-making. In fact, there’s nothing like the feeling of walking through something you helped give birth to.