Managing Change in Museums and Galleries

A Practical Guide

Piotr Bienkowski, Hilary McGowan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9780367858513
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000364750
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Museum Studies

Managing Change in Museums and Galleries is the first practical book to provide guidance on how to deal with organisational change in museums, galleries or heritage organisations.

Written by two authors who have direct experience of leading change, running change programmes and advising on change in more than 250 museums and galleries, the book identifies the various problems, issues and challenges that any professional in a museum or heritage organisation is likely to encounter and provides advice on how to deal with them. The book's six parts treat change holistically, and help the reader understand what change entails, prepare for it and lead it, ensure that everyone in the museum is involved, understand what can go wrong and evaluate and learn from it. Each chapter is devoted to a specific challenge that is often encountered during change and is extensively cross-referenced to other relevant chapters. Including a list of helpful resources and suggestions of useful publications for further reading, this book is a unique guide to change in museums.

Managing Change in Museums and Galleries is an essential resource for all museum practitioners – whether they be the people in museums and galleries who are leading change, or those affected by change as a leader, a member of staff or a volunteer.

PART 1 What is change?

It is often taken for granted that everyone in museums and galleries understands what ‘change’ is, but, in practice, this is not necessarily the case. Part 1 defines the nature of change, and what it is that museums and galleries are actually changing, so that everyone involved and affected can understand up front what change may entail, be prepared for it and take an active part in it.

It describes and explains the common factors of all successful change programmes: they take time; the strategic vision needs to be long term as museums need to be long-term organisations; small changes in many different areas, across the whole museum, add up to significant transformation; and change is everyone’s responsibility and job – not only leaders and governing bodies but all staff and volunteers can become change agents.

As noted in the Introduction, throughout this book the word ‘museum’ will refer to both museums and art galleries.

1 WHAT ARE YOU CHANGING?

The future of successful museums will be one of constant repositioning to adapt to, or outwit, the forces of change.

Michael Ames, University of British Columbia Museum of Anthropology¹

When museums talk about ‘organisational change’, exactly what is it that they are proposing to change? For many staff, ‘change’ is perceived as shorthand for redundancies, and this can immediately set up a resistance to the process.

As reviewed in the Introduction, organisational change in museums usually happens in response to, or as a result of, external or internal pressures, such as a need to cut costs, generate more income, increase visitor numbers, realign the organisation to the changing requirements of stakeholders and funders, respond to the impact of external events or become more permeable to community voices. This can necessitate a change in aims, strategy and/or working methods. Most recently, the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic brought all these issues sharply to the fore, with its devastating impact on all walks of life, including museum finances and staffing.

Any organisation – including all its staff, volunteers and stakeholders – needs to understand up front what change may entail and to be prepared for the (often painful and lengthy) process. Table 1.1 shows which aspects of running a museum an organisational change programme might involve, who might be impacted and how.

TABLE 1.1 What organisational change in a museum might involve

What is changing?	Who does it impact?	What might be the impact?
Core mission and aims of the museum	All staff, volunteers, governing body and stakeholders	Changes in roles, job descriptions, working practices, revised strategies and policies
Policies	Potentially all staff, volunteers, governing body and stakeholders	Updating and changing policies on key activities might impact roles, job descriptions and working practices
Governance and leadership	Leaders, governing body, but potentially all staff and volunteers too	For example, change to trust status; changing the nature and remit of trustees and their relationship with the director; including community voices on the governing body; local authority restructuring, including merging departments or moving museums into another department. Some of these will impact on contracts, roles and job descriptions
Staff structures	Potentially all staff and volunteers	Changing staff groupings and who reports to whom; amalgamating departments; amending who is or is not on a senior management team; physically moving staff to different locations
Need to adapt to a sudden and unexpected drop in income	All staff and volunteers	Complete review of aims and mission, staffing levels, structures and activities
Volunteers	Potentially all staff and volunteers	For example, increasing numbers of volunteers working in key areas; changing methods of recruitment of volunteers; changing training, management and supervision of volunteers
Changes as a result of a major capital project	Potentially all staff and volunteers	For example, secondment or reassignment of staff; role changes; temporary closure of some or all of the museum; or relocation
Job descriptions	Potentially all leaders, staff and volunteers	This usually involves negotiations with trade unions and can be a protracted process
Role changes	Potentially all leaders, staff and volunteers	Staff temporarily or permanently reassigned or asked to take on other roles due to, e.g. sickness, maternity/paternity leave, secondment, redundancies
Cultural change	All staff and volunteers	Changing the values and behaviours of staff and volunteers, e.g. to become more participatory, more commercially minded, to become a learning organisation or to integrate greater equality and diversity
Increasing commercial activities	Leaders, governing body and some staff	Targets to generate set amounts of income from activities might change what the museum is offering, and have an impact on certain roles and ways of working
Broadening audiences	Leaders, governing body and some staff	Targets to diversify visitors; focus on under- or unrepresented groups; change in the nature of museum programming; strategic partnerships with external agencies in order to identify and attract new audiences
Evaluation	AH staff and volunteers	Embedding formative evaluation into all activities, and building reflection into all meetings
Sharing decision-making with communities	Leaders, governing body and some staff	For example, setting up participative fora; including community members on the governing body — this impacts ways of working as decision-making involves more people with different perspectives, and can become more complex
Training	Potentially all leaders, governing body, staff and volunteers	Changing the nature of staff continuing professional development; including delivery of training by community partners; or, sometimes, cutting all funding for such training
External voice	Leaders, governing body, some staff	Bringing in critical friends or other external voices to work with key staff groups to provide fresh perspectives and to challenge ways of working
Cutting hours	Potentially all leaders, staff and volunteers	Some or all staff have their hours cut, temporarily or permanently, in times of financial difficulty, through closing the museum early or on one or more days a week, or a decision to open only seasonally
Redundancies	Potentially all leaders, staff and volunteers	Certain staff made redundant for financial reasons, or because the role is no longer needed or has been assimilated, or as a result of restructuring

As the table demonstrates, an organisational change process might involve redundancies, role changes, or cutting hours, but it need not – and it is best to be clear about these points right at the start to ensure that staff understand and buy into the change process.

See also:

• 7 What is your stimulus for change?
• 10 Finding common purpose: a shared understanding of change
• 43 Misunderstanding of change

Note

1. 1 M.M. Ames, ‘Introduction’, in R.R. Janes, Museums and the paradox of change: A case study in urgent adaptation (third edition, Routledge 2013), p. 4.

2 CHANGE TAKES TIME

Change is a continuous process. Most organisational change succeeds after five years, if at all.

Robert Hewison, John Holden and Samuel Jones, All Together¹

The conventional wisdom is that organisational change takes three to five years at a minimum. In fact, it has been described as a never-ending journey, and it is true that organisational change rarely stops or has a neatly defined end point.

Some commentators on change in the business world think that this is wrong, and that for organisational change in that environment to be successful it must happen rapidly and must create momentum. Yet the evidence from case studies of change in the museum and wider cultural sector clearly demonstrates that it does indeed take time. Even when the need arises to respond to a sudden change in circumstances, which affects funding and staff – such as happened in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 – the actual process of change will take time, although some immediate steps will need to be taken and not deferred.

The most detailed analysis of organisational change in an individual museum – Glenbow Museum in Canada – reveals that it went through discontinuous change for more than a quarter of a century: an initial ten years of tumultuous change which led to more robust finances, a new strategic plan and organisational structure and a more flexible and open way of working. Further changes over seven years by a new CEO were followed by a financial crisis, allegations of mismanagement, and a refocus of its entire mission over five years, which rowed back many of the previous changes. In recent years Glenbow has focused on financial stability and a visitor-centred appro...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• Introduction
• PART 1 What is change?
• PART 2 Preparing for change
• PART 3 Leading change
• PART 4 The role of staff and volunteers in change
• PART 5 Why change fails
• PART 6 Evaluating and learning from change
• Appendix A: Resources to help you
• Appendix B: Useful publications
• Index