Museums for the New Millennium:Don't Lose Your Nerve:
Museums and organizational change
Museums for the New Millennium:
DR. CREW: Good morning. Can I get your attention. It is really wonderful to have people here enjoying each other's company, and I don't want to discourage that. Welcome to Session III of the Symposium, Museums for the New Millennium. This session is entitled Transforming the Internal Structure of Museums.
Our speaker this morning is Dr. Robert R. Janes. He is currently the Executive Director and CEO of the Glenbow Museum Art Gallery, Library and Archives in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. He has held that position since 1989. He has a Ph.D. In archeology from the University of Calgary, and he still teaches there as an adjunct professor. I admire him for finding the time to balance these things in his life. He has received many honorary degrees, including being named the first honorary life member of the Canadian Museums Association, and the award for Outstanding Achievement in Museum Management, also from the Canadian Museum Association.
Jointly, he and his staff have received the Award of Merit for Outstanding Achievement from the Alberta Museums Association in 1992. Dr. Janes has written three books and numerous articles in the areas of archeology, anthropology, and museology.
We are here this morning in relation to his latest book, Museums and the Paradox of Change, which looks at the process of change in a major cultural organization. It is a book you really need to know about and to read.
To give you a sense of why it is such an important book, a recent review of the book began this way: "Bob Janes has written a dangerous book. Museum executives be warned: Reading this book may lead to heart palpitations, desert mouth, and shortness of breath. Janes, the director of the Glenbow Museum in Alberta, Canada, describes in detail the actions taken to transform an institution born in the 1960's, the age of endless potential, into a Museum that would survive and perhaps even flourish in the nasty 1990's."
Any of you who are directors who work in museums would recognize that scenario. I think we all find it useful to sit down and talk with others going down that same path. We are very fortunate today to have Dr. Janes with us to tell us more about his experiences and how we can profit from them, and we welcome his challenges. It is now my pleasure to introduce Dr. Janes.
DR. JANES: It is funny, you don't have to read my book to have a dry mouths and heart palpitations.
[The following is an edited version of a presentation made at "Museums for the New Millennium." Do not quote or copy any of this text without the written permission of the author.]
I am indeed honoured to have been invited to speak to this important symposium - even more so because our host is none other than the Smithsonian Institution. Its work is legendary, even in Canada, where I have lived most of my adult life. With an American mother and a Canadian father, I have encountered the perennial enigma of Canadian identity which was so well-described by one of your journalists, Richard Starnes (National Film Board of Canada 1976:133). He observed that ....
Identity aside, few would dispute John F. Kennedy's (National Film Board of Canada 1976:40) remark that "geography has made us neighbours. History has made us friends." Always striving for balance, I should also note a comment from one of our former Prime Ministers, Pierre Trudeau. He observed that if you sleep with an elephant, you have to be aware that it may turn over. Now, to begin -
Organizational change and adaptation occur with great difficulty in museums. My most vivid testimony to this is the death threat I received during the most painful of our organizational initiatives - the reduction of 25% of our staff. There could hardly be a more stark reminder of the impact of these events on individual human beings than such a threat. Nor is there a more cogent reminder of the responsibilities we have for the decisions we make and the actions we take to ensure the survival and prosperity of our museums.
Significant change requires a form of dying (De Pree 1992:35), and it is foolish to expect that organizational change will not anger, frustrate and disappoint people. This is especially true when the changes go far beyond cosmetic tinkering. At Glenbow, we are insisting upon new ways of thinking and acting which will make us more responsive to the communities we serve. The real question is whether or not the emotions associated with change, be they rage or elation, and the energy these emotions require, can be redirected toward organizational change and improvement. I also hope, perhaps naively, that change in museums will not have to be a zero-sum game, where progress can come only at the cost of dearly held values (Traub 1995:60). The key to pushing, without the organization pushing back, is balanced inquiry and action. The indiscriminate use of trendy solutions is as destructive as a stubborn reverence for tradition. Because organizational change is chaotic, uncertain and often mysterious, we have no choice but to try to be as intelligent and caring as we can. In a 1995 survey of 29 North American museums, conducted by Martha Morris (1995) of the National Museum of American History, fully 83% of the respondents said they had recently undergone some degree of organizational change. We should not be surprised by this, nor disturbed, as it is in the nature of complex adaptive systems to change. This is also true of our families and our other relationships (Flower 1995:1).
Please note that I do not question why museums exist or whether they should be replaced by something else. My main interest is in museums as organizations, a subject which has received remarkably little attention in the museum literature (Griffin 1987:389). These concerns should not be dismissed as mere process, for the manner in which a museum does its work will either permit or preclude innovation, inclusive thinking and the persistent questioning of the status quo, all of which are fundamental aspects of a museum's role. Museums will only thrive to the extent that traditional practices are continually questioned, improved or done away with.
In preparing my remarks for today, I was continually reminded of John Kenneth Galbraith, who recently observed (April 27, 1995: University of Calgary) that, in 60 years of teaching at Harvard, he has learned that you can take any idea, however simple, and extend it to 55 minutes. My task is just the opposite - summarizing our complex and lengthy change process in about the same time. I want to emphasize that most of what I will be talking about today is not particularly new or original. I ask that you consider my comments on Glenbow's change process as a summary of an experimental work-in-progress, which I hope will be useful to you in navigating the stormy seas between organizational realities and societal needs. We shall undoubtedly find it easier to change museums than to change the world (Phillips 1995:3). My purpose in summarizing our work at Glenbow is to set the stage for the second half of my talk, which is a consideration of some of the opportunities and hazards facing museums as organizations in the late twentieth century.
It will help to know something about Glenbow at the outset, if only so that you can compare it to your own situation. Glenbow's uniqueness lies in the sum of its four parts - a museum, art gallery, library and archives - all under one roof and under one administration. Glenbow's western Canadian research library is the largest of its kind in Canada. The Glenbow Archives is the largest non-government archives in Canada, with 2 million photographs and manuscript collections occupying two shelf miles. Our art gallery, with a permanent collection of over 28,000 works, attracts almost one third of our annual visitors. Our museum includes the disciplines of ethnology, military history, cultural history and mineralogy, for a total permanent collection of 2.3 million objects.
Glenbow does not restrict its work to the city of Calgary. We also operate a rural and special loans program which makes objects available to non-museum environments, including the Calgary International Airport. These programs served nearly 900,000 Albertans last year, as well as visitors from all parts of the globe. To fulfill these responsibilities, we currently employ 86 full time staff and 33 part time staff. We are also deeply indebted to 260 active volunteers.
Dr. Frances Kaye (1995), an historian at the University of Nebraska, has provided a succinct description of Glenbow's role:
When I arrived as the new Executive Director in 1989, it was clear that major changes were in the offing. Although Glenbow is remarkably self-sufficient for a Canadian museum, we still require a major contribution annually from the provincial government of Alberta. An agreement to provide this funding had come to an end coincidental with my arrival (at least I hope that it was coincidental), and we decided to develop a corporate and strategic plan in 1990 as the basis for securing multi-year funding from the province. All of us were weary of the one-year-at-a-time, crisis management approach common to the funding of public agencies. Thus began our six years of continuous change, which is still unfolding.
Although financial concerns were a major stimulus for this initiative, there were other reasons which contributed to a perceptible, albeit largely unspoken, desire for change among Glenbow staff. To begin with, Glenbow had been without an Executive Director for a lengthy period prior to my arrival, and the institution was drifting. There was also a widespread belief among staff in 1989 that Glenbow's management was simply top-heavy. All these factors had created dissatisfaction with the status quo, so that even if stable funding from the province had been available, Glenbow was in need of a thoughtful overhaul.
Our corporate and strategic plan was a first for Glenbow, in that it enabled all staff to become involved. This plan was also a first for Canadian museums, in incorporating explicit performance measures and standards, as well as a set of principles outlining how we would treat each other as individuals and as staff. But alas, the provincial government rejected both our plan and our request for multi-year funding out of hand, presumably because multi-year funding was not only a foreign concept to them, but would also mean a loss of provincial control over Glenbow.
As infuriating as this was, in retrospect there was a hidden benefit to this impasse. It forced Glenbow's executive staff to confront the future with a vengeance, in the face of declining government support. We did some financial projections five years out, and glimpsed a huge deficit and eventual bankruptcy for Glenbow by 1998. A 20% reduction in operating expenses was required. With this kind of massive budgetary reduction, it is impossible simply to tinker with the organization chart. In short, we were confronted with the opportunity and responsibility to renew Glenbow by increasing our capacity for change.
This realization spawned another staff and Board exercise, based on the assumption that people will become committed to that which they help create (Beer 1988:4). There is no doubt that openness to good ideas is the best assurance of organizational vigour (Boyd 1995:175). This work resulted in the six strategies which continue to guide all our efforts at change. These strategies are designed to improve our overall effectiveness, increase revenues and decrease expenditures. As I have discussed these strategies in detail in my recent book (Janes 1995), I will only summarize them today. These strategies include:
I realize that this is a far cry from current museum practice based on boundaries and control, but consider the paradox that "the more freedom in self-organization, the more order" (Jantsch 1980:40). I will mention two attributes of our new organization here by way of example. We collapsed 22 functional departments into five multidisciplinary work units, and one of these units, the Library/Archives, now works as a self-managed team. The director of this unit is elected by his or her peers for a two year term.
But that's not all. In addition to adopting these strategies as our blueprint for change, we had to lay off 25% of our core staff (or 31 people) as part of our plan to become sustainable, with all of the attendant individual and organizational injury. Despite the corporate celebration of legendary lay-off greats like "Chainsaw Al" Dunlop of Scott Paper and "Neutron Jack" Welch of General Electric (his nickname apparently reflects the neutron bomb - people are eliminated but the buildings remain), laying off people is an unavoidably traumatic and hurtful undertaking. It has taken Glenbow staff well over two years to reconcile the pain, and even so the experience has left an almost gun-shy quality in some otherwise healthy, competent staff.
Repeated lay-offs are not a long-term solution for the difficulties which currently bedevil our organizations. Recent news from the corporate world bears this out. Although lay-offs have apparently become a strategic business manoeuvre to be used in both good times and bad (Tough 1996:37), recent research in the United States (The Economist 1996:51) reveals that nine out of ten firms which outperformed their industries over a ten year period had stable structures, with no more than one reorganization and no change (or an orderly change) in the chief executive.
There are some lessons in these revelations for museums. To begin with, while downsizing may necessarily be thrust upon us, it must be part of a broader plan. Cuts must be made in the right places, so that the organization reinforces its most promising activities. In doing this, one must ask and answer the two most salient questions - what is the central purpose of the museum and what resources are required to achieve it?
The critically important resources, of course, are people and their knowledge. Once again, there are lessons to be learned from the private sector, where middle managers have endured a highly disproportionate share of the lay-offs. Apparently unknown to senior management in the firms engaged in these dismissals, middle managers often serve as the synapses and memory within an organization's brain (The Economist 1996:51). Glenbow, thankfully, avoided this destructive behaviour by studiously ignoring the corporate mania for eliminating middle managers. We adopted a different approach, by asking at the outset of our reorganization - who are the people who own the knowledge which makes Glenbow unique? It turned out that most of these individuals were our department heads - the museum world's middle managers. I can't imagine where Glenbow would be today without them. Pay particularly close attention to who your knowledge-owners are, especially if you are contemplating staff reductions as part of a reorganization. Avoid dumbsizing at all costs. This is a recently identified phenomenon wherein management does not realize a given job is necessary until it has been eliminated (Jackson 1996:87).
The latest chapter in our process of continuous change is our disassociation from the provincial government. Glenbow is now an autonomous corporation, and no longer a provincial crown agency. This has been called privatization, but the term is wrong, as Glenbow will never be privately controlled. Its collections belong to the people of Alberta, in perpetuity. In a country like the U.S., where so many museums operate independently of any government, you might ask why I have chosen to mention this today. It's relevant because we are breaking some new ground, at least in Canada, and this work might be useful as some of you reconsider your relationships with your major funding partners. As part of our disassociation from government, we have developed a multi-year, fee-for-service contract with the province, which specifies the amount of money required to care for, and provide public access to, our collections. We want to debunk the government's belief that they are doing Glenbow a favour each year by giving us taxpayer's money to care for the taxpayer's collections. We also wanted to be free of nonproductive government procedures and reporting requirements. We commissioned a third party study of the costs of collection care and access at Glenbow, in order to put these negotiations on a more empirical, business-like basis. It is already apparent that we will always want more money, while government will want to allocate less. Nevertheless, we have signed a contract, even though our lawyer has likened these negotiations to trying to remove a fishhook from your thumb!
To conclude this first half of my talk, where has six years of continuous change at Glenbow left us? At first glance, the scorecard is not encouraging. For example, the provincial contribution to our operating budget has now decreased by 39% since 1989/90, the year I arrived. In addition, Glenbow's full-time, core staff has decreased from 137 in 1989/90 to 86 today, for a decline of nearly 40%. There is no doubt that we have suffered some major setbacks.
It's also true that many museum employees throughout North America are feeling exhausted, and rightfully so. Six years ago, Glenbow staff and volunteers were thrust into what we believed was a temporary state of budgetary madness, from which we would emerge ready to return to business as usual. We have emerged - stronger, smarter and much leaner - but now there appears to be no rest for the weary.
There is some instruction in this seeming disillusionment, however, which might help us to approach the 21st century more calmly and more productively. First, no matter how hard we might wish it so, there will be no return to "normal", whatever that might be. To idealize the past is all too human, even when that "past" is largely responsible for the discontent which led to change in the first place (Janes 1995:153). Second, we must learn to live with the notion that we will never find that mythical plateau where we can pause and say "we've made it". This is most difficult for me to accept personally, simply because I am still not comfortable with the idea of organizational life as an endless home renovation. I long for the noise, dust and confusion to be over, so that we can all spend some peaceful time in our new home. But I know deep down that this will never happen - there will never be a final, desirable state when the change is over and the house is finished.
There may be some comfort, albeit cold comfort, in noting that there are at least two kinds of tired (Chapin 1980). There's good tired and bad tired. Bad tired is the day you may have been successful, but you fought the wrong battles. Good tired is the day where you might have lost every battle but you fought the right ones. I'd like to think that when all of us feel tired in our museum jobs, that it's the good kind of tired.
Setbacks and fatigue aside, the future is upon us and I want to spend the remainder of my time today outlining a sample of the opportunities awaiting any museum which is poised to seize them. Predictably, these opportunities exist in a world of chaos and ambiguity, alongside a variety of hazards, each with sufficient potential to damage, if not derail, the museum enterprise. I will also identify some of these hazards, before concluding with some brief reflections on what can be learned from all of this.
Opportunities
Opportunities abound for all museums to fulfill their purpose. That is, to provide some answers to the fundamental question - what does it mean to be a human being (Postman 1990:50-58)? Our visitors, indeed North American society, are searching for answers. Museums can help; perhaps even show the way. For example:
| A local child attended Glenbow's new and innovative Museum School, the first of its kind in Canada. In an unsolicited letter from this child's parent, we learned that this family's dinner conversation had changed because of their daughter's new-found awe and excitement. The emotion is so palatable in this letter that I get a lump in my throat every time I read it.
Another example: At the conclusion of an exhibition commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Second World War, our exhibition team hosted a reception for the war veterans who had served as interpreters throughout the show. Unscheduled and unannounced, a frail, 80 year old survivor of a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp rose and spoke. He said that, as a result of Glenbow's exhibition, he now felt recognized and valued as a citizen and a soldier for the first time in his life.
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All museums must continually embrace the responsibility of providing meaning to people, for museums, in effect, are storehouses of individual and collective consciousness.
A second challenging opportunity lies in the notion of museums truly sharing power and responsibility with some of their primary constituents. For Glenbow, this includes the First Nations of the Blackfoot Confederacy (the Blood, Siksika and Peigan Nations), as we house a truly extraordinary collection of their cultural patrimony. Several years ago we started to lend sacred bundles to various ceremonialists for use and safekeeping. Slowly and painstakingly, this has opened up an entirely new world for Glenbow staff - the world of Blackfoot culture. We, in turn, have hired an individual from the Siksika Nation, bereft of academic degrees, but steeped in traditional knowledge. Mutual respect and understanding are increasing daily.
But all is not right. Our efforts to share these sacred objects have provoked anxiety among some government officials who are in a position to influence Glenbow's operating policies. They use the classic slippery slope, or thin edge of the wedge, thinking. That is, having loaned or returned objects to the First Nations, these officials foresee a run on all our collections and the eventual loss of everything to a variety of special-interest groups. What's more, possession is nine-tenths of the law, and what if the Blackfoot do not return the loans?
Yes, these are both possibilities, but they are the risks museums must take if we truly respect the peoples whose cultures we so boldly interpret for public consumption. Consider this recent example. A Peigan woman, who served as the Holy Woman in the Ok'an ceremony this past summer, requested the loan of a particular sacred bundle. The need for this bundle came to her in a dream, to aid her son who had recently undergone an unsuccessful operation which left him paralyzed. Some public officials would have us decline this request, or insist that the bundle be immediately returned after the ceremony. But, the Blackfoot people regard these bundles as living objects, which need all the care of a young child. Their ongoing presence in Blackfoot communities will have long-term benefits for many people. Museums are fond of saying that we keep our collections for posterity. I cannot help but think that posterity has arrived and is staring us in the face. What would you do? We loaned the bundle.
My last two examples are best described as opportunities which have yet to be fully realized, and they have more to do with museums as organizations and how we do our work. The first of these opportunities requires that we manage our intellectual resources more effectively. Most people would agree that museums are knowledge-based organizations, and that the knowledge of our staff, along with our collections, are the most important assets. Although collections management has evolved its own body of method and theory, surprisingly little attention has been given to managing professional intellect (Quinn et al. 1996:71). Some private sector organizations have become acutely aware of this, and see the management of human intellect as the critical executive skill of the age. What does this mean for museums?
We recognize that a true professional commands a body of knowledge, and that he or she must keep current with that knowledge. Our challenge in museums is to maintain a self-motivated, level of creativity among these professionals, without which we are unable to adapt to changing external conditions. There are various ways to nurture and sustain the creative professional, all of which are appropriate to museums. This obviously begins with hiring the best people available, and then encouraging their development through repeated exposure to complex, real problems. Perhaps most importantly, leading organizations in various sectors are maximizing their intellectual capital by abandoning hierarchical structures (Quinn et al. 1996:76), such as the departmental/divisional hierarchy, which is still the hallmark of so many museums.
One alternative to hierarchy is in the project-based organization, where professionals use self-organizing networks to do projects and solve problems, and then disband when the job is done. This is the true meaning of interdisciplinary work, where the organization's capabilities exceed the sum of its parts. It is now time for more museums to begin to embrace these new ways of working. In an ideal world, the most effective organization would be one in which structure develops and changes as a natural expression of purpose (Owen 1992:138). We are not there, yet, but Glenbow staff say that we are surprisingly close at times. In any event, this is the thinking behind our multidisciplinary work units. These work units are actually flexible pools of knowledge and experience, whose members work individually, collectively and across the organization, depending upon the work to be done. There is a refreshing informality to all of this. Our challenge now is to develop a performance management and development system based on both collective and individual work.
Last, I ask you to consider the nature of executive leadership in museums. My interest is in the idea of collective leadership, and I wonder if the time has come to experiment with this approach? There are basically two organizational traditions (Greenleaf 1977). In the hierarchical tradition, one person is the lone chief at the top of a pyramidal structure. We apparently see no other course, be it a museum, corporation or university, than to hold one person responsible. All of us know, at least privately, that the "great man" model of leadership increasingly resembles the emperor with no clothes.
In my experience, there are many museums where something different is actually happening. A group of people at the top of the organization, with shared responsibilities and clear accountabilities, are developing strategies together, reaching decisions by consensus, and coordinating implementation of these decisions. This is collective executive leadership and most closely resembles the second organizational tradition, primus inter pares, or first among equals. This tradition apparently goes back to Roman times, although there is precious little mention of it in the voluminous leadership literature, nor virtually any references to its use in modern-day society. The principle is simple: there is still a "first", a leader, but that leader is not the chief executive officer. The difference may appear to be subtle, but it is important that the primus constantly test and prove leadership among a group of able peers (Greenleaf 1977:61). It might be worthwhile for our bolder colleagues to try out the primus model to test its utility. If one concedes that senior managers often act like self-interested feudal barons (Hout and Carter 1995:135), and further, that the chief responsibility of an effective CEO is to foster interaction and interdependence within the senior group, it may be that the primus model could move us one step closer to effective, collective leadership. In fact, why not extend this opportunity and responsibility for collective leadership to all staff, or at least senior staff, to give them the opportunity to provide fresh perspectives and to learn more about the overall operation?
Hazards
In addition to these and countless other opportunities yet to be realized, there are also numerous hazards for museums as the century comes to a close. I use the term hazard to denote risks and dangers, not insurmountable obstacles or lethal threats. Nonetheless, the hazards I will discuss are real enough, and they have already demonstrated their capacity to demoralize, demean and otherwise divert museum workers from the task of arriving at the 21st century intact.
The first of these hazards is the prevalence of paradox in contemporary museum work. Paradoxes are things which are simultaneously contradictory, unbelievable, and true or false in their meaning. The problem is that they can wear us out, or at best, leave us discouraged and frustrated. Consider the following paradoxes:
| At a time of diminishing resources, museums must provide new and creative ways of serving a growing and diverse public, or;
At a time when a concerted effort must be made to identify new ways of enhancing the sustainability of museums, it is all most museums can do to keep the wolf from the door. Designing and testing new ideas cost time, energy, and often money - or a third paradox; |
At a time when far too many museums are preoccupied with their survival, it is also imperative that we accomplish our purposes. Survival does not necessarily equate with success (Weil 1994:4).
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The most useful thinking I've encountered in dealing with paradoxes is that of Charles Handy (1994:12-13), who notes that paradoxes are like the weather - "something to be lived with, not solved, the worst aspects mitigated, the best enjoyed and used as clues to the way forward." He (1994:63) also observes that "the secret of balance in a time of paradox is to allow the past and the future to co-exist in the present." Museums can provide this unique perspective on behalf of society, but we are going to have to pay more than lip service to the juxtaposition of the past, present and future in our programs and services, if we are to fulfill this role.
Avoiding my second hazard requires that all museums cultivate their capacity for self-reference (Wheatley 1992:95, 146-147). This is our ability to be guided by a strong sense of our own competencies as an organization, so that as the organization changes, it does so by referring to itself - meaning the skills, traditions, and values which have guided its operations. People in the business world call this "sticking to the knitting".
This idea of self-reference is an important one, especially when considering our current financial pressures. There is a growing belief among governments and the public that museums must become more commercial, and embrace the notion that the customer is always right. Although we at Glenbow are adamant about an absolute commitment to public service and maximum self-sufficiency, we must do this in a thoughtful and balanced way, as knowledge-based institutions, not commercial enterprises.
For example, Glenbow happens to host weddings to enhance revenues. [See Facilities Rentals] However, if hosting profitable weddings means closing public galleries in order to do so, then we are losing sight of our purpose and are no longer engaging in self-reference. We do this at our own peril. The hazard here is a fuzzy sense of self-reference, which can destroy a museum just as surely as it has destroyed those many corporations which have strayed too far from their core business.
The importance of organizational self-reference leads me to my third hazard, which Canadian author, John Ralston Saul (1995), has dubbed the "crisis of conformity," or more colourfully, "the great leap backwards." He is referring to North America's slavish adherence to the ideologies of corporatism and the marketplace, and to putting self-interest over public good (Saul 1995:2). The trend is of potentially great concern in Canada, where the vast majority of the nations' foremost museums are highly-dependent, if not totally reliant, on public funding.
What I hope to avoid altogether is the assumption that either business or the non-profit sector holds the exclusive keys to the future. As we all know, business has never had a monopoly on virtue, effectiveness or accountability. Business has everything to say about value in the marketplace, but often has less to say on the subject of responsibility, except perhaps to shareholders. At the same time, business is rich in experience when it comes to organizing work, marketing and adding value. Why would we ignore these lessons, especially when we can choose what is most germane to our particular needs?
Having said this, we must not ignore our responsibility to make known the inherent limitations of marketplace ideology for long-term heritage preservation. I say this because all custodial institutions have enduring obligations to the dead and to the unborn, as well as to the live customer. Yet the dead and the unborn neither vote nor buy; they have no voice in the dynamics of the marketplace.
Collections care is not glamorous, and it will probably never rank highly on the private sector's sponsorship agenda. This means that there will always be a public responsibility to care for the collections bequeathed to our citizenry. We must make it known that museum collections are similar to other fundamental resources like the natural environment, in that they are collective property, essential to our identity and well-being, and unable to speak for themselves.
Museums must not rush to embrace marketplace ideology, without first ensuring that there are long-term safeguards for our heritage resources, as these resources lie at the roots of our humanistic consciousness (Saul 1995). Unfortunately, these complexities of time and collective memory seem to have escaped the imagination of many politicians and officials, who are increasingly judging museums by the sole criterion of the number of people through the door. High attendance induced by blockbusters, like profits, are momentary. Both can quickly disappear. It is things like reputation, name recognition and the trust of visitors, users and supporters which will allow museums to stand the test of time (Flower 1995:6). In the idiom of the marketplace, this means quality and market share.
The fourth and final hazard concerns all of you as individuals, as it has to do with the cumulative stresses and strains of continuous change in our work. We must be aware of the inherent dangers and develop our own pain management programs. I hope that your own situations are not as difficult as that of a colleague of mine, however. He is the President of a post-secondary educational institution and has described his efforts at organizational change as similar to a Kamikaze pilot with a two ship quota.
As you know, emotions run extremely high when we talk about change in museums, and dealing with emotions, one's own and those of colleagues, is perhaps the most difficult part of the change process. I am always alert to ideas and concepts that provide some comfort and hope amid all the stress, and I want to mention several of them. First of all, it is okay to make up solutions as you go along, because there is no "right way" waiting to reveal itself or be discovered. This cannot be overstated, as it is fundamental to the creative process. I suggest, however, that it is useful to pay attention to other peoples' experiences, as we are doing here today.
Second, don't fear ambiguity. In the museum world, which has raised the practice of "no surprises" to a high art, few things make us more frantic than increasing complexity (Wheatley 1992:109). We also have a hard time with questions that have no readily available answers. It is not necessary to fear ambiguity or complexity, however, if we can just give up our preoccupation with details and refocus our attention on the bigger picture. This also means that managers, executives and Board members don't have to control everything. Really.
A third source of comfort to me is the realization that it is okay to stir things up. We must do this in order to provoke questions and create challenges. One writer (Wheatley 1992:116) observes that when things finally become so thoroughly jumbled, we will reorganize our work at a new level of effectiveness. I don't know if this is true, but I am willing to accept it as a possibility. My challenges as President and CEO continue to be balancing the needs of the organization with those of the staff, and determining how deeply I should listen to the negative people whose voices I tend to hear the loudest.
Finally, its O.K. to admit the discomfort you're feeling. I see in retrospect how silly I was about this during the low points of Glenbow's change process. I was too embarrassed to tell my colleagues that I was going to see a counsellor to deal with the distress I was feeling. Stress becomes a hazard when you don't deal with it openly and constructively.
AFTERTHOUGHTS
Now for some concluding comments. Whether it's continuous change, opportunities or hazards, the most important constant for all of us is our attitude towards learning. In the final analysis, all our efforts at change are about learning. This means learning from experience, learning from people, and learning from successes and failures. Learning organizations, as with individuals, are those which are skilled at creating, acquiring and sharing knowledge, and then using this knowledge to modify their behaviour (Garvin 1993). Learning really means collectively increasing your capacity to do something that you could not do before (Walmsley 1993:40). We must consider the very real possibility that we, as individuals, are the predominant creative forces in our own lives, as well as in the lives of the organizations within which we work. We also must try to ensure that this vast creative potential contributes to both individual and organizational betterment.
In addition, we must get comfortable with the fact that, despite all the work devoted to designing for the future, no one will be able to assess its value until it is over. While this doesn't mean that organizational change is a game of chance, it does mean that we will never know the outcome until it happens. This cannot be used as an excuse for inaction, however. The emphasis on the duties and performance of Boards, managers and executives has to be on the future (De Pree 1989:114), and much of this performance cannot be assessed until after the fact.
If reality is the pawn of ideas, and there are few, if any, assurances about the outcome, where does that leave us? Personally, I take heart in the words of Charlotte, the beautiful gray spider, in E. B. White's (1952:64) wonderful book, Charlotte's Web. Charlotte said:
We at Glenbow can only aspire to Charlotte's advice, because we hurry all the time; we also worry a lot, and I have no idea how fit each of us is. But, we have not lost our nerve, and we have no intention of doing so. I sincerely hope that none of you do either.
Thank you again for the honour of speaking here today, and Happy 150th Birthday, Smithsonian! I hope you have a great one - you deserve it. Thank you.
I wish to thank Gerry Conaty, Richard Forbis, Michael Fuller, Terrence Heath, Melanie Kjorlien, Mike Robinson and Ron Wright for their invaluable comments on an earlier draft of this presentation. Evy Werner and Denise Savage-Hughes typed and proofread various drafts of this paper, as well as seeing to the countless details inherent in this sort of work. I am indebted to both of them.
I also wish to thank Glenbow's Board of Governors for both their ongoing support and their commitment to learning. Because this presentation is a continuation of my book, Museums and the Paradox of Change, I remain indebted to the many people who have contributed to this work, especially Glenbow staff.
Finally, my thanks go to the Smithsonian Institution, especially Nancy Fuller and Rex Ellis, for the privilege of participating in their celebratory symposium, "Museums for the New Millennium."
DR. CREW: I want to thank Dr. Janes again for sharing his experiences and his insights and his knowledge about this experience. We have some time left for questions from the audience. I would like to open the floor for comments or questions or an exchange of ideas. If you don't ask a question, I will pick on someone.
VOICE: Is it possible in your institution to apply your concept of team leadership to include members of distinct communities that may be impacted or a part of a particular process? I want to know if you are having success in that area?
DR. JANES: Whenever we are doing that,"we" is very important...a major ingredient in a sort of collective approach to work that involves people external to the museum. I guess a good example would be we are opening a major show on breast cancer this fall. In the planning team there is only one Glenbow staff [member; ...nine other community members...]compose the team. So it is an important term of reference when we do that sort of thing.
VOICE: You mentioned when you are doing staff reductions, you need to reduce the right staff, the staff that are no longer supportive of the mission of the institution as you now see it; and yet when you are in a government environment, doing that kind of staff reduction is exceedingly difficult. We have just gone through a process in the Federal Government here in the United States where essentially it is whoever wanted to leave left, and you are left with the organization that exists after that.
How did you in fact accomplish the targeted kind of staff reduction that you say was desirable?
DR. JANES: Well, we actually started with a blank sheet of paper and we redefined the purpose of the institution. As I said earlier, we determined the resources that we needed.
I guess a good practical example of that would be at that time we were operating the largest conservation department west of Ontario. We had 11 conservators working at any particular time. We decided we could no longer afford that level of commitment to conservation, so that department was reduced from 11 people to 3 people. I suppose the standard is dropped, but we are also doing it more effectively by buying the conservation services of private conservators, rather than maintaining a very expensive and elaborate in-house department.
The second key thing in the staff reductions was, in the beginning, we have a unionized staff. They are a local of the largest public service union in Canada. We took great pains to be totally open with our union about this layoff process. We actually formed a joint group, so that we had a mechanism to deal with layoffs and all the issues directly in conjunction with our union.
We have a very progressive union. They could see the future of the institution was at stake, and they did things unorthodox in terms of a union, but they could see the efficacy of it.
Is that the sort of thing you are thinking about?
VOICE: You didn't face civil service type of regulations you had to work around that were outside of your control?
MR. JANES: No, we didn't, except for certain labor laws, and then the collective agreement we had with our union. We were really able to bargain and negotiate to mutual benefit. It wasn't perfect and it was messy, but at least it allowed the outcome.
VOICE: Mary Case here. We had a conversation at dinner last night about the difficulties a director faces when they are walking around a museum, and they might make a kind of offhand comment, or when they need information and they might ask a question. Fifteen minutes later there is this rumor that goes around the museum that says, "Oh, my God, he asked. Now he wants to do this."
I wonder how you dealt with the difficulty of being the single person who is really at the top, no matter what changes you are trying to do and how other directors might get the information that they need? We know the hierarchal system is really good for getting information down, but not good for getting information up.
DR. JANES: When I think back, one of the most important ways that we tried to deal with that was just changing the way that I interacted with staff. So, for example, during two particularly intense years of change, I simply went around the building on a continuous basis and met with small groups of staff four-by-four. I would maybe have a group of staff that was never more than eight. Sometimes it would be 20 minutes, sometimes it would be two hours, but I simply took the time to sit down, to dispel rumors, to provide all the information that I knew at the time, and just communicate openly and directly.
We used to have large staff meetings to do that, but we learned in several months that people were uncomfortable talking - some didn't talk, some people dominated the conversation - so we broke up into the small units. Admittedly it took a great deal of my time, but you simply have to do it, because process is everything in this difficult change. People have a need to know.
VOICE: Robert Goler. First of all, I would like to thank you for publishing your work. I think it is very important that more studies like this get out. I commend you for that.
The question I have has to do with the for-profit arm that you established after reorganizing. I would like to ask how it seeks direction, how it decides what it is doing, and the extent to which the museum staff are involved in those decisions and implementation.
DR. JANES: It is an integral part of the organization. We thought at first we would have to spin it off outside our nonprofit status, but we haven't had that problem yet. The vice president of that unit is part of what we call our strategy group; she is one of the six senior managers of the organization. The priorities are set for that unit, along with all the other work unit priorities as we do our annual strategic plan update, and we actually, for that particular unit. specify numerical performance targets, whether it is in our shop or whatever.
We also continuously engender the notion that enterprises will succeed to the extent that other staff become involved, because it is only the unique knowledge and products that we have that enterprises really have to deal with.
That has been problematical and it has taken time, because many staff don't see that their work needs to involve any commercial work. But we are slowly getting there. Curators now are advising on products that could be reproduced for sale in our shop or wholesale.
I think one of the most interesting things that we have done recently is that we are essentially building a corporate museum for Gulf Canada, the oil company. That corporation has a wonderful collection of ethnographic objects, and the CEO of that corporation is also a collector. He decided all that material should be shared with the staff and his business clients, et cetera. So we have a contract with them to basically conserve, curate, produce and deliver a whole series of exhibitions throughout the corporation, and that has been very profitable for us. Gulf Canada doesn't mind paying that, because they know they are getting the best service they can get.
To do that, we have had to draw upon 11 different Glenbow staff. Some have time to do it, others don't. What we have been able to do is go back to some of the people we laid off and form a sort of spin-off company that is now doing that work under our supervision.
VOICE: I am an objects conservator. I was wondering if you could talk more about how you went about your deaccession campaign. Did you target objects in poor condition, or duplicates, or did you look at your collection and reassess what type of collection you needed to implement what you thought your mission was going to be in the future?
I think that is particularly applicable to general history museums, which is my background. I think there is still a lot of poorly curated unorganized collections, and it seems like to support all of these different mandates in the future, that we still need to go back and maybe take a closer look at the collections and redefine what our collections really should be about.
DR. JANES: Yes, that is an excellent point. We started with the duplicates, with the objects that were of inferior quality, with the objects with little or no documentation. In addition to that, we were in a unique position because of the way Glenbow was founded by a private person. We had numerous high-value objects not relevant to our mandate. We had a number of natural history works of art. We were able to identify those things which had been in storage but which were never exhibited, never researched and never used. Those formed also the core of the deaccessioning program. We were able to sell so far about $5 million worth of material that doesn't affect our ability to be responsible for our mandate at all.
VOICE: Was your mandate subject to provincial review and approval, since that is your touchstone?
DR. JANES: Not really. The mandate originally enshrined in the act which gave birth to Glenbow in 1966 is so general that we were able to put a finer focus on it. That is an interesting question, because some people took issue in the government with our deaccessioning program and actually tried to shut it down with a court injunction, saying rather than sell these objects, they really belong in the provincial museums, museums owned and operated by the government. We were able to negotiate our way out of that.
DR. CREW: I have time for one last question, and I am going to ask it. That is the prerogative of the Chair.
You talked about the idea of moving to a more collective leadership approach to the organization. I am interested in how do you transition your staff and your senior managers to accepting that?
DR. JANES: I don't know the answer to that. I am sorry. I think we have to just try the bold experiment and see what happens.
DR. CREW: I don't know the answer either. I think the transition is a good idea.
DR. JANES: I think so. There would have to be one.
DR. CREW: Once again, let us thank Dr. Janes for sharing his ideas with us.
(Applause).
DR. CREW: We will have a break now, and come back here at 10:30.
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