Originally posted on 6 July 2016 #LMGBlogArchive #LMGBlogArchiveProject by Carrie Svinning
In this post by Bridget McKenzie from Flow Associates, Bridget investigates what skills will be needed in the museums and heritage sector of the near future through the exploration of design thinking.
My reflections draw on my work as director of Flow Associates helping arts, museums and heritage organisations to engage with learning audiences, to develop staff skills and build capacity. To mark the founding of Flow exactly 10 years ago, we’re thinking how to evolve our offer to serve these sectors’ needs in the decade to come. With nice synchronicity, we’ve also been commissioned by three Bridge organisations to conduct a project called Future Views – imagining the next generation of cultural learning. So the future of skills is much on our minds!
Essentially, we design cultural experiences and organisations for change so that people, society and planet can learn, create, connect and flourish. However, we aren’t designers in the traditional sense of using graphic visual skills. Instead, we use Design Thinking.
The mindsets, skillsets and toolsets of Design Thinking can help the sector ride its challenges:
to positively redesign museum and heritage services to meet future needs as work, society and environment change
to create compelling experiences as the cultural realm is transformed by technology
And to demonstrate the value of the sector in order to sustain itself
I borrowed these three categories of mindsets, skillsets and toolsets from a post by Doug Belshaw. For me, the most important shift to make is in mindsets. The next few diagrams explain how in the museums and heritage sector, there are two dominant mindsets, Business Thinking and Creative Thinking. I use Creative Thinking as a catch-all for the mindset of staff who pursue specialist research, develop public-facing services and experiences, or innovative and digital projects. Business Thinking is a catch-all for the mindset of staff who focus most on operations, finance, retail, development and public relations. This does not mean that everyone in either group conforms strictly to that mindset. Of course, marketing roles sit between the two, and some small organisations may try to cover either Creative or Business tasks without people of the right mindset.
However, I think we can all think of occasions where there has been conflict between these two agendas.
The terms in the Business Mindset list appear to be pejorative, but in fact these are essential components of any successful organization. By saying that the Business Mindset is ‘self-serving’, I don’t mean that individuals serve themselves but that they are more focused on the continuity or growth of the organization than on the needs of its users or audiences.
These two mindsets can sometimes be in conflict because there can be different emotional drivers. People in Business Thinking roles tend to gain pleasure from achieving targets or maximizing income. The ethical challenges that motivate them tend to involve avoiding damage to reputation or saving resources in an efficient way. People in Creative Thinking roles tend to gain most pleasure from engaging others, and to develop novel experiences or products in open-ended and playful ways. The ethical challenges that motivate them tend to come from the wider world of ideas and society.
Beneath these preferences and motivations lie more ingrained habits of thinking. For example, Business Thinking tends to focus on analysis, problems are seen as hurdles to overcome and mistakes make them uncomfortable. Creative Thinking tends to focus on synthesis, and problems and mistakes morph more easily into opportunities.
It’s hard to tell whether these mindset differences arise through individual personalities or the culture of a team or professional specialism. It’s one of those complex ‘nature or nurture’ questions. Team leaders or project contractors can ‘recruit to type’, make a positive virtue of a particular team ethos, and only network within their comfort zone. I think this is especially true in the museums and heritage sector.
Since the cuts have begun to bite into the sector, many developmental programmes led by sector policy bodies, funders or training agencies have emphasised two messages:
Your future resilience depends on getting more hard-nosed and business-like
The UK’s strongest economic asset is its creativity.
This can be confusing, and it’s not often clear how to balance the two.
In addition, because the role of Local Authorities is changing there are many new kinds of alliances to fill gaps, including Local Enterprise Partnerships. There can sometimes be gulfs in understanding between business-minded industry players, and the creative and cultural sector.
This is where Design Thinking comes in. It provides frameworks for planning and designing any kind of intervention, service or experience that enable you to balance the two mindsets, and shift smoothly and respectfully between the two.
We tend to think of Design as a service role, of people who communicate ideas once they’ve been formed, or simply make our products attractive. However, Design Thinking goes much deeper, and also could offer to us a set of skills suitable for leadership. What would our organisations look like if all managers (indeed, all staff) were well grounded in it?
Where can we learn more to develop these skillsets? There is a lot of material to help, especially from the emerging fields of digital and social enterprise. To name one resource, I was very inspired to read Bob Johansen’s ‘Leaders make the future: Ten new leadership skills for an uncertain world’. These are, to summarise:
The maker instinct (creative, constructive)
Clarity (focus, timely decisions)
Able to flip dilemmas (not just problems)
Immersive learning (learn by experience)
Bio-empathy (stewardship of nature)
Constructive depolarisation (defuse conflict)
Quiet transparency (open, generous)
Rapid prototyping (e.g. AGILE methods)
Smart-mob organising (urgency, influence over many)
Commons-creating (cooperative, generative, conserving shared heritage and resources)
What do these skills look like put to work? We are starting to see these skills explored in the Local Cultural Education Partnerships (LCEPs) run by ACE’s Bridge organisations. For example, in our Future Views project working with three LCEPs in three Bridge regions, we are using Speculative Design methods with young people. They will be using the imagination to consider alternative futures, to prepare for a wide range of possible scenarios and to edge towards their preferable futures.
And also, we see these skills developed in museum staff through participatory design projects led by Derby Museums, for example their Re:make project.
So, how can we turn these skills of Design Thinking, and the broader range of future leadership skills, into toolsets? It’s my hunch that such toolsets could really help arts, museums and heritage staff collaborate better:
with other sector organisations to save and generate resources
across silos within their organisations to reduce conflict
outwards with other sectors such as Tourism, Place-making, Retail, Education, Sci-tech and digital industries, Social Enterprise, Health, Nature Conservation, and Broadcasting).
Maybe there’s potential for collaborations across organisations to develop such future-proofed toolsets, building on their existing work.
コメント