By Stephen E. Weil
This article was published in Museum News January/February 2005.
Success” and “failure” are terms generally used to describe the outcome of an individual life, a business venture, or a major public undertaking. An individual may be deemed to have led a successful life by achieving a particular personal or professional goal. The success or failure of a business venture may be measured by its fiscal results. As a public undertaking, the effort to eradicate polio in the United States was a great success. The effort to halt the use of illicit drugs has been a failure.
“Success” and “failure” also can be used to describe the overall performance of a cultural enterprise like a museum. In its simplest form, success for a museum could be defined as consisting of four key dimensions. First, its ability to articulate a clear and significant purpose that is both (a) worthwhile, at least in the eyes of the beholder,1 and (b) responsive to some identifiable need of its target audience.2 Second, the museum’s ability to assemble the resources necessary to achieve that purpose. Third, its demonstrated possession of the skills necessary to expend its resources to create and present public programs that achieve its articulated purpose. And fourth, its demonstrated possession of the managerial skills necessary to create and present those public programs in as efficient a manner as possible. Failure, by comparison, has a briefer definition. Failure is simply the lack of success.
Tolstoy wrote, “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” When it comes to museums, we tend to spend more time and effort in thinking about what doesn’t work than what does. While successful museums might be fundamentally “all alike” with respect to these four key dimensions—purpose, resources, effectiveness, and efficiency—a museum that fails to achieve success may do so for a variety of reasons. It may lack a clearly articulated purpose or have one that’s irrelevant to the needs of its audience. It may be unable to command the resources necessary to carry out its purpose. Or it may have a clear, worthwhile, and relevant purpose as well as adequate resources but lack the skills required to create and present public programs that are both effective and cost-efficient.
Though at first the four key dimensions may appear to be independent variables, they actually form a sequence. Like a series of hurdles, they must be addressed in a particular order. Until an institutional purpose is in place, there is neither any way to know what resources may be necessary nor any standard for judging institutional effectiveness. Once a purpose has been established, however, the museum is still unable to move forward until either (a) all of the necessary resources can be identified and secured, or (b) the purpose has been scaled back to match the available resources.
Estimates of effectiveness must be similarly deferred. Only after resources have been combined with purpose to create public programs can the effectiveness of those programs be evaluated. Questions of efficiency, in turn, invariably come last. That’s not because efficiency is unimportant. To the contrary, the more efficient the museum, the more resources it will have available to devote to its primary purpose. Efficiency comes last because there’s little point in trying to increase the efficiency of a public program until it’s been ascertained that the program is effective.3
This analysis might be further advanced by (a) first arranging these four key dimensions in a matrix where the connections among them may become more readily evident, and (b) then embellishing that matrix with the addition of “programming” as the core activity that serves to tie these dimensions together.4
Reading this matrix horizontally, it should be clear that the two upper dimensions—purpose and resources—are matters that are primarily (but not wholly) within the province of the museum’s governing authority. In the case of a museum that lacks an articulated purpose, the staff may be unable to effect any major repair on its own. Purpose-setting (albeit with staff input) is quintessentially a task of governance. Likewise, for the museum that is seriously deficient in resources, it’s doubtful that this lack can be corrected without the substantial involvement of the governing authority. Staff may be helpful but the ultimate responsibility lies with its governance. As Dan L. Monroe, executive director of the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Mass., once observed, “Good as your staff might be, you still can’t outmanage a bad board.”
The two lower dimensions—effectiveness and efficiency—are, by contrast, primarily (but, again, not wholly) within the province of the staff. While deficiencies here may be a cause for concern, they do not necessarily threaten the museum’s fundamental existence. In general, such deficiencies can be addressed by some combination of better internal procedures for evaluating programs and controlling costs, more staff training, the use of outside experts or, in the most extreme cases, the replacement of some or all of the staff. Reading the matrix vertically, what becomes immediately clear is the direct relationship between effectiveness and purpose. Effectiveness is an indicator (but not necessarily a quantitative measure) of the degree to which the museum is able to achieve its purpose. Similarly, efficiency is directly related to resources. It’s a measure (but, unlike effectiveness, will almost always be susceptible to quantitative measurement) of the level of resources that the museum has expended in seeking to be effective.
That effectiveness and efficiency relate to different dimensions of the museum is a point that cannot be emphasized too strongly. For those either unfamiliar with or new to the not-for-profit field, this is frequently a source of confusion. In the case of the typical business organization, for example, effectiveness and efficiency do have considerable overlap. If the organization’s basic purpose is to generate a positive fiscal outcome, then cost-saving efficiencies can make a direct contribution to producing just such an outcome. In the case of an organization like a museum, however, effectiveness and efficiency refer to distinctly different kinds of results. One is an evaluation of its program outcomes. The other is a measure of how much those programs cost.
Reading the matrix vertically also helps to distinguish between what are essentially institutional “ends” and institutional “means.” The left-hand dimensions (purpose and effectiveness) deal with the museum’s programmatic aspirations. What does it want to accomplish, and how successful is it in doing so? By contrast, the right-hand-dimensions (resources and efficiency) address the means by which those aspirations are to be realized. How much in the way of people, money, collections, facilities, good will, and information will be required? To what extent has the museum been able to attract and expend those resources in the least wasteful way it can? To use an organic metaphor, the left side of the matrix might be envisioned as the museum’s flesh and blood, and the right-hand side as its skeleton. Though neither is sufficient without the other, still—in the everyday world—it’s by their flesh and blood that humans initially know and interact with one another.
Within the museum community, the relationship between the left and right sides of this matrix often is perceived as a form of tension. “Mission versus market” is one common way to describe these allegedly competing priorities. Common also is the perception that a museum ought to maintain some ideal balance between its aspirational goals (the left side of the matrix) and its practical ones (the right side). Common as these perceptions might be, though, they miss the mark. 5
What the museum is fundamentally and substantively about is the left-hand side of the matrix. The right-hand side is necessary but subordinate. Practical considerations should have no more weight than they absolutely need. The practical is there to support—not to be kept in balance with—the museum’s programmatic activities. It’s the distinction between what’s necessary and what’s sufficient.
The embellished version of the matrix introduces “programming” as the core activity that ties the four original key dimensions together. Every program that a museum undertakes must necessarily respond to a series of questions generated by the matrix. How does it relate to institutional purpose? Are the required resources available? Will it be effective? Will it be efficient? Museums generally undertake programs of two kinds.
“Public programs” embrace the entire spectrum of activities through which the museum, in an effort to achieve its purpose, seeks to reach both a direct and indirect audience. That would include exhibitions (both special loan exhibitions and displays of the permanent collection), publications, gallery tours, lectures, symposia, films, and other presentations.
“Supportive programs” are all of those other activities in which the museum engages. Those would include on the one hand such inwardly focused activities as protecting its collection, maintaining the museum’s facilities, and establishing various sub-systems for tracking financial transactions and keeping human resource records. On the other hand, they also include such externally focused concerns as soliciting donations, recruiting members and servicing a membership organization, dealing with the media, and supervising such auxiliary activities as restaurants, shops, special events, and parking.
In real museum life, of course, things are not always this neat. Many museum activities, in fact, may straddle this divide by being at once both programmatic and supportive. Consider the museum shop. While some such shops may generate net income to increase the museum’s available resources, it is also arguable that the shop is a major conduit for the distribution of educational materials. Those who have found themselves in conflict with the Internal Revenue Service over the Unrelated Business Income Tax (UBIT) will be familiar with the argument that this is what museum shops primarily do. What about a museum restaurant? To the extent that a restaurant enables a visitor to extend the duration of a visit, does it not directly contribute to the achievement of the museum’s substantive purpose?
Nobody familiar with a museum can be other than dazzled by the extraordinary range of activities in which it regularly engages. Regardless of how diverse these activities may appear, they are, no less than exhibitions or publications, all subject to those same matrix-generated questions. And this is so whether the activity is creating the seating plan for a member’s dinner at an exhibition opening or trying to arrest a case of bronze disease or calculating the wage an hourly employee should receive for two hours of call-in overtime worked on a holiday. Above all, does the activity relate to the museum’s basic purpose? Here—at least in the well-run museum—the answer must presumably be positive. What makes a well-run museum well run is that its efforts are channeled exclusively into the pursuit of its purpose and not scattered elsewhere. Efforts directed elsewhere are a waste of institutional resources.
In parallel to what Vince Lombardi once said about winning, purpose isn’t the most important thing in the museum. It’s the only thing. Unlike an individual, a museum neither exists for its own sake nor is endowed with passion, will, impulses, whims, wit, or desire. All it has is purpose, and not even that is generated from within.6 It is imposed initially by the museum’s founders and then modified from time to time by its successive governing authorities. The only activities in which the museum can legitimately engage are those intended to further its institutional purpose. Activities intended to further the interests of anybody or anything else—a staff member, a member of the governing authority, some other institution—give rise to conflicts of interest. So the answer to the first question must, again, almost always be yes. Unless the activity is improper, it relates to institutional purpose.
That the activity will implicate resources is a given. Every activity implicates resources. At minimum, it may be the a staff member’s time. Further along the spectrum, it also may involve the use of space and/or equipment, potential wear on collection objects, the expenditure of money or even, in the most extreme case, the sacrifice of some part of the museum’s good will. The second matrix-generated question, then, does not address “whether.” It is, rather, about how much. In the well-run museum, no activity will be initiated without first understanding whence the required resources will come.
It’s with the third and fourth matrix-generated questions—those that deal with effectiveness and efficiency—that the answers become complicated. Here, a distinction first must be made between “outcomes” and “outputs.” Outcomes are those positive changes in its targeted audiences—those impacts, those hearts and minds differences—that are the museum’s ultimate goal. Outcomes are the realization of its institutional purpose. What a visitor learns at an exhibition, for example, is an outcome. Outputs, though, are what the museum actually produces in an effort to achieve those outcomes. The exhibition itself is an output. So is its catalogue. So are any accompanying lectures. In the museum’s public programs, outputs are what’s intended to trigger outcomes. In its supportive programs, outputs may have more importance on their own.
Because they address such disparate things, care must be taken not to muddle the quantitative measures of efficiency appropriate for evaluating outputs with the qualitative estimates of effectiveness required for evaluating outcomes. Among the characteristics that distinguish museums (churches, too) from many other organizations in the not-for-profit sector is that virtually none of their public programs are susceptible to the same kind of qualitative evaluation as those of such other organizations.
To try to measure a museum’s outcomes in the same way as those, for example, of a health or human service agency is to get truly deep into apples and oranges. The outcome of a museum visit can scarcely be as dramatic as a visit to the emergency room or the intervention of a drug counselor. Museums operate on a different time scale. To the extent that a museum’s public programs have a positive impact on the lives of its direct and indirect audiences, that impact may be subtle, diffuse, intermixed with the impact of other organizations, and not always immediate.7
There is probably no more important task in the museum field today than trying to establish some middle ground—something less than a numerical scale, but also something more than blind faith—between those funders (and others) who demand that museums provide them with hard evidence about their effectiveness and those members of the museum community who argue that the work of museums is of such self-evident value that no justification of that work is necessary.
Efficiency is another story. Because efficiency deals with something entirely different—the level of resources expended to create a particular output—it can readily be addressed in quantitative terms. What it does require, however, is the availability of information from institutions of comparable scale engaged in comparable activities in order to make meaningful comparisons possible.
Imagine, for example, that a museum has a program to ensure that 95 percent of the interactive devices in its galleries are fully operational at any given time. While the museum may be successful in achieving that standard, the question of what costs it incurs to do so is a wholly separate one. Without something with which to compare those costs, however, there is still no way to determine whether the museum is making efficient use of its resources.8 Although a museum can compare its own costs from one time period to another—so-called “trend” analysis—true measures of efficiency still require the availability of comparable information from other sources.
Afterword
Why should it matter whether a museum is successful? Two answers suggest themselves. From an external point-of-view, the governance and/or management of the museum that is not successful may be perceived as (or even, in an extreme case, even penalized for) behaving in a socially irresponsible manner. The opportunity cost of operating a museum is the diversion of scarce community resources that might otherwise have been productively employed for child care, housing, public health, or other communal purposes. With respect to the for-profit sector, Peter F. Drucker has written:
Economic performance is the first responsibility of a business. A business that does not show a profit at least equal to its cost of capital is socially irresponsible. It wastes society’s resources. Economic performance is the basis; without it, a business cannot discharge any other responsibilities, cannot be a good employer, a good citizen, a good neighbor.9
If we substitute a social performance for Drucker’s economic one, then that same statement must be equally true for a not-for-profit organization like a museum. If it fails to provide a social benefit, it wastes society’s resources. To produce a social outcome—to provide a positive benefit to its targeted audiences—must be such an organization’s first responsibility. To fail in that is to fail as a socially responsible organization.
From a managerial perspective, a museum’s failure to achieve success is similarly problematic. Experience suggests that the surest way in which not-for-profit organizations primarily funded by contributions—so-called “donative” organizations of which museums (again, with churches) are a prime example—can attract ongoing support is by demonstrating a consistent ability to achieve results. This is consistent with a broad trend across the United States—possibly even worldwide—to hold organizations of every kind (government, for-profit, and not-for-profit) to ever-higher standards of accountability. In this regard, Peter Swords, the retired director of the Nonprofit Coordinating Committee of New York, has distinguished between the traditional notion of accountability (“Negative Accountability”), which was aimed at preventing abuse, and a superseding notion (“Positive Accountability”), which seeks to find out not only whether an organization has been managed honestly but also whether it’s “doing anything useful [and] whether it’s doing it effectively.”10 Positive accountability is where we are headed.11
Put otherwise, the test that organizations of every kind, including museums, must pass today is one of performance. For an organization to attract and maintain support, it must not merely do things right (maintain good procedures) but also do the right things (achieve its intended results, make its intended impact).12 More than ever before, performance counts. The matrix proposed here is offered in the hope that it may prove a useful diagnostic tool in identifying those institutional factors that are either contributing toward—or impeding—a museum’s effort to perform well, achieve positive results, have an important and desired impact—to be, in the word with which this article began, a success.
References
1. What constitutes a “worthwhile” purpose is an inescapably subjective question. Regardless of what levels of excellence the (mythical) Museum of the Magnificent Macho might achieve in its programming, it is highly unlikely that those who find its purpose ideologically repugnant will ever be dissuaded from their view that it serves no worthwhile purpose.
2. The range of such needs may be very broad. At a bare-bones minimum they might include cultural, economic, educational, physical, psychological, social, and spiritual needs.
3. For a more extended discussion of these attributes and their interrelationships, see “Organization-wide Quality: A Theory of Museums and Immodest Proposal” in Stephen E. Weil, Making Museums Matter (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2002), 3.
4. This analysis is comparable to a balance sheet to the extent that it looks at an organization only at a specific moment. What it does not include is an additional dimension that can be understood only over time, i.e., sustainability. For a successful museum to continue its success on an ongoing basis may depend on such factors as staff morale, transparency, internal accountability, the relationships within each of the staff and the governing authority and the relationships between the members of the staff and of the governing authority.
5. Underlying these perceptions may well be the tendency in organizations of almost every kind to transform “means”—particularly as they become crystallized in a repertory of managerial and other techniques—into being “ends” in themselves. See in general, Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society (New York: Vintage Books, 1964).
6. “Results in an organization exist only on the outside. Society, community, family are self-contained and self-sufficient; they exist for their own sake. But all organizations exist to produce results on the outside.” Peter F. Drucker, Post-Capitalist Society (New York: Harper Business, 1993), 54.
7. See, for example, John H. Falk, “Museums as Institutions for Personal Learning,” Daedalus, summer 1999, 259. See also Stephen E. Weil, “Beyond Big and Awesome: Outcome-Based Evaluation,” Museum News, November/December 2003, 40.
8. That such costs may differ widely from one institution to another is not necessarily in and of itself a sign of greater or lesser efficiency. It may simply be a red flag to alert management of the need to find out why such a discrepancy exists. See Peter M. Jackson, “Performance Indicators: Promises and Pitfalls,” in Susan Pearce, ed., Museum Economics and the Community (London: The Athalone Press, 1991), 51.
9. Drucker, Post-Capitalist Society, 101.
10. See Peter Swords, Esq., “Form 990 as a Tool for Nonprofit Accountability,” a paper presented at the Governance of Nonprofit Organizations: Standards and Enforcement conference, New York University School of Law, National Center on Philanthropy and the Law, Oct. 30-31, 1997.
11. For an exploration of some the consequences that can follow from failing to distinguish between success and failure within an organization, see David Osborne and Ted Gaebler, Reinventing Government: How the Entrepreneurial Spirit is Transforming the Public Sector (New York: Prime Books, 1993), 146-155.
12. The frequently quoted word-play “Managers do things right; leaders do the right things” has been attributed to both Peter F. Drucker and Warren Bennis. One source certainly is a chart comparing managerial and leadership attributes that appeared in Warren Bennis, On Becoming a Leader (New York: Addison Wesley, 1994), 44-45. Stephen E. Weil is scholar emeritus, Smithsonian Center for Education and Museum Studies, Washington, D.C. His most recent essays are collected in Making Museums Matter (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2002).
