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(trying to anticipate change before it happens), has long been at the core of my own work. This contrasts with the traditional museum approach of keeping one’s head down until things have stabilized so that museums can go back to their “real” work of research, collecting, preservation, and so on. In my view, the constant re-examination needed for museums to remain viable leads inevitably to the requirement for their missions to underpin the change process. The mission statement has to be a lot more than a mere description of the functions performed by a museum, which, Anderson noted, had been common in the sector (2000, v).
Acknowledging that the mission is actually a central and inspirational part of modernizing a museum, and of ensuring it remains relevant, is a key to understanding how change can be brought about in the museum industry. Needless to say, the world outside the museum changes at a faster and faster rate, so the need for museum staff to understand these changes and to keep up with them becomes ever more pressing (Knell, MacLeod, and Watson 2007). Recognizing the need for constant change in museums, and implementing this change, is the most important role of the modern museum director, and a huge challenge for his or her leadership skills (Fleming 1999). Managing change lies at the heart of the contemporary museum.
In this chapter I present two case studies which demonstrate the process of bringing about change, and in which I have been involved over the past two decades. In each case I was the new director of a museum service which was in need of a major overhaul in order to realize its potential. Bringing about sustainable change within these two services was my primary leadership challenge. I felt that my staff and I had to reshape the services so that they had a healthy and productive future. So, I needed to ensure that we re-envisioned ourselves, based upon an agreed set of values, captured in a set of statements that made it absolutely clear within the museum service what we were about, and which also served to announce to the outside world how we saw ourselves.
Case study 1: Tyne and Wear Museums
My experience with missions, values, and vision began in earnest in the early 1990s, when I became Director of Tyne and Wear Museums (TWM) in the northeast of England. TWM was, and remains, essentially a major local authority museum service, which has responsibility for a group of museums that hold collections of regional, national, and international significance (Tyne and Wear Archives and Museums 2011).1 Its funding and governance arrangements are unusual, and the service currently is funded by the five Tyne and Wear local authorities (Gateshead, Newcastle upon Tyne, Sunderland, North Tyneside, and South Tyneside), by the University of Newcastle, and by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, part of the UK Government. Balancing the interests of the various funding bodies has always been a challenge, and this necessarily underpinned the ways in which I approached the management of TWM.
I had been Assistant Director at TWM for just over a year when, in late 1991, I was appointed director. I was fully aware, therefore, that TWM was an organization that was failing to inspire the public, the politicians who provided the majority of the museum service’s funding, or its staff. It was made clear to me by the politicians who voted the funding for TWM that the service was being given its last chance to put its house in order, or dire consequences would follow – in effect, the probable collapse of the “joint service” arrangement entered into by the five Tyne and Wear local authorities.
The febrile atmosphere at the time was captured in a Museums Journal article entitled “Lifting the Fog on the Tyne” (Davies 1991). Having been created as a joint local authority service in 1986, TWM was unstable, and had already been condemned by the Museums and Galleries Commission in 1988 as “unworkable.” I recall one northeast museum director described TWM at the time as a “critically injured patient.” Nonetheless, a series of attempts had been made to stabilize the beleaguered museum service, which led to a new staff structure in 1990, though this had been done in such a way that a senior member of TWM staff commented that “someone had a vision of how it’s all supposed to work, but they didn’t tell me.”
Within weeks of this article appearing in print, a second Museums Journal article appeared entitled “All Change at Tyne and Wear Museums Service” (Murdin 1991). This described the latest upheavals that resulted in my appointment as director. While this is all now seems like ancient history, the point is that TWM was able to go on from the unhappy situation in 1991 to become, over the next ten years, arguably, the most successful of all UK local authority museum services. The potential that many observers recognized in TWM needed to be unlocked. How did this happen, and what role was played in the TWM saga by a new mission, new values and a re-envisioning?2 First and foremost, I believed that what TWM needed was a change in its “culture”: namely, “the shared assumptions, beliefs, values and norms of an organisation, which shape patterns of behaviour” (Fleming 1993). In an address to the Museums Association Conference in 1993, I explained that TWM had had “a major change of philosophy” that meant we saw “the museum as an agent of social change” (1993).3 In a 1994 lecture, I said:
I believe that museums should play an active role in society, and engage with as many people as possible. This means breaking down those barriers, which museums themselves have erected, which dissuade too many people from using museums … I believe that museums in towns and cities have an important role to play in combating societal decay, in encouraging disadvantaged groups of people to increase their understanding of their environment. Because I believe this, I have made it my business to change the culture of Tyne and Wear Museums. (Fleming 1994)
It seems obvious to me now that, at the time, we were groping toward a new mission for TWM, but my instinct was that what we really needed was a change in attitudes and behaviors, which I described as “culture.” I spoke of using the reorganization of a museum to “change culture,” of recruiting new staff, and promoting others, who would “carry the new culture,” of using modern management techniques to “lever in culture change” (Fleming 1994).
I still believe this. There is nothing more pointless than a mission that is not based on attitudes and behaviors, as well as beliefs and values. Without culture change a demoralized museum service such as TWM could never have thrived. One member of TWM staff wrote to me on the eve of his retirement and referred to the “amazing job” we had done at TWM, which, he wrote “was doomed without your intervention. The apathy was writ large for all to see.”4 The problems that had to be confronted were insularity, departmentalism, negativity, lack of ambition, and lack of realism. I felt that we had to reinvigorate TWM, and give it a new sense of purpose and direction. We had to learn how to cope with change, and take control of our destiny. We needed a mission.
But in order to create a workable and worthwhile mission, we had to understand the context in which TWM was operating. The Tyne and Wear area was characterized by widespread urban poverty, arising out of the post-industrial collapse of the local economy: coalmining, shipbuilding, and heavy engineering were all things of the past. Museums do not exist in vacuums; rather they are functions of contemporary society, and need to key into what is going on around them. This is why it is so important to conduct research on audiences, existing and potential. Consider the question: “If you do not understand the audience, how do you know what to do tomorrow?” This is a rhetorical question I have posed a number of times at National Museums Liverpool (NML), where at the beginning of the twenty-first century it seemed to me that we had not done sufficient to learn about our audience.
It took time to crystallize a mission at TWM. It always does, if it’s done with rigor. More urgent was the need to improve morale and bring about behavioral change. This involved a range of changes; breaking down of artificial barriers; creating new staff structures, new line management, some new posts; and switching resources between operational areas. In the early days of effecting culture change, the senior management team had to be dictatorial. There was nothing optional about the changes, although there were people who resisted it. My new management team had to steam ahead, as we felt we had