I have now spent perhaps 40 odd years in organizations in the private sector, in academia and now in public service. One notion that has become ingrained in my own approaches to things is that of the "objective."

Objectives seem to me to be potentially very useful things. They indicate a commitment about what activities should command resources. They clarify which activites are likely to be more efficacious and they provide a basis for determining success, since if they are properly stated one can design evaluation systems to determine the extent to which they have been achieved.

What in your experience is the range of objectives that museums attempt to accomplish? How satisfactorily are they articulated (that is are they stated in ways that would permit one to determine with objective data whether they had been achieved)? To what extent do they function to shape museum activities (I have seen organizations in which objectives are stated and then largely ignored)? And what are the sorts of evaluation designs museums use to capture data indicating the extent to which the activities they undertake are working to achieve their objectives?

I ask this question in part because as an instructional designer, I often presume that "learning" is a primary museum objective, but am often brought up short in this regard by suggestions that museum objectives are likely considerably broader than this.

Thanks for your continuing patient responses,

R. John Howe

I haven't done a search of museums, but your question did prompt me to log onto the Textile Museum web site. The very first item on their home page is a link that says, "Mission...". Sounds like something close to "Objectives" to me, so here's theirs:
The Textile Museum is dedicated to furthering the understanding of mankind's creative achievements in the textile arts. As a museum, it is committed to its role as a center of excellence in the scholarly research, conservation, interpretation and exhibition of textiles, with particular concern for the artistic, technical and cultural significance of its collections. The mission is pursued through development and maintenance of collections, records and a library, as well as through scholarly research, exhibitions, publications and educational programs. In all of this, the standard of excellence established by the Museum's founder, George Hewitt Myers, will be maintained. While it doesn't explicitly spell out criteria by which they judge whether the objectives are being met, it wouldn't be hard to do so on the basis of that statement.

My university also has mission statements for the university, schools, and departments, with what would appear to be the reasonable rule that no school can have a mission outside that of the university and no department can have a mission outside that of its school. It follows logically that no member of the faculty can absorb departmental resources (like, for instance, his own time) in pursuing an activity outside that of his department. And this is the way we are structured. It appeals to the management-by-objective types very much.

The problem with it is that there is nothing within that structural framework that even remotely suggests that it is a good idea for one department to contribute resources to some activity in a school other than their home school. In fact, taken at face value, such contributions would be forbidden. Dilemma in an institution that (like every research university in the world) would like to promote interdiscipliary cooperation.

I went through this just to illustrate that management by objectives in an organization that has itself divided into cubbyholes (and most large organizations meet this description) can be counterproductive in some ways.

Steve Price

However you raised another point which deals with how a museum evaluates or measures its successes. This is an area of growing interest in museum work. Presumably we are about learning, but studies indicate that learning is only part of how the public uses us and values us. It's now understood that learning or gaining new knowledge represents the goals of about 20% of our visitors. People use for other reasons. High on the list is the use of museums as a place of socialization. People come with friends of family to an interesting place to enjoy each others company. Another set of visitors come to us to have their opinions reinforced. These people are looking for reaffirmation of beliefs and attitudes. These are legitimate uses. Can they be evaluated? I think not.

We've learned that schools use our museum for not only learning but as a place where children can be brought for reasons such as helping them learn to how to behave in a public space. Can that be evaluated? Perhaps anecdotaly through teacher evaluations.

Some museums are working with evaluation models for increasing the effectiveness of exhibitions by pre-testing display techniques and observing behaiviour or by conducting time studies of exhibits and measuring a visitors attentiveness at a single exhibit component. I've lableled this the "rat psychology" movement of museum studies.

Conducted properly these studies aparently increase public use or intellectual interaction with exhibits, which presumably leads to greater learning for the visitor. I don't know if these museums administer written tests at the end of the exhibit in order to verify new knowldege gained. (a joke!)

As to your last statement concenring objectives of a museum beyond learning; like most bureacratic organizations perpetuation of our existence takes precedence over learning. Of course some of us understand that the two might be inseperable - or are they?

Ah, the "fodder" in these two responses. I will virtuously resist most of it.

Steve: Point of clarification. One can be interested in the utility of objectives without being a member of the "management by objectives" crowd. Some of my colleagues have been impressed enough with the potential pathologies visible in this latter group to suggest that their primary interest is in "getting the sucker (read 'individual performer') to commit to unachieveable objectives" and then to beat him or her over the head with that commitment. Not what I'm about.

There is, I think, nothing in the notion of an objective itself that bars it from being conceptulized usefully rather than pathologically. When I was last in the university community "interdisciplinary" was not only a buzz word but something that licensed reaching between both departments and schools. Fire and water have been abused in history. That does not make them less useful.

Mr. Koos, I would first suggest that most "missions" are stated at too high a level of generality for them to functon as concrete goals and objectives. I would argue that some further specification of what follows from a mission statement is almost alway needed.

You don't indicate what a typical goal statement might be but do say that in your world perhaps 80% are achieved inferring that achievement can in fact be determined. It would be useful to know whether objective rather than subjective data is needed. (I would argue that it is possible to do the former without indulging in "rat psychology" although that too has its points since it requires very concrete behavioral descriptions of what is to count as success. I say that latter sentence while being much more a disciple of G. H. Mead rather than of B. F. Skinner.)

The objectives of whether a museum is a place to "interact enjoyably with family and friends" or whether it succeeds in "reinforcing visitor opinions" are certainly capable of evaluation with subjective data. I would encourage museum professionals not to decide such things prematurely. The same is true for socialization objectives for school children. This seems to me a particularly impoverished set of objectives on which to waste a museum (any restaurant will do) but its efficacy can readily be evaluated without recourse to "reputational" methods such as teacher estimates.

Finally, I was reaching for something beyond mere self-perpetuation with my last question and I think most museums do have such objectives. For example, the objective of preserving the items in the collection is legitimate but disconnected from "learning." There are undoubtedly others. I was just not clear about their actual range in practice.

Thanks again for this useful dialogue,

R. John Howe

I wasn't suggesting that having objectives is a frivolous or useless thing to do. It is my observation that their use as a basis for resource allocation in a complex institution like a university (and, I suspect, in a museum as well) is more likely to cause problems than to solve them. This leads me to the conclusion that it is better not to use them that way than it is to cause more problems by continuing to use them as we try to fine tune the system. I might add as an aside that this is a way of looking at things that has profound political implications.

One of the things that Greg raised in his post is that the objectives of the various constituencies an institution serves and those of the institution itself are typically not congruent. A museum, for instance, is unlikely to perceive itself as a venue for teaching children to behave in an acceptable way in a public space. At least, that isn't likely to be very high on its list of goals. For some of its "customers", that is its major role. Since the museum (like a university) depends on public support for its survival, it behooves a museum to have some sensitivity to the goals of the "customers". The trick, of course, is to set appropriate limits on how it deals with that sensitivity.

Steve Price

If you see objectives as a likely dysfunctional way to allocate resources in organizations (the notion that there are often several stakeholders whose objectives sometimes conflict is not, I think, part of any such dysfunctional quality, since their explicit statement permits self-conscious decisions about the trade-offs and prioritizations that you also mention) I would be interested in what you see as a more viable strategy.

An objective is nothing more than a self-conscious statement of what one wants to achieve. Does your recommendation include not being explicit about such things?

Regards,

R. John Howe

The problem in institutions like museums and universities, all too often, is that the model that there are actually objectives that can be measured as tangible data is wrong. A car dealership (or, to stay closer to the topic, a rug dealership) has any number of ways to objectivy its criteria. Unit sales, dollar volume, repeat customer percentage, etc. are easily tracked and become a convenient basis for allocation of resources and evaluation of success.

Museums and universities are different in kind, and their evaluation is most often done by very broad criteria (for universities, for instance, the annual US NEWS AND WORLD REPORT rankings) that involve subjective input from many of their peer group. Big institutions have enormous inertia, and changing a ranking is a process that, by its nature, takes many years. That's because it doesn't happen until the institution has not only changed, but the peer group has taken note of it.

At the level of the individual employee, university faculty and, I suspect, museum curatorial people, are chosen not just for what they know, but for their ability to create new knowledge and disseminate what they know. It's hard, probably impossible, to turn that into a numerical expression at the level of the individual (although it isn't too hard to do at the level of the whole institution). One fairly common practice is to apply the institutional measures at the individual level. The outcome is generally dysfunctional.

An objective is, as you say, just a self-conscious expression of what you want to achieve. The extent to which it is useful or counterproductive depends on how good the person stating it is at articulating what often lies beneath the conscious level. As a university professor, for instance, my objectives include imparting certain specific kinds of information to my students in ways that they can understand. That's teaching. Stating the objective is easy, and so is measuring success or failure. I'm also supposed to profess (remember my title?), to impart an understanding of my academic discipline and it's attitudes - that's not so easy to articulate or to measure. Then, too, I'm supposed to impart something about ethical attitudes and ideals. That's even fuzzier and less easily measured, especially in the short term.

The problems in museums are, I am sure, similarly diffuse even though not identical. And if explicit statements become hindrances rather than ladders, yes, I would advocate avoiding them. I know that this leaves people like me in a difficult position when trying to persuade the public that we ought to be on their payrolls. The hope is that their leaders had experience with people like us in their formative years and will, well, lead.

Steve Price

The current societal focus on measurable outcomes is an example of this. Museums are learning about visitor's motivations and the needs of educational groups who use us. We adapt to these new understandings the best we can. However, 10 years from now another set of needs and societal desires will be expressed and we will work to adjust ourselves to those demands.

In making these adjustments we are faced with a simple fact - we are about the physical world - we collect objects. Changing our infrastructure to fit ephemeral ideas is very expensive. Its easy to have an idea. It is very tough to change the physical world to reflect those ideas. This is not to say that we shouldn't. ADA regulations are an excellent example of an idea - physical access for the disabled - which although it comes with tremendous costs - should be done. A bad idea is to change an entire exhibition program because a rat psychologist can demonstrate that people will spend more time at an exhibit component if you put a bulls-eye behind the artifact. (No one has really recommended this!)

I'm not sure if this statement clarifies or muddies the issues presented above. I hope that I am communicating the complexity of the issues which museums face in fulfilling their mission.

By the way John, our 80% success rate in achieving objectives deals with museum development work. We like to say that a museum is never done. Tremendous behind the scene work is performed to manage a museum's multi-faceted programs. Our goals are expressed in such terms as "x amount of collections entered into a database, x amount of collections re-housed to prevent incompatible materials from causing deterioration." We haven't gotten to a point of "x amount of the public knowing the starting date of WWII." We do say "x% increase in school programs." I guess we are happy to have that as an outcome. Measuring the "amount of learning" is never going to be part of the process. I think Steve explained that well.

Greg

One more thought occurred to me that might be useful, and that is to bring the discussion into a realm with which most of the readers are experienced. I'm thinking about raising kids, which most of us have seen from both sides and all of us have seen from one (having been raised ourselves).

This is pretty important work, so it would seem reasonable that it ought to have objectives that can be stated and whose success or failure can be measured if it is reasonable to suppose that this is a functional approach to important work.

OK? What are the objectives? An obvious one, easily stated and easily measured, is that we need to abort the attempts every young kid makes at self-destruction. But that's pretty minimal. The more difficult objectives have to do with preparing the kid to function productively in society, to develop ways of getting him (or her) off Daddy's payroll and self-supporting some, to become a person with high ethical standards and respect for the rights of others. I could extend this list, but you get the idea.

How do we measure these things, as good professional evaluators? The sad fact is that we can't really know whether we succeeded or failed on most of those objectives until more than 20 years, maybe much more than 20 years, after the time we take the actions (to use the words of people in the business, from the timeof our specific behaviors) . So we use our judgment, do what we think is right from day to day and even include some long term planning. If anyone showed up at my door to ask me to provide him with a list of objectives along with an agreement that he'd be allowed back in 6 to 12 months to evaluate my parenting - based on those objectives - I'd kick him out. And that's pretty much a summary of my interactions with the folks in our institution's Office of Education (or whatever it's called these days).

The functions performed by professional people are probably more like those of parents than like those of employees of most businesses.

Steve Price

We're probably towards the end of what we can do usefully in this thread but I can't quite let it end without indicating that, despite your efforts, I'm not clear about what's so distinctive about museums and universities that makes the notion of using objectives within them so wrong for you.

You are going to have to decide somehow what to do next. You are going to have to decide to spend money on this rather than that. You might even be asked occasionally for some modest evidence that what you are doing is producing some sort of predictable results. It may well be that you have an alternative conception of the way that museums and universities will more appropriately deal with these matters (I decline to see either the university or any museum I have yet encountered as a "parent") but to bridge briefly to another thread, it lacks "transparency" for me.

You say at one point that if an objective is "restrictive" it should be discarded. Restrictive of what? This suggests to me only that perhaps a person didn't state their real objectives accurately at first. That happens all the time and shifts are made without concluding that this suggests that the notion of an objective and its potential functions are defective.

One of the leading folks in my field, who has championed learning objectives, says often that "if you don't know where you're going, you're very likely to end up some place else." More, it also seems likely that you may not even know it. A kind of fish in water, who doesn't know that he/she is a fish in water. The Greeks had a phrase for "an unexamined life." Perhaps you don't go this far but it is tempting to think so.

Thanks for your thoughts in this trialogue,

R. John Howe

R. John Howe

There are separate (but related) matters being confounded here.
1. Should museums (and universities) have objectives and should those objectives be articulated? OF COURSE! For all the reasons you stated.
2. Should the resources be allocated to sections of the institutions by some formula based on the objectives? To some extent, but not slavishly.
3. Should success be measured every year (or every six months, or every two years, or some other interval that bears on the next budget period) by the extent to which the objectives are met? This is the part that's absurd, mainly because the success or failure to meet some of the important objectives can't be known until long after the current period. It is in this respect that I referred to professional peoples' functions as being sort of like those of parents. Will my kid develop according to my objectives? He's 9 years old now; I won't know for another 15 years, at least, whether my methods of achieving those objectives were successful. Does it make sense to insist on generating methods to evaluate my success in achieving those objectives right now? Not to me.

Steve Price

Sam Gorden would probably say "like anyone else, they are moved by beauty."
Greg

I am glad that things are not as bad as I momentarily suspected they might be.

I think the thing that troubles me is a seeming underlying resistence to self-reflexiveness.

It troubles me because this is a quality that humans often point to in their efforts to distinguish themselves from other life forms. It is seen by many as a defining human capability. Why not use it? Fully.

There seems to me nothing disabling about the notion that some "terminal" goals take a very long time to achieve. What we do there is establish shorter term goals the achievement of which we judge will through accretion and over time likely produce the desired ultimate result. What's crazy about that?

I want my museums, as they think about the kind of human being they might over the years help me to be, to think just a little more concretely about what experiences I might have in a given exhibition and whether there is anything they might want me to take away from it. If so, I would encourage them to be creative in trying to determine whether they have succeeded. If they do not, how will they determine whether they should do similar things next time?

If something like faith in positive outcomes is this central to what they are doing, I'm going to have trouble dealing with them since I just barely escaped from Protestant fundamentalism a few years ago.

The notion that we there are arenas in which we cannot set coherent and useful objectives and determine whether they have been achieved seems to me both a shade nihilistic and a call for a "free lunch."

Thanks again,

R. John Howe

Spell check just crashed a long and eloquent response to your issue on museum objectives - oh well.

What I was trying to get at was that museums have about 45 minutes of attention span from a visitor who will usually come once or twice a year. These visitors share little common agenda and few common experiences. Because of this to suggest that museums can implement objectives based on a social theory to somehow make a better human heart is unrealistic. A few visitors will have an epiphany. Most will spend their time in a reverie about lord knows what. Thats ok with me. I'm happy they came. A few make pick up a fact and a few may develop an idea.

Thank you for your challenges and questions.
Greg

You mentioned a spell-checker crash. I noticed that you stated: "A few make pick up a fact..."
You may have "hit" upon an idea that may or may not consciously be used in museum planning: they are a great place to meet people, if the proper environment is fostered. I know that the Seattle Art Museum has music concerts in their lobby regularly. These kinds of off-purpose functions create a dynamic, interesting social-cultural venue that would contribute greatly to a more favorable funding scenario. People who would not ordinarily go to the trouble to visit a museum will come for other reasons, continue to come and contribute to the financial stability of the museum.
Our local rug club has held a meeting at the museum and one of our members has generously provided an antique rug for a display of period furniture.
As far as MBO (those pesky objectives that seem more annoying than useful to those of us just trying to get our job done), John, the world would continue to thrive without the straitjacket strictures they impose upon us. I wouldn't want to say that they just provide careers for people with a masters degree but no common sense. The topic of Mission Statements is a bit of a pet peeve for me. My darn business card has the entire back covered in the senseless thing and I can't use it to write notes on anymore!!! I'd like to find whoever started THAT ridiculous trend and force them to watch reruns of old sitcoms for ten years.

Well, Greg, I guess everyone's 45 minute attention span has just about expired!

Contrarily yours,

Patrick Weiler

My God!!! I am surrounded by people intent on "doing their jobs" as a set of "activities" disconnected from self-consciously specified "outcomes." [Maybe Peter Drucker was right when he said that most people are more interested in "efficiency" (doing things "right") than "effectiveness" (doing the "right" things). You can do the wrong things right without achieving much. You can often achieve quite a bit doing the right things half-assed.]

Sometime some of you need to tell me over a beer or two, how you do decide what to do and whether the question of how you're doing or whether you should do things differently ever arises.

Just for the record while I find objectives extremely useful, I am not an MBO fan nor do I find most "mission statements" informing.

But if someone finds an adopted objective acts as a "straitjacket" this suggests to me either that the notion of objectives was externally imposed and not actively integrated into the way one approaches one's work or that the objective adopted has been discovered to be an incorrect one.

As Pat says, the likely 45 second attention span of most readers here has expired long ago.

I am about to start on my morning walk and just to show that I am open to alternative conceptions and to new experiences, I am going to walk without any decision about where I am going. I will absolutely be moved by the spirit. It is at least one occasion in which my root objective of mild cardiovasular fitness is likely disconnected from the selection of any particular destination.

Thanks to all for this revealing exchange,

R. John Howe

You wrote,
I am about to start on my morning walk and just to show that I am open to alternative conceptions and to new experiences, I am going to walk without any decision about where I am going. I will absolutely be moved by the spirit. It is at least one occasion in which my root objective of mild cardiovasular fitness is likely disconnected from the selection of any particular destination.

Am I correct in understanding that most mornings you examine your objectives (the reasons why you are going out for a stroll), decide upon a destination before you set out, and feel duty bound to stick with that? You might consider simply enjoying the time spent walking as an objective. Of course, then you'd get entangled in what and why you enjoy things, and that would spoil the enjoyment. I'm glad I don't wrestle with such dilemmas.
Steve Price

Soon midnight will come and put a grateful end to what we are now doing here but I fear that you continue deeply to misunderstand objectives and how they can function.

My normal practice is at intervals and quite deliberately to do a little research to identify new walking routes that I have reason to believe might be quite beautiful and would take me about an hour and a half to complete. There is no great intellectual anguish about this that gets in the way of enjoyment but it is an effort to predict in advance what might be enjoyable. Washington being the kind of city it is, there are always new routes to discover and to explore.

Once a route is in my collection I often let the selection of which of these routes to take that day be a matter of pure "vibe."

Today I walked south and east and turned on impulse into attractive streets I did not remember walking before. My evaluation of this new route is that it did let me see some interesting houses, landscaping and other buildings that I hadn't seen before but that the constant turning meant that I had more short blocks and streets to cross and therefore didn't often get the periods of sustained pace to which I aspire. I will not walk that particular route again.

Now I quite agree that life cannot be lived at the level of constant self-reflection. One would quickly acquire a kind of intellectual "stiff neck." It would be immobilizing.

But that is a caricature of what I proposed for museums [I have personally pretty well given up on universities. They seem to me now likely instances of institutions in which (regardless of whether any objectives are ever articulated) most sectors are going to have trouble ever noticing whether findings in other sectors might be applicable to their seemingly central and common default enterprise of fostering learning.].

How do you make a green "devil" face? If I'm to learn some new "technical" things perhaps it should start there.

Regards,

R. John Howe

Greg has posted his summary, so discussion is over on these boards - even for me!

However, since you ask about the devil face, if you look to the left of the textbox in which you type messages you'll see the words "Emotions Legend". Clicking on those words opens up the list of codes for all the little icons.

Steve Price