Some thoughts on museums and “Public Value”

I have long argued that unless publicly-funded museums can understand, articulate and fight for the “public value” that they contribute to individual users, communities and wider society in terms of better outcomes, they are at great risk of being assessed solely by cost-accounting and efficiency measures of throughput. And it is a risk rather than a benefit, because museums are intrinsically complex, uneconomic and inefficient engines, and measuring or managing them in cost-efficiency terms with only a superficial grasp of how those engines actually work is very likely to cut (and efficiency always seems to be about cuts) away exactly those parts which made the museum “great” and worthwhile in the first place. This is not to argue that museums cannot and should not look for ways to do what they do more efficiently – they should – but that by allowing any judgement of efficiency to be based primarily on inputs, throughputs and outputs rather than on the external benefits of what they do they fail to emphasise the greatest part of their rationale.

Given this, for museums as a species there seems to be far too little thinking put into what that rationale is, their individual or collective Goals or core purposes in terms of how they make the world a better place, why they matter. This is exactly what museums should be laying claim to – making a difference, changing lives, rather than just attracting more footfall, clicks or satisfaction ratings. This is, or rather should be, where their definition of “public value” starts, but it rarely if ever does.

As an example, let’s look at Liverpool’s excellent International Slavery Museum and what it says about its “goal”. Before visiting its website I had imagined that I would find something like:

 “By telling the history of the international slave trade we aim to show the inhumane nature of slavery and help to bring an end to this evil practice in today’s world.”

I was expecting, indeed hoping for, an exemplary vision-led affirmation of purpose, bent toward a clear Greater Good. In fact, under the headline “We Remember. We Act”, the Museum’s “About Us” reads:

 “The International Slavery Museum increases the understanding of transatlantic, chattel and other forms of enslavement. Through our collections, public engagement and research, we explore their impact and legacies.

We are a campaigning museum that actively engages with contemporary human rights issues. We address ignorance and challenge intolerance, building partnerships with museums, communities and organisations that share our vision.”

Now that is, for reasons too many to go into here, an all-too-typical museum statement of purpose, a quasi-rationalisation for What We Do (and want to keep on doing) rather than Why We Do It. But it fails to explain what this “campaigning museum” is actually campaigning for, or the “vision” that its partners must share. Or the purpose behind its active engagement with human rights issues. None of these make sense unless there is also a big over-riding “in order that…” result in mind, a picture of the better world the museum aims to help shape. There isn’t one, not even on the subject of slavery, on which one would think that stating a clear position of condemnation would be entirely uncontentious. It is not as if slavery is somehow up for debate; there are no “two sides to the argument” to be put. Nor is slavery confined to history; it is still prevalent in the modern world, is repugnant, uncontestably evil and unjustifiable, and should be stamped out. And I was expecting an International Slavery Museum vision statement clearly to state such a position, to have the eradication of contemporary slavery as an explicit aim, a clear benefit to mankind, and to shape, manage and measure its activities accordingly.

By contrast a UK national museum that really does hit the mark in the ordering of what it does in support of a big, compelling vision is the Natural History Museum. Here is its statement of vision, mission and strategy – the Museum’s Why, What and How:

• Our vision is of a future where both people and planet thrive

• Our mission is to create advocates for the planet

• Our strategy to 2031 sets out the part the Museum will play as a global, scientific and cultural leader 

This, for me, is an exemplary definition of purpose for a public institution: the long-term future (better for all) world we aim for, the specific role we will play in creating it, and the headlines of how we will go about it. It clearly delineates Vision, Mission and Strategy. It is about external outcomes. It’s big, clear, simple, logical, compelling and memorable; and it creates a frame of reference against which every element of what the NHM does, every single person’s job, can be focussed, assessed and managed. The (probably apocryphal) story of President Kennedy asking a cleaner at Cape Canaveral “and what do you do?” and being answered “I’m helping to put a man on the moon, Mr President” comes to mind; given a clear direction and goal, then every contribution of every member of the organisation can be bent towards achieving it. And, for the bean-counters, that is one measure of real efficiency and real public value.  

Back to my argument that museums need to make the case for the public value they create, I read with interest a paper published recently by Academia entitled "Creating public value: Case studies", by Louise Horner, Rebecca Fauth and Michelle Mahdon for the Work Foundation. This can be found here: https://www.academia.edu/23319503/Creating_public_value_Case_studies?email_work_card=view-paper and is an appendix to a more substantial document which as yet I have not read. The case studies cover a number of UK educational and cultural institutions and local government bodies, their different interpretations of public value, and how it is managed and delivered in planning and practice.

In particular, given my own background there, I focussed on the paper’s case study devoted to London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, the V&A. Apart from illustrating the awful contortions that publicly-funded national institutions must go through these days to please the short-term, look-good whims of lazy, uncomprehending political paymasters, this also showed the central weakness of so many museums in fighting for funding; nowhere is the public value the V&A creates actually, let alone powerfully, defined. I challenge anyone after reading the V&A case study to tell me just what public value the Museum thinks it creates. Given the number of times the case study reads "the V&A creates value by...", this may seem an odd claim to make. What is its core reason for existence, its raison d'être as a public institution? It's not explained, there's a lot of "what we do" flummery, but the big central “so that what...?” question is never answered. As with many museums, “we are A Good Thing” is complacently assumed to be a self-evident truth and so the only case needing to be made is how more people can get more of us.

And that is particularly telling since the V&A, of all the UK's great national museums, was the one with the clearest original vision of its place in creating a better future. Its founding purpose was explicitly to promote good design in order to shift Britain’s manufacturing economy up the value chain in order to meet emerging global competition. Consumers exposed to examples of good design would look to buy accordingly; manufacturers would benefit from a market expecting higher quality goods. The V&A was purpose-based, rather than designed to house an existing collection. Its innovations – late opening hours, artificially-lit galleries, a cafeteria, even a tram service from central London – were purpose-led ways to encourage ordinary working men and women to visit (i.e. access). Sadly, within 25 years that clear original vision was already being frittered away and the V&A becoming a conventionally curated museum collection behind a conventionally imposing museum facade, but that’s another story.  

There’s lots of good being done at the V&A of course. It’s travelled a vast distance since I worked there in the 1990s, and mainly for the better. It’s deservedly far more popular, more ambitious, more exciting, its collections better housed and displayed, its estate in far better shape. Yet there appears to be just as much inward-looking, status quo defending, collection-first rationalisation of What We Do rather than Why We Do It as there was in my day.

For example, in the Academia paper it states the V&A’s position that “access to the collections is the primary way in which the V&A creates public value”. This concept is well-worn in museum circles. Access (greater numbers, wider demographic and geographic spread, reach via digital channels, provision for the differently abled, loans to other museums, and so on) is today pretty much a universal KPI for every museum in the world, certainly the publicly funded ones. Worthwhile though it is, it's also an unforgivably unquestioned sector dogma that greater access to museums must intrinsically be better – the paper cites the DCMS aim of extending more widely the “benefits of culture” without ever describing what these benefits are, surely fundamental to any proper understanding of or consensus on “public value”.

In reality access per se creates no public value beyond the superficial claim to democratisation of a taxpayer-funded cultural resource and evidence of popular appeal. Access is a means rather than an end, at most an enabling objective; it allows a wider public to benefit from a museum’s actual value (which is almost invariably left unexplored). Greater access is only "better" inasmuch as it allows more users' lives to be transformed by the museum experience in some way that is of worth to them, their community or society at large. And the question of what that way or ways might be is far, far too often left both unasked and unanswered by museums themselves.

Not least because the question looks, to quote Al Pacino in Scent of a Woman, “Too. Damned. Hard”. Yes it is hard, but unless museums at least start trying to get to grips with what they make happen, to articulate the positive outcomes for individuals and society that they create through one visit or a million visits, they will forever struggle to occupy the high ground in the relentless and emotive competition for limited public (and probably also private) funds. This is where the Five Whys approach is needed; the thinking exercise that aims to shift attention from features and functions towards value and benefits. By keeping on asking Why (or “so that what…?”) at least five times the analysis drills down to much more fundamental motivations, needs, behaviours and purposes. It’s a probing and often uncomfortable process, very rarely done in museums, and particularly rare in museums over a certain age and size; collections easily become regarded as a purpose in themselves, so intrinsic to the very definition of a museum that questioning what they are for is tantamount to admitting religious Doubt.

The V&A’s own definition of purpose can be found online in its vision statement, which reads: "A strategic expansion of our physical and digital reach, using the lens of design to showcase ingenuity, spark the imagination, and make our collections increasingly accessible and relevant". All these describe a changing V&A, but WHY? All are legitimate means, but towards what ends? What will doing all this bring about in terms of a different and better world? What does the new, improved, increasingly relevant V&A empower, enable or inspire in those who have now been “reached”? What does the V&A envisage will happen when it "sparks imagination" – are there any outcomes, out there in the real world?

As in the NHM example, a true vision statement describes a desired future external state that the institution intends to help create or shape. There's nothing of that sort to be found in the V&A’s strategy document, unless you count the very vague objective to be "a global catalyst for the UK creative industries". To be honest, that absence is not surprising, because if such things really existed as genuine strategic goals or KPIs driving and baked into everything the V&A does, then they would be (but are not) found front and centre in the museum's Annual Report, with persuasive examples and statistics and case studies and measures of how the V&A museums change lives for the better. What the V&A is for, the difference it makes to people’s lives, perspectives and opportunities, how it makes the world a better, richer place to live, its true public value, what management guru Tom Peters would call its “big, hairy-assed goals”, all these should be fundamental to the V&A’s sense of itself, its aspiration, why it matters, why every part of it does what it does, why people should visit and treasure it, and why it deserves more rather than less public funding. These should be at the core of the V&A’s identity, purpose and culture, and vitally in the stories it tells about itself. 

Instead, subtitled “Why We’re Here”, the Museum’s mission statement (the What to any vision’s Why) starts with its intention: “to be recognised as the world’s leading museum of art, design and performance”. Seriously?! This is an entirely self-absorbed ambition framed in a mixture of hubris and fudge: what, after all, does “world-leading” actually mean or involve? Is the mission to be world leading or just be seen as such? What would be the evidence for any world-leading claim, what are the criteria, and what would be the clear signs of success? Which other museums globally are in the running for the title? Who confers this recognition and awards the accolade ? And, of course, why? - what greater public benefit would being recognised as world-leading, rather than as #2 or #6, create? None of this is explained. Instead there is a strong sense that the V&A is taken with the idea of becoming a (if not the) global “playa”, another Guggenheim or Louvre, much as countries’ political leaders very soon prefer the glory of being statesmen or stateswomen on the world stage to the mundane drudgery of actually running their own nation’s affairs. Recognition as being a leader in one’s field is something conferred by others, the result of doing as leaders do; to place such importance on it, to make it one’s central goal, implies an unhealthy bias towards style rather than substance, towards self-regard rather than public benefit. 

One area already mentioned in which the V&A would seem to have a powerful (at least in normal times) argument to make is in its relationship with the UK’s Creative Industries. I say “in normal times” since we are currently governed by a political party that has casually and unthinkingly disembowelled the UK’s previously thriving, unique and genuinely world-leading Creative Industries sector on the altar of Brexit dogma, so normality cannot be assumed. Putting aside that sad reality, the V&A could very persuasively build a strong case for a role in the sector. The strategic goal of being a “global catalyst” for it, however, looks more like a case for an “International Secretariat£ and a New York office than any coherent sector-directed plan. And there is little evidence that any catalytic activity is happening now beyond the eyebrow-raising claim that one third of the V&A’s visitors are design practitioners (the survey definition of “design practitioner” that threw up that statistic would be interesting to see).

The paper goes on to say “the value of the V&A to this community is seen to be ‘at the heart of the value created by the V&A for society’ ” (the quotes imply these are the V&A’s own words), so of central significance. Yet in the V&A’s most recent published Annual Report under the heading “Focus and Deepen the Relevance of our Collections to the UK Creative and Knowledge Economy” there is no definition of this value to society at all, nor any evidence of its delivery. The “so that what…?” is entirely absent. The heading does not explain the planned public benefit of focussing and deepening relevance, nor what relevance actually means, nor what success would look like. There are no outcomes listed, no measures applied; the Annual Report is merely a narrative of things the V&A has done in the year lumped under that heading, not on what positive difference any of it made, what “value” it created. Even the interesting DesignLab (encouraging young people to enter the creative sector) schools initiative, described as a flagship project, is claimed as a “success” without any explanation of how success is judged.

The V&A Annual Report as a whole lists activities – outputs rather than outcomes. Granted, such reports by museums are primarily directed at Boards of Trustees and funding bodies, in this case DCMS, who may well have access to more specific information on these programmes, their measures and their results. However, Annual Reports are also public documents, even if not widely read, and so are platforms for a museum to parade not only what it has done, but what that activity achieved, why it matters to real people, why the Museum is A Good Thing. On the battlefield of Efficiency one should first establish the defence of Effectiveness, since proof of that enables a museum to draw lines beyond which demands for further Efficiency will obviously be counter-productive. Effectiveness being what happens as the result of what a museum does – the public value of its activities – failure to understand and promote this up-front seems a recipe for certain defeat.

So for this reader both the Public Value paper on the V&A and the Museum's own Strategy and Annual Plan paint a picture of an opportunity squandered, or perhaps not even recognised. The result is a predictable forced retreat into the hostile world of efficiency – the world of cost accountants and bean-counters – which is an endless vicious spiral downwards. After all, if you can do the same with less money this year, then with a bit more effort you can probably do the same with even less the year after, ad infinitum. And when the only positive performance measures that a museum puts forward are the likes of access and reach, because these are all it opts to measure itself by, then it has also chosen to fight on its opponent’s ground – the convenient but superficial cost per. Cost per visitor, cost per click. Inputs and outputs rather than outcomes. If by temperament a museum sees itself as collections-led rather than purpose-led – where acquiring and preserving its collection is an end in itself rather than a tool to create an outcome – then “value” will inevitably reduce a matter of inputs and outputs. If its narrative is all about what it does rather than what these things contribute for people then its public value will never be truly appreciated. And the big story of why we should treasure the museums in our lives, why they matter to everybody, how they benefit society, how they change lives, will get told less and less and less. And then…