Want Buy-In? Build Trust

John Kotter is a prolific author of books about “change” in organizations. Getting people, organizations, and communities to move in new directions or to end old habits is difficult, but he’s developed lots of practical strategies and outlined a step-by-step process to succeed based on his studies of dozens of companies. Fundamental is a relationship of trust among the participants (e.g., managers and employees, city council and residents, historic sites and neighbors), which is a result of transparency and openness, and a willingness to listen and discuss tough issues. It sounds obvious but I’ve seen national organizations create an atmosphere of suspicion, hostility, and fear simply because they hold too many closed door meetings, only communicate bland or stale news when the environment is clearly unsettled, and won’t answer simple questions about what’s happening. The result is change has to be forced (and enforced and reinforced) and buy-in, participation, and support is low. It’s the worst way to implement change, except for war.

If you’re dealing with change at your historic site or house museum (either leading or experiencing it), John Kotter introduces this idea in, “Levering Trust to Achieve Buy-In,” a short video at Forbes posted last week. If you want to explore his ideas further, I’ve found his books Leading Change (a classic) and Buy-In: Saving Your Good Idea from Getting Shot Down (really a handbook, great for advocacy and fundraising) to be helpful.

Engaging Exhibits: An Experimental Approach at the Smithsonian Institution

Andrew Pekarik discussing a new theory of visitor typologies to the education staff at the National Air and Space Museum.

Yesterday I had lunch with Tim Grove, the Chief of Interpretation at the National Air and Space Museum and author of the History Bytes column in History News, to catch up on various things. We were discussing my current puzzling out of methodologies for my book on interpretive planning for historic sites and discussing Howard Gardner’s “multiple intelligences,” when he mentioned that I might be interested in joining his staff meeting that afternoon. Andrew Pekarik in the Office of Policy and Analysis at the Smithsonian was giving a presentation on a new theory for visitor engagement–would I like to come? Absolutely!

Andy’s presentation was a short 30 minutes but was incredibly intriguing. It’s based on dozens of evaluations on various exhibits at several different Smithsonian exhibits and is currently being independently verified, but the framework is public and was published with Barbara Mogel in the October 2010 issue of Curator as “Ideas, Objects, or People? A Smithsonian Exhibition Team Views Visitors Anew.” Here’s the new framework in a nutshell: Continue reading →

Maintaining Your Entreprenuerial Edge

The people who work in historic sites and house museums are often among the most entrepreneurial I’ve encountered, mostly because circumstances force them to be risky, resourceful, creative, and innovative. Working with a tight budget and a reliance on volunteers to change the world (or at least their community), they are continually looking for new ways to succeed. The trick is how to do it without getting overextended, derailed by interruptions, and staying in a rut. In the Daily Muse, Adelaide Lancaster recently shared Three Bad Habits of Entrepreneurs and How to Break Them to attain these goals:

To have a clearer head. At any given time, you should have only a few main areas of focus—no more than three a quarter. Other initiatives must be declared a secondary priority, and projects or “opportunities” unrelated to your business goals must be declined. [A focus on a few things done well rather than many things done poorly seems to Continue reading →

Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission names James M. Vaughan as Executive Director

Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission (PHMC) Chairman Andrew E. Masich today announced that James M. Vaughan of Washington, D.C. has been appointed as the agency’s new executive director, effective November 28, 2011.

Vaughan most recently served as Vice President, Stewardship of Historic Sites for the National Trust for Historic Preservation in Washington, D.C., where he Continue reading →

Apps Students Want

Artist's rendition of "The Past Speaks to Us" mobile app. From THE Journal.

Project Tomorrow asked students from kindergarten through high school to imagine their ideal mobile app for learning. They received more than 200,000 responses and T.H.E. Journal highlighted fifteen of them that could transform student learning and take advantage of this budding technology in their November/December 2011 issue. For museums and historic sites, here are the ones with most potential (as well as what’s happening currently in the field):

The Real Thing. Suggested by a sixth grader in California: “Some students have a hard time with subjects but they don’t want to ask teachers. This app would let them watch videos or talk to real professionals about the subjects they are learning in school.” Some institutions are already offering YouTube videos like this to explain the job of a curator or an expert’s view on a topic.
iMu-see-’em. Suggested by an eighth grader in New Jersey: “This app is at once a virtual planner, information database, and textbook archives. It includes a three-dimensional model viewer for referencing subjects, like Continue reading →

What’s Next in the Social Media Revolution?

"What's Next for Social Media" Forum at the National Archives.

The National Archives brought together a diverse panel of practitioners and critics of social media to discuss some of the challenges and opportunities for communication with the public in, “What’s Next in the Social Media Revolution?” at its Seventh Annual William G. McGowan Forum on Communications on Friday, November 4. A really informative (and free!) evening and for historic sites there were these particularly useful insights and recommendations:

Social media is not just for socializing, but can inform and motivate. Alex Howard, the Government 2.0 Correspondent for O’Reilly Media, provided a quick history of social media noting that many of them are very new (Flickr, Facebook, LinkedIn, Digg launched in 2004; YouTube and Twitter in 2006) but the turning point was the Iran elections in 2009, which showed that the use of social media could have tremendous impacts on society. My advice: your organization may not have the capacity to use social media actively right now, but Continue reading →

Teaching History Through Inquiry

If you’ve ever worked with students, you know that lectures and PointPoint presentations are a sure way to kill any interest in history or historic places. In Teaching History Through Inquiry, Stephen Lazar, a social studies teacher at the Academy for Young Writers in Brooklyn, lists six ways he engages high school students to provide cultural literacy and help them develop as critical thinkers:

Carefully craft your questions.
Engage students in examining evidence.
Move on to more nuanced questions.
Navigate myths with the inquiry approach.
Identify helpful resources.
Prepare critical thinkers.

You can find details of each of these points at TeacherMagazine.org, which is making this premium article available for free. But let me add another point:

7. Engage with the real thing: use original documents, visit historic sites, look at objects, and examine historical photographs and maps. Those experiences bring mind and eye (and perhaps heart) together in a way that’s not possible in textbooks and classrooms.