Читать книгу Museum Practice - Группа авторов - Страница 38

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 no time to spare if we were to save TWM. This concentrated our minds wonderfully. Nonetheless, this approach can only be sustained for a limited period, and sensing the right time to ease off and adopt a more inclusive style of management is crucial to the successful implementation of culture change.

The importance of supportive governance needs to be stressed. Museums always have governing bodies, whether they are local authorities or a board of trustees, and culture change is impossible without their agreement. At TWM our governing body was the Joint Museums Committee, a body made up of elected councillors from the five local authorities of Tyne and Wear. It was the potential threat of these five authorities ending the joint funding agreement that always hung over TWM like the Sword of Damocles.

In fact, the Committee could not have been more supportive.⁵ The councillors welcomed the improvements that the new culture brought about. In particular, they could hardly fail to notice that visitor numbers began to increase as we invigorated the museum service with education work, capital developments, an increasingly varied exhibitions program, and a new emphasis on attracting non- traditional audiences and on professional marketing and fundraising.⁶ In 1994 TWM was cited as a success in that year’s Newcastle Labour Party Election Manifesto: an extraordinary turnaround, and proof that successful museums can prosper even in the most skeptical political environment.⁷ Anecdotal evidence and independent evaluation has confirmed that the revamped museum service has been successful in terms of social impact and other factors (Calzia et al. 2005).⁸

Committee support meant that we could take risks. And one of our biggest risks was to take over the management of the Hancock Museum from Newcastle University, which subsequently became the core of the Great North Museum. This was a major undertaking that could have gone wrong in so many ways, but in fact the new arrangements led to significant gains for the Hancock (including increased profile, audience growth, several awards, and improved fundraising) and a huge amount of credit for TWM (Great North Museum 2013). Moreover, assuming management responsibility for the Hancock meant that TWM staff were exposed to all manner of new practices and issues, and our success in turning around the museum’s fortunes acted as a demonstration of how good TWM could be, and a motivational example. It became a catalyst for change elsewhere in TWM.

During the 1990s, as TWM developed into a radical and effective museum service, we developed a written set of documents that culminated in our Statement of Purpose and Beliefs. Along the way we wrote a number of mission statements. The (rather clunky) one from 1995 reads: “Tyne and Wear Museums assembles and protects evidence of human and environmental development in Tyne and Wear and, where appropriate, elsewhere; and provides the fullest access to that evidence to people of all ages, background and abilities.” While the 1995 mission acknowledges the core collections-based role of TWM, significantly it follows this with the statement that “the fullest access” should be provided to these collections. In the TWM 1996 Corporate Plan this mission statement had been amended to read: “Tyne and Wear Museums assembles and protects evidence of human and environmental development, and, in making these fully accessible, strives to improve the quality of people’s lives in Tyne and Wear.” The 1996 mission statement was supported by a list of “aims,” which elaborated upon the brief mission, and included the express aim that TWM should act “as an agent of social change.”

What was happening was that TWM was edging away from the traditional view of the role of museums as defined by, for example, the UK Museums Association and ICOM, toward a position where the right of the public to access and benefit from collections becomes the overriding mission.⁹ This is a subtle but important distinction that reflects the need for museums to be acutely conscious of their socioeconomic environment, whatever their collections-based needs and priorities.

In May 1996 TWM’s senior managers held a “Strategy Day,” something we did on a frequent basis. We noted at that meeting that, in 1991, we had been suffering from political hostility, low staff morale, a low professional profile, declining funding, no strategy, and low visitor numbers. By 1996 we had become politically popular, staff morale was “quite good” (although members of staff were “tired”), our professional profile was strong, our fundraising was successful, we were now very strategic, and visitor numbers had more than doubled from 500,000 to 1.2 million since 1990 (Tyne and Wear Museum Annual Reports 1990–1998). We also noted that we had become far more cost-effective and ambitious, the funding from the National Lottery had changed our landscape dramatically, and that a possible Labour Government was on the political horizon.

High visitor numbers suggested that our focus on being relevant to local communities was working, but we could not rest on our laurels. In April 1998, I sent a note to TWM staff: “If ever we forget that our single most important performance indicator is the level of public support we enjoy (and earn) then our present Golden Age will be finished.” There was a growing acknowledgment within TWM that the primary purpose of museums is to provide a service to the whole of the public. This belief sat at the heart of TWM’s philosophy by the end of the 1990s, and was captured in our Statement of Purpose and Beliefs (mentioned above), a document worked on by scores of TWM managers and endorsed by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport in its Policy Guidance on social inclusion for museums, galleries, and archives in May 2000 (DCMS 2000, 29). This Purpose and Beliefs was clearer than had been our previous mission statements about TWM’s social role. Here is an extract:

Our Mission is:

To help people determine their place in the world and understand their identities,

so enhancing their self-respect and their respect for others.

We Believe that:

We act as an agent of social and economic regeneration.

We Pursue our Mission by:

Exposing our public to ideas, thus helping counter ignorance, discrimination and hostility.

Our Vision for the Future of TWM is for:

Total inclusion.

Thirteen years later, the current TWAM (now Tyne and Wear Archives and Museums) mission reads: “Our mission is to help people determine their place in the world and define their identities, so enhancing their self-respect and their respect for others” (Tyne and Wear Museums and Archives 2011).

It would be fair to note that the advent of the New Labour Government in 1997 had encouraged our explicit commitment to social inclusion at TWM, because social inclusion was a key government policy which shaped and was shaped by important research on social inequality (Fleming in Dodd and Sandell 2001). We felt able to be more expansive about our social aims, and when the Government decided to use the TWM Purpose and Beliefs in its policy guidance for all museums and archives, we felt vindicated in our approach. In letters written to me by the outgoing Government Ministers in 2001, both Secretary of State Chris Smith and Culture Minister Alan Howarth made reference to the example TWM had provided to the museum sector. Howarth wrote:

I have very much admired the way in which you have flown the flag not just for Tyne and Wear Museums, but for regional museums in general. You have demonstrated that first class practice is not confined to the national museums, and indeed you have blazed several of the trails that as Ministers we very much wanted the museums system to pursue.¹⁰