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My most recent experience of redefining a mission and organizational values has been at National Museums Liverpool (NML), where I became director in October 2001. NML has been a national museum service since 1986. It is a group of museums in Liverpool and Wirral that hold world-class collections across the range of museum disciplines (National Museums Liverpool 2013). It is a bigger service than TWM and, unlike TWM, there is no local authority control. Again my perspective on this case study is colored by my own involvement, but I believe the value of this autobiographical sketch is to provide a personal account of organizational change from the inside.

On becoming director of, as it was known at the time, National Museums and Galleries on Merseyside (NMGM), like all new directors I needed to get beneath the skin of the organization, and one of the ways of doing this was to find out what the NMGM managers thought of their service. A “Vision Away Day” in November 2001, entitled “Reinventing NMGM,” threw up a great many issues, as senior managers raised long-held frustrations.

Among the more serious concerns about NMGM that were expressed by the senior team were: the museum had no shared vision, it was fragmented, risk averse, not strategic, and, far from having a team culture, had a blame culture. Having worked at TWM, of course, none of this was altogether shocking. All museums need to refresh their thinking every now and again in order to prevent this kind of perceived staleness. NMGM’s Mission Statement read in 2001:

To use effectively the staff, buildings and resources of NMGM to promote the public enjoyment and understanding of art, history and science by:

 adding to, caring for and preserving the collections

 studying and researching the collections

 exhibiting the collections

 and by other appropriate means.

The mission was backed up not by a set of values or beliefs, but by a schedule of “services provided to the public” and a list of “national standards achieved or aspired to.” This was hardly a motivational mission. Dry, descriptive, and functional, it had been in use for a number of years, and spoke volumes about the need for a new approach at NMGM.

NMGM was certainly not in the parlous state that TWM had been in 1991, but it did need a renewed sense of purpose, wherein the service was able to identify what it was good at, but then go on to fulfill its potential in terms of audience- building and social impact; audiences were too low, invariably a sign that all is not well. When I worked at TWM, we used to compare our visitor numbers with those of NMGM, which had far bigger budgets but smaller audiences. I was determined to do something about this: at my job interview with the NMGM trustees, I had argued that NMGM needed a new primary aim, which was “to be a social, cultural and educational powerhouse, through audience development.” In a report for trustees in 2005, I wrote that in 2001:

Our culture was slow-moving and bureaucratic, and energies and boldness were suppressed by anxieties and fear of failure … NMGM was tribal, racked by departmental agendas, with loyalties to individual venues. Central services, such as marketing and finance, were held in low regard by venue managers, and therefore by their staff. Curators often saw themselves as superior beings rather than as part of a team. Others simply kept their heads down so as to avoid, as they perceived it, unnecessary bureaucracy and interference.

And so, together with senior staff, I set out together on a long journey to reinvent NMGM. In an early address to staff entitled “First Impressions” in December 2001, I set the scene: despite having talented and experienced staff, great collections and buildings, and other capabilities, we were poor at internal communications, at forward planning, at prioritization. I said that:

Over and above all this, and causing many of these problems, is the issue of NMGM CULTURE, or corporate personality, which in turn is the result of a lack of a shared and articulated VISION. We have, to a degree, failed to be clear about why we exist, what we are here for, and what we want to be.

Furthermore, I argued that NMGM needed a vision “of a learning organisation which is ambitious, generous, exciting and successful; which is founded on a bedrock of scholarship and excellence; wherein different talents are valued and respected; which is geared up for operating in a rapidly-changing world.” It was at this address that I first set a target for NMGM to attract 2 million visitors a year by 2010. The number visiting in 2001 was around 700,000 a year (Brown 2006). It was also in this speech that I explained my belief that museums are, first and foremost, educational organizations, and that NMGM must strive to attract the broadest audiences.

Much discussion and debate followed, involving staff and trustees, and out of these discussions arose an early symbolic change of name from National Museums and Galleries on Merseyside, which the service had been called since 1986, to National Museums Liverpool. This may not seem such a big deal, but it was a conscious decision to shorten our name and acronym, and drop the rather indeterminate “Merseyside” in favor of the much stronger, if somewhat controversial, city brand “Liverpool.”¹¹ Names can be important signifiers of intent, style, and value, which is why many organizations spend so much on branding (see Chong, this volume).

Meanwhile, we restructured NML in order to improve strategic focus, try to kill off a rampant departmentalism, enable us to bring in some new talent, and promote existing talent. We continued a process of “visioning,” which included an illuminating discussion in February 2003 at a workshop for 30 managers. We were seeking “a shared sense of purpose,” and specifically we wanted to develop a new mission, values, and vision. During the course of this workshop, members of staff were asked to imagine NML as a person, as a car, as a dog, and to suggest whom or what we would rather be. The responses were rather alarming: they saw NML as nonagenarian romantic novelist Barbara Cartland (“seen better days”), Tory Prime Minister John Major (“safe, old fashioned”), and Coronation Street’s Ken Barlow (“stuffy, staid, a bit embittered”). Similarly, as a car we would be a safe family car like a Volvo or a Rover (“old and reliable, past its time”), and as a dog we would be an old English sheepdog (“big, cuddly, lumbering, wants to be loved”) or a cross-breed (“so in-bred, not sure what it is”). In aspiration terms staff wanted NML to be like Halle Berry (“stylish, elegant, sexy, racy”), a Mini Cooper (“nippy, sporty, cool”), and a young Border collie (“boundless energy, enthusiastic, fun, friendly, hard working”).

The comment about being “a bit embittered” struck a real chord. What was obvious was the degree of frustration among the managers at NML’s stately pace and demeanor, lack of excitement, and the distance between where we were and where the managers wanted us to be. As a newcomer at both TWM and NML, I discovered that many staff understood that something was wrong with the museum service, and they were often clear about what it was. They were frustrated that those with the power to change things for the better seemed unable to do so. As the new director, I saw it as my job to erase this frustration.

However, there was a problem in addressing the issues revealed in this workshop; namely that the staff did not always feel that our ambitions for modernizing NML were matched by the ambitions of our trustees. Staff felt that we were way ahead of trustees, who were regarded as staid, traditional in their thinking, risk-averse, and rather nervous, which is obviously problematic in the fast-changing twenty- first century.

At a joint session with staff to discuss possible name changes, one trustee forcibly expressed the opinion that museums weren’t about education at all. This was both irritating and ironic, in that the central role of education in museum work was precisely what staff were trying to implant in our corporate thinking. Trustees took an age to allow us to change NMGM’s name, and, for a number of years, they insisted on watering down the new mission statements that staff had drafted, so that they became less radical than we would have liked. We had to wait a while until the governance environment was more positive, enlightened, and enabling (on governance see Lord, Chapter 2 in this volume).

This situation was compounded by a distinct sense among members of staff that some long-serving trustees actually resented the reforms and improvements to NMGM, in that they felt they were being implicitly criticized for faulty stewardship of the organization. Trying to effect radical change in an atmosphere of defensiveness and denial is not easy. At the beginning of 2004, I wrote a status report on NML entitled “Picking Up Speed” that expressed the belief that our new “Aims and Beliefs” fell somewhat short of what we wanted to say (see Appendix B below).

One of the hardest things to change in a complex organisation is its culture. What I found when I came to NML was a culture of rivalry and finger pointing, compliance and deference, with a bureaucratic overlay which made decision-making and prioritisation difficult. This is not a recipe for an organisation to be able to improve its performance in a fast-changing and demanding environment.

I do not pretend that all is yet well, though I do believe we are on the mend. I sense widespread support for our new Aims and Beliefs which, while imperfect, does a decent job of outlining what we need to do – and with what attitude – in order for us to move onward successfully, i.e. to be a people- and service-orientated organisation rather than an insular and procedurally-minded one.

We have gone some way towards freeing up the collective mindset of NML, causing us to be less risk averse and more creative, more confident in sharing information, more relaxed, easier to engage with. Of course, such a transformation is facilitated by obvious successes such as the steep rise in visitor numbers, in turn the result of changed ways of doing things.

Nonetheless, we were making progress. These are some of the changes we implemented during the five-year period from 2002 to 2006:

 overhauled our financial structure and got a grip on our finances;

 brought in some key new staff and made some judicious promotions to ensure a positive approach to a change agenda;

 strengthened our Board of Trustees with some key appointments;

 placed a new emphasis on education work;

 placed a new emphasis on work with local communities;

 increased our volunteer workforce;

 implemented a number of capital projects that helped break down internal barriers and motivate staff;

 introduced free admission to all venues, events, and activities;

 introduced an improved exhibitions management regime;

 greatly increased our media profile.

These changes enabled us to build audiences: the annual number of visitors rose to more than 2 million by 2007, three years ahead of the target I set (purely speculatively) in 2001, and almost three times as many as that year. By 2011, the annual visitor total was 3 million, up 330 percent, and by 2012 the NML had its most successful year ever with 3.3 million visitors, five times as many as a decade before (National Museums Liverpool 2013). These audiences were more diverse than before, and more diverse than most other national museums in the United Kingdom (Changing Lives 2012, 21). Meanwhile new iterations of our Aims and Beliefs appeared annually over the years, arising out of regular discussions among staff and trustees, culminating eventually in the current version:

Who we are and what we do

National Museums Liverpool (NML) is one of the world’s great museum organisations. We hold in trust and safeguard some of the world’s most important museum collections, which are universal in their range.

We are core-funded by central government and we are the only national museum service in England based wholly outside London, so we have a unique fourfold role – we are the main museum service for Liverpool and Merseyside; we are the region’s largest cultural organisation; we operate at national and at international levels.

Having played a pivotal role in the cultural, educational and economic life of Liverpool and the North West for more than 150 years, our success can be measured in terms of how well we combine this local and regional role with our national and international responsibilities.

NML currently comprises eight museums: International Slavery Museum, Lady Lever Art Gallery, Merseyside Maritime Museum, Sudley House, UK Border Agency National Museum, Walker Art Gallery, World Museum Liverpool, and the Museum of Liverpool.

Our mission

We change lives and enable millions of people, from all backgrounds, to engage with our world-class museums.

Our values

 We believe that museums are fundamentally educational in purpose.

 We believe that museums are places for ideas and dialogue that use collections to inspire people.

 We are a democratic museum service and we believe in the concept of social justice: we are funded by the whole of the public and in return we strive to provide an excellent service to the whole of the public.

 We believe in the power of museums to help promote good and active citizenship, and to act as agents of social change (National Museums Liverpool 2010).

The “who we are and what we do” statement of mission and values is supplemented by a “Strategy Statement” (see Appendix A below). This approach to capturing values and writing a mission, but also citing the social and economic contexts in which we work, seems to me to be the best way for a museum service to stress its non-profit nature. Readers may not be surprised that we try to run NML efficiently; they may be more surprised to find that we are quite so aware of, and tenacious about, our social role.

This is particularly important to NML because we see ourselves as an organization that carries a very weighty social responsibility, and we have to capture this in our mission statements, values, and vision. Before the arrival in 2008 of Phil Redmond, the current Chair of NML, the atmosphere among our trustees was at best indifferent, at worst hostile to this kind of socially oriented mission statement, even though members of staff were committed to this approach.

In July 2011, we opened a new museum, the Museum of Liverpool (Museum of Liverpool 2013). I have often described this as a “democratic museum,” in that it has been conceived and created by people who adhere to what I see as NML’s democratic mission (Fleming 2011). Indeed, the Museum of Liverpool in many ways embodies NML’s values: it is people- and story-led; it is emotional; it sets out to engage local people first and foremost. The museum is the culmination of ten years of re-visioning the purpose and value of NML, and of the ways in which we work. So far the museum has proved to be extremely popular with Liverpudlians. In 2012, ALVA reported it was the most visited museum in the United Kingdom outside London with over 1 million visitors (ALVA 2013).

The current Aims and Beliefs statement is now just about where we want it to be. It will be revised for our Strategic Plan 2012–2015, because our external environment has shifted with the election of a Conservative-led Coalition Government in May 2010, and the subsequent reduction in our budgets. Thousands of public sector jobs have already been lost in Merseyside, including scores at NML, as government spending cuts bite deep; the think-tank Centre for Cities has forecast that cuts will damage Liverpool more than any other city in the United Kingdom (Centre for Cities 2011). Nonetheless, we will adhere to our values. As the world around us shifts on its axis once more, our values are what make us what we are.