Museum leadership in an age of disruption

So a, a kind of a, a reality-based achievable vision which everyone shares.

You, you also talked about values, and, and we talked quite a bit about values in 2022.

Um, we spoke about leading through values and, and, you know, values being a source of continuity in a changing world.

But in 2026, values are increasingly contested and polarized.

So what does values-based leadership look like now?

I think it means, first of all, an evaluation, almost an updating of the values to make sure sort of almost every year that this is really where you need to go as an organization.

It strikes me that it's crucially important to make sure that we have humane and human-centered values, and that's always gotta be there regardless of where we are.

That we've gotta work effectively and take care of the people that we work with.

But also recognizing that our value is as an educational entity, that it's not just sort of saying, "Here are important things, come see it," but to work effectively to make sure that the public can dip into the museum as a reservoir of education, of understanding, of clarity.

And I think that notion of making sure that you are externally focused, recognizing that you have an obligation to help people, um, find understanding, to basically deal with the greater good, is one of, I would argue, um, the important values.

I think another value that I've touched on is this notion of embracing ambiguity.

I think in some ways, if you look at the history of museum leadership over the last century, you know, you had leaders that stayed 20, 30 years and had a couple of big projects that they focused on.

But I think now what's happening is that as a leader, you're gonna have to embrace the kind of ambiguity that may come in your way.

Uh, you'll suddenly have to think about working with new partners, thinking about working with different kinds of staffs, thinking about how do you really balance the need to be a place that people can trust, to be an educational institution that really means that you're gonna help people but also challenge people.

How do you do that? And I think that that's really one of the core values, to be able to be a place that matters in profound ways.

Matters that, um, as somebody who, um, you know, uh, years ago in my, years ago in my career, I was doing work along, uh, slavery in plantations in South Carolina.

And I met a man who lived in a, in a pla- plantation ca- a slave cabin that basically he lived with his grandmother who was enslaved.

So he really was this amazing source of information for me.

But after spending days with him, he finally looked at me and he said, "I'm not sure what a historian does, but isn't your job to help people remember not just what they want to remember, but what they need to remember?" So for me, that notion of being an educational entity to help people learn, understand what they need, not just what they want, is in my mind one of the core values that we have to hold on to.