Strategic planning is widely used and often discussed in management literature as the premier technique for successfully managing organizational change. Museums seeking to improve performance turn to strategic planning to chart the future, in part because strategic planning has been held in such high esteem by museum leaders and the consultants that assist them.

Strategic planning permeated the business world in the late 1960s and 1970s. Many large corporations staffed full-time strategic planning departments. By the 1980s, however, Business Week featured the failure of strategic planning to deliver on its promises. Too many managers pointed with dismay at three-ring binders filled with unimplemented strategic plans. In spite of this, the process of strategic planning has such inherent strength that its reputation continues to flourish.

In a sense strategic planning is like the center span of a suspension bridge. The soaring pillars and the sweeping center span attract all the attention. But without the connecting ramps at either end, the bridge won't work.
Strategic planning can be considered the center span in a series of organizational development tools that bridge the past and the future. To succeed, it must be preceded and followed by other critical developmental tools.

This article identifies the organizational development tools, including the American Association of Museums' New Visions Process, needed for strategic planning to succeed in your museum. Understanding the range of tools available and the sequence in which they should be employed will help your museum to use strategic planning to its full potential.

Successfully bridging transition in museums involves improving problem-solving and decision-making systems to produce an optimistic learning climate. These organizational improvements help release the time and energy necessary to undertake strategic thinking exercises that extend the horizon, create Vision, test or revise Mission, and outline Objectives (VMO). Strategic planning efforts are then linked to VMO through detailed departmental plans. The American Association of Museums' New Visions assessment engages board, staff, volunteers, and key constituents in focused dialogue and provides a structure within which the need to change can be examined and sequenced. Action planning, review, and measurement of results constitute the off- ramp of museum transition and ensure the implementation of the strategic plan.

The On Ramp: Problem Solving

Some museums collect more than the material remains of humankind and the natural world. They collect a large reservoir of unsolved problems. This unintended collection grows because problems recur as fast as they are solved or because the problems are ignored and don't get resolved at all. Problems recur because the symptoms rather than the causes are addressed. These unaddressed, underlying causes continuously generate new symptoms that demand staff and board attention. Problems remain unsolved because the working environment (which accounts for upward of 80 percent of all organizational problems) blocks problem-solving efforts.

Museums that have not systematically and successfully addressed problems in the past tend to build a culture of frustration, helplessness, and hopelessness. This condition augers against creative thinking and future focus.

Strategic planning cannot succeed unless staff and other key stakeholders perceive the museum making consistent progress toward solving internal problems. Many museums fail to identify and resolve internal problems. The results? Executive and employee attention becomes mired in long-festering symptoms, precluding the possibility of a future focus, required for thoughtful strategic thinking and planning.

If crisis management is the norm, managers will be distracted and short-term thinking will become habitual. Organizations that manage from crisis to crisis produce managers who feel hopeless and helpless. Dousing organizational flash points by creating a problem-solving system can build momentum and allow people to think about the longer-term health of the organization.

Although it is impossible to resolve all problems before planning begins, it is necessary that employees identify, address, and resolve internal issues. Problem-solving skills advance the strategic planning processes by producing initial results--and releasing energy—which creates the time and psychological stamina required for strategic thinking, planning, and managing.

The organizational actions that are required prior to strategic planning are:

• diagnosing current problems;
• establishing a system for prioritizing the problems;
• training employees in problem solving and team work skills;
• developing an ongoing method to orchestrate problem-solving assignments, monitoring, and resolution.

Learning Climate

Another influence on the museum's ability to conduct strategic planning is the quality of its learning climate, the psychological foundation that enables problems to be addressed and solved. A productive learning climate stimulates the high morale and the energy needed to think creatively about the museum's future. A negative climate, however, gets in the way. Negative learning climates lack sufficient openness, honesty, and mutual respect. No one is able to engage in the kind of constructive strategic thinking that s necessary to resolve key issues about the organization's future. Staff and board focus on current problems, protecting turf and personal status. There is a debate between factions rather than dialogue among respectful colleagues.

This debate invariably leads to an unfocused organization, suffering from too few resources and too little time. The resulting stress produces a discouraged staff and a dissatisfied board. Individuals and departments launch continuous appeals for more money, usually in the form of requests for more staff. Responding to these appeals without focus accelerates the museum's decline.

Most museums can navigate the on-ramp to strategic planning—creating a learning climate with an effective problem-solving system--in four months. Developmentally aged or bureaucratic museums require more time, and the problem-solving process is even more critical to the successful transition. Change comes hard to a developmentally aged organization, one in which the focus is internal, delegation is weak, communication is poor, and the tendency is to be "nice" (or genteel, or collegial) rather address the real issues.

The Center Span: New Visions For Strategic Thinking And Planning

Managing transition requires that the museum surface and challenge closely held assumptions in order to create new direction. Inquiry, conducted in an atmosphere of mutual respect and trust between and among the key stakeholders (staff, board, volunteers, advisory constituents and visitors) fosters strategic thinking. Strategic thinking forms the grand ideas, or vision, around which the community can rally and build the museum's future.
Strategic planning takes the grand ideas and converts them into the specifics necessary for day-to-day implementation.

Strategic planning without strategic thinking may create semi-useless detail about the same old direction, or worse, the wrong new direction.

Strategic planning without strategic thinking easily deteriorates into a paperwork exercise filling volumes of binder with semi-useless detail. Strategic thinking without strategic planning may create a vision that is impressive but impossible to implement.

New Visions

Recently, the American Association of Museums published New Visions: Tools for Change in Museums, a framework for inquiry and strategic thinking and a valuable new approach for crossing the center span and effective strategic planning. In essence, New Visions undergirds what we're calling here the center span of museum transition--strategic thinking and planning. New Visions is intended to help staff and boards work collectively to improve the museum's learning climate, focus priorities, create a vision for the future, and move the museum toward broad-based improvement and change.

There are four aspects to the New Visions approach:

• dialogue intended to improve communication for learning and adapting to change;

• assessment as a way to consider the museum's current situation and its readiness and ability to change;

• vision that stimulates thinking about the directions for change; and

• action planning, which mobilizes the museum toward the vision.

This framework was developed as a response to Excellence and Equity: Education and the Public Dimension of Museums, which challenged museums to assert their central public service role in community life. New Visions explains the concepts, describes what it takes to make the concepts work, elaborates the benefits, and provides practice examples and practical advice. In addition, the publication includes advice and caution from museum leaders who have used the methodology in their work.

Both the content and the methodology of New Visions can help the museum with strategic thinking and planning. It guides the stakeholders as they assess the museum's current position vis-a-vis education, public service, inclusion, scholarship and stewardship. Moreover, the New Vision technique raises the level of productive dialog and shows how to create focus and establish priorities. This tool surfaces the challenges the museum faces in ways that allow staff and others to target problem solving, to use data in creative ways, and to make decisions which can be rapidly implemented. Doing these things create a environment that fosters longer-term strategic thinking.

Strategic Thinking

Strategic thinking creates vision by providing opportunity for leaders to learn collectively about the primary opportunities and threats constraining the museum and likely to challenge it in the future. These issues are long-term opportunities and threats that affect multiple departments, if not the whole museum. To create focus, they should be limited in number. The endless range of good ideas and interesting potentials available in the seemingly ever-expanding museum field needs disciplined, rigorous review. Why? In order to create a healthy future, focus must be gained. Generally, museums define between six and twelve vision elements, each described and addressed in a paragraph or two. This vision statement then becomes the museum's guiding policy for day-to-day decisions and, most important, for the creation of the mission, a fundamental element of the strategic plan.

A comprehensive identification of opportunities and threats always includes:

• a definition of market segments;

• a definition of the needs that exist in each of the market segments;

• a definition of the products and services the museum can provide to meet the needs;

• a definition of how the museum is uniquely positioned to address those needs;

• a definition of the key values or principles that the museum will use to guide all activity and decision making.

A well-conceived vision statement can be converted into plans sufficiently detailed to implement throughout the day-to-day operations of the museum.

Until recently in the corporate world, strategic thinking—the greatest creative opportunity for most administrators—was turned over to strategy consultants who had the fun of doing the thinking without the responsibility of implementing their plans. This disconnection between thinking and doing was and remains the principle cause of the failure of strategic planning efforts nationwide.

In the nonprofit arena, strategic thinking is often a board function. When the museum staff and board are working together effectively, thinking together for the museum's future, strategic thinking is without question the most valuable contribution a board can make. Unfortunately, when the museum board is uninformed by staff or out of touch with the community, the same disjunction evidenced in corporate planners and doers becomes evident in museum efforts. Strategic ideas formed only in the rarified air of the board room risks the same fate as plans created by corporate strategy consultants.

Strategic Planning

The goal of strategic planning is to translate vision into specific, annual operational plans. These plans become central to each department and project. Interdepartment support and agreement for essential resources (people, time, money, collections) must be negotiated before the plan can be successfully launched.

Mission

The mission articulates why the museum exists, whom it serves, and at what cost. Testing the board-approved mission or creating a new one follows from strategic thinking exercises. The board and staff and key constituents need to recognize and fully comprehend the constraints under which the museum operates and the potential opportunities to which they can look. Understanding the constraints creates the rationale for all the hard work needed to deliver on the strategies. This understanding forms the basis for communication throughout the organization.

Objectives

Once the mission is understood and shared by the stakeholders, specific objectives, or results, can be designed. What does the museum intend to achieve? by when? at what cost?

In general, objectives respond to the needs of the museum's key stakeholders groups. These groups include the board, the staff, the visitors, donors and foundations, the community, and the museum itself. We specify the museum itself as a stakeholder because the other groups may clamor to meet their needs without considering the overall health and vitality of the organization. All organizations have basic needs--cash, investment in the future; and challenge.

The Off Ramp: Implementation

Strategic Management

When an organization is strategically driven, decisions cascade or devolve from vision, to mission, to objectives, to action plans, to daily activity. Small decisions are made within the constraints provided from larger ones. Day-to-day activity can be predicted from the action plans, which devolve from objectives, which were created from the mission, derived from the vision. It is possible to observe what any individual in the museum is doing on any given day and link it to the appropriate planned task, objective, and mission element. Cascading decisions align activity for the greatest benefit to the museum.

There is never a shortage of useful and important work in museums. Eventually, however, activities beyond the scope of alignment should be scaled back or eliminated altogether to allow the museum to excel in mission-related endeavors.

Strategic managers have the persistence to align the cascade, the courage to say no to many of the compelling ideas posed by staff and board, and the self-discipline to rein in their own inclinations to add another program to an already over-full agenda.

Lack of strategic management means the museum will attempt to pursue new strategies AND continue business as usual. Only one in a million museums has the resources to operate in this manner. And if you have those resources, you don't need a plan!

Strategic management depends upon proficient problem-solving and team-work skills, developed while navigating the on-ramp. These skills allow people to negotiate across department lines and gain the support necessary to achieve the mission. A museum with an adaptive learning environment draws the right people into thinking and planning for the museum's future. Such a climate regularly tests the assumptions from which the vision was created and toward which all the minions labor. Strategic managers will constantly probe, test, and question the vision, mission, and objectives to ensure that they remain relevant, clear, and understood by all the key stakeholders. Action plans for achieving the objectives project enough detail to allow tracking, monitoring, and flexible responses to the changing environment. Finally, the initial assumptions are annually revisited, tested, and confirmed to avoid the blind pursuit of false objectives that wastes valuable time and money in the process.

Measurement and Review

An old business adage states: What gets done gets measured. If you can't assess your progress, you can't manage strategically. Because traditional measurement focuses on financial variables, many museum managers believe that if the budget is in good shape, all is well. Nothing could be further from the truth! Financial measurement is widespread because it is important and relatively easy to determine. But managing by tracking monthly expenses to budget projections is a little like driving forward by looking through the rear view mirror.

Visitor loyalty, educational objectives, staff retention rates, collection acquisitions, catalog backlog reduction, and members satisfaction scores are only a few of the factors that can assess a museum's progress. The point about monitoring is to use the resultant data to improve decision making. The most useful measures reveal trends which allow the museum to get out in front of the curve, to be proactive. It often takes as long as three years to develop a measurement function comprehensive and sensitive enough to efficiently measure the factors needed to inform the planning.

Conclusion

Operating today's museum takes enormous intellectual resources, inspired creativity, and careful planning. Fortunately, there are adequate methods and procedures available to museum leaders, regardless of the size, discipline, or developmental stage of the organization. The techniques described in this article entail sequenced actions that can build a stable bridge to future success. Problem diagnosis, problem-solving methodology, and improvements in the learning climate provide an atmosphere in which animated thinking can inspire and inform the planing so vital to sustained success. AAM's New Visions rapidly gathers the collective opinions of the museum's stakeholders and encourages focused, open dialogue about the issues that matter most to the individual museum. Negotiating the on-ramp and the center span of museum transition leads directly into strategic management, characterized by decisions that cascade from vision, to mission, to objectives, to action plans, to daily activity. The strategic manager may at first struggle with the design of measurement systems but such systems eventually reveal trends, vital for decision making in our rapidly advancing world.

Following the installation of these management techniques, strategic planning avoids the pitfalls of "analysis paralysis" and the resultant dust-covered binders so prevalent in the government, business, and nonprofit sectors of our economy. Implementation based on data gained from dialogue, strategic thinking, planning, and evaluation becomes routine, ordered, and predictable. Bridging transition is the primary challenge of today's cultural leaders. Using the techniques outlined in this article creates a stable, strategic bridge leading to an anticipated and prosperous future.

Bibliography:

Adizes, Ichak. Corporate Lifecycles. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1988.

American Association of Museums. Excellence and Equity: Education and the Public Dimension of Museums. Washington, D.C.: AAM, 1992.

American Association of Museums. New Visions: Tools for Change in Museums. Washington, D.C.: AAM, 1995.

Senge, Peter M. The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization. N.Y.: Doubleday Currency, 1990.

Senge, Peter M. The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook: Strategies and Tools for Building a Learning Organization. New York: Doubleday Currency, 1994.