When purpose no longer guides your strategy.
What happened at Toronto’s Design Exchange? Canada’s design museum was intended to be a vital place for supporting design culture when it opened in 1994. The United States and the United Kingdom have similar organizations (the Cooper-Hewitt and the Victoria & Albert respectively) that collect and preserve design objects; they also – perhaps more importantly – work to foster critical debate around how things are made. These are two museums with a purpose: spaces to disseminate culture, challenge thinking, and shape the conversation about innovative design. The DX, on the other hand, didn’t emulate them: a mere twenty-five years later, it announced the entire DX collection would be “de-accessioned,” the legal process by which a museum’s objects are permanently removed. This decision marked the end of the DX as a museum.
Brendan Cormier, a curator at the V&A, commented that people had long held out hope the DX would become, like the models on which it was based, an important part of Canada’s culture. With its failure he lamented that everyday material culture was “at risk of being lost and forgotten simply because we neglected to invest in the cultural infrastructure to preserve these stories and objects.” (“Canada no longer has a design museum. That’s a blueprint for failure.” Globe and Mail. 23 August 2019).
But who neglected? And why? The DX is a good case study of an organization unable to translate the well-defined purpose of a design museum into action. Cormier told his Globe & Mail readers that the “DX long-struggled to assert itself as a major museum of importance.” It’s common for cultural organizations to wonder why they aren’t having greater impact on people: they expect to play a major role as a focus of reflection and debate, and often rely on glamorous architecture to convey that something is being done on the inside. But the organization didn’t know how to assert itself. It had a story it didn’t bother telling: When it needed to communicate, to foster critical debate, to shape the conversation, and thereby inspire innovation, it didn’t. Unable to articulate its messages, and unwilling to provide a sustained leadership effort, it couldn’t realize its founding sense of purpose.
Nothing, Cormier says, was done to fulfill the organization’s purpose beyond some one-off efforts: “a good exhibit here, a great lecture there.” In other words, its statement of purpose – if it had one at all – was little more than “a bunch of nice-sounding words on a wall,” which is exactly what organizations have to avoid. (Thomas Malnight, Ivy Buche, and Charles Dhanaraj. “Put Purpose at the Core of Your Strategy.” Harvard Business Review. September-October, 2019).
But that doesn’t tell us where fault lies. Darren Walker, President of the Ford Foundation, wrote recently in The New York Times that “everything that moves an institution forward, or holds it back, can be traced to its board.” (“Museums need to step into the future.” New York Times. 26 July 2019). He went on to comment that museums can “enact bold forward-looking visions only when their boards support them in seeing museums as spaces to challenge, take creative risks, and not simply conserve.” Cormier agrees: he tells us the DX could not perform competently as a museum because of “misguided management and a complacent board,” and the result was its growth was doomed.
It should be the museum’s role
to challenge our thinking,
to help us think as a society;
make us better-informed citizens.
Correcting this won’t be easy. In Walker’s view, it is wealthy trustees and donors who decide what is valued at American museums; they who determine the museum’s purpose, because they anchor fundraising. David Brooks would agree with Walker that museums are more interested in serving the interests of this narrow elite than the diverse range of people who actually make up modern America. He wrote recently in the New York Times about exclusivity being the pervasive ethos in our current society and how it “is spinning out of control. If the country doesn’t radically expand its institutions and open access to its bounty, the U.S. will continue to rip apart.” (“The Meritocracy Is Ripping America Apart.” New York Times, 12 September 2019).
The solution, Walker says, is for institutions to “look beyond the gilded frames of this new Gilded Age and better reflect the public they serve.” To do this, he advises museum boards to “stop seeing cultural diversity as subtracting from their annual revenue, but rather as adding strength: new stories that lead to new visitors, broader constituencies, and stronger communities.
And because this newly diverse museum will mirror what society actually looks like, it will better-serve democracy – and that’s its true purpose. It should be the museum’s role to challenge our thinking, to help us think as a society; make us better-informed citizens. A more active and leadership-focused museum/cultural organization is a place of ideas, and the goal of any organization should be to build its brand around shaping society’s conversations.
Getting a handle on the brand
We still haven’t addressed how we got to this point. The bottom line (pardon the pun) is that following the money has led these organizations off-track and off-purpose. A brand is a strategic signpost offering direction on how the organization should behave and what decisions it should make. But this situation described by Cormier, Walker, and Brooks indicates managers don’t have a handle on their brands, and they can’t articulate their respective institutional purposes. If the cultural organizations Walker wants to build are to stay on-purpose they have to understand three new rules.
1. Branding is about trust
Trust builds around organizations that explain why they are leaders and why they deserve the public’s support. This is not something we saw at the Toronto Design Exchange. When organizations don’t say why their work matters, an information vacuum is created and people’s attention is drawn to others who tell more compelling stories.
2. Speak authoritatively on issues of public interest
A culture of expectation rules the thinking at many cultural organizations, leaving them to wonder why they aren’t having a greater impact. They expect to play a major role as a focus of reflection and debate, but do little to achieve that goal. Providing the public with something meaningful and relevant to think (and talk) about, allows the organization to reach-out beyond its four walls to connect millions of people to its leading ideas. The alternative – either not reaching out, or doing so inconsistently – is to have a brand that can be quickly marginalized, as was the DX.
3. Community gathers around leading ideas
Putting your organization at the center of a vital public conversation allows you to become the focal point for discussion and shape the conversation. This is the type of leadership people expect of a leading organization, and why they will support it – and why the DX was not viewed in this way.
You need your organization to be relevant in this rapidly-changing world. If you want a more unified organization, with a more unified team that can make a broader and more positive impact on society, put purpose at the core of your strategy. Make sense of your past and then, with those insights, decide where you go. Just don’t make it a one-off effort.