Museum Metamorphosis : Day 6

Unlearning how to plan

This is the sixth instalment of my thirty day challenge to write a daily 300 word article about the business of reopening our local museum after being closed for over five years.

Once you’ve got your volunteers on-board you need to think about how best to use them. This means looking at their skills and needs and matching them with organisational needs. In a fully volunteer-based organisation, there’s another catch. Unlike a traditional business where you can predict work patterns, volunteers are not contracted or expected to turn up on demand. This means you have to think differently about how to plan.

You’ve got your volunteers — now what? (generated by author using Artist.ai)

We had our Vision, which set out fifteen goals for the next few years. But that had been written on the assumption that we were still open and had income and people. Now, much work needed to be done before we could reopen and return to our starting point.

I created three work streams around the areas that needed attention: governance and operations, managing the collection and rebuilding the museum layouts and displays. But we had a dilemma. We didn’t know where items in the collection were — they’d all been packed into boxes at random with no records. So, how could we select what to display and where to display it?

I created an initial 90-day plan with outcomes for each work stream. For governance — write the key policies and procedures to create a safe environment. For the collection — start to go through the boxes and list their contents. For displays, create a theme around which we could start to build the layouts. With this framework we could get people working while they learnt the ropes and we could figure out what to do next.

Planning was designed to be fluid, flexible and iterative. We’d adapt and adjust as we progressed. If something didn’t work, we’d ditch it for something else. It smacked of “agility”!

I am a semi-retired independent management consultant specialising in organisational change management and better Ways of Working and the chairman of the board of trustees at my local Heritage Centre. I’m from the UK but based in Prague in the Czech Republic. I mainly write about developing better ways of working, working in the Apple ecosystem, and my adopted home in Prague. If you’ve enjoyed this, please check out some of my other articles or even follow me if you’d like to be notified when I publish new material.