How’d i get here ? — Chapter 3
The Natural History Museum
Working at the Natural History Museum, oh boy what a privilege and a joy. I was the content/interp/curatorial lead on four temporary exhibitions then headed up the content for a large multimedia project. I was then granted an opportunity that became my career-definer — leading development of the public offer for Darwin Centre Phase 2 (DC2). Five years of challenge, growth, pain and joy. So altogether 11 years there, rising through a couple of management layers but overall it was longer than i had ever thought it would be. Some observations, in no particular order.
Doing the Voyages of Discovery exhibition moved me from being the content writer who knew the stuff to being the content writer who drew on others’ knowledge. Harnessing experts, filtering points of view, meeting audience needs. I finally let go of ‘knowing the content’ as the prime function of the exhibition curatorial role.
I did a dog of a project. Political expediency led to a rushed project in which audience and content did not match at all, and to top it my bosses hired a poor designer — zero listening skills combined with heaps of arrogance was a heady combination. From it i learnt that success comes from the culture and climate in which something occurs, not solely from your own actions. In many circumstances, individuals are powerless. So fixing it means fixing the surrounding culture. (Major influence when i joined Museums Victoria)
I found i was good at the project management / process side of things. I was asked to ‘shadow and quietly help’ a soon-to-be retiring project manager. They needed to have a successful final project: it was a kind way to sunset a career. At the time it felt like an imposition — it was more work for me, they’d get the credit, and really it was their manager’s problem to deal with their weak performance. I cringe at that now — what a selfish perspective. I learnt so much from watching what they did well and badly, how to support a leader by being an excellent follower, how to be humble. I hope that when i approach my dotage, someone can be so kind to me. Helping a staff member retire well is an act of such humane kindness.
Coming at project management as a set of tools to get great stuff done, rather than as a means of control and authority, meant i approached it quite differently from the project managers i’d worked with to date. And also, must admit, my chemistry background gave me an appreciation of the abstract beauty of a well-crafted systematised process. This combination of process and content is what led to my success on DC2, I’m sure. And it left with a conviction that the role of a project process, and the project manager, is to humbly serve project goals. It is not an end in itself.
Line management. I was lucky — with hindsight, it was awful at the time — to make a bad recruitment decision. The person was not a good fit, and i needed to manage them out of the organisation in the least damaging way to all. Learnt a lot about the role of the manager — your staff might be your friends, but you aren’t primarily there to be theirs. Lesson — recruit well, take the time, trust your gut, invest time to be caring when you have to manage an exit.
Steering Groups. On DC2 there was one for Science and one for Public Engagement. The Project Director for Science sat with me on the Public one, and vice versa. The science meetings were interminable: they went on for ages, went round and round the subjects, exhaustively analysing everything, and decisions were either non-existent or months late. The Public Engagement one was a buzzy creative chatter, things were decided quickly and we had direction to advance the project and do the next task. Great, right? No. I noticed that the public steering group kept having the same conversations again and again. Old ground was gone over. Decisions were undone. The Science group, however, never went backwards. Lesson: it taught me to have the debate properly, don’t just get the decision you need and walk away — if the decision isn’t sticky it doesn’t stick.
Best of all i had the first experience of a genuinely multi-project high-functioning team. Myself and two other managers, Michael Harvey and Emma Freeman, recruited/managed/trained a team of exhibit developers who acted as more than the sum of their parts. And more than that, with Michael i had my first experience of genuinely superb peer teamwork. We picked up each other’s slack, we relied on each other when things were tough, we brought new perspective to each others problems. I’d bring process and tangential ideas, he would bring a coffee-and-chat interpersonal approach and found win-win solutions in everything (which i now recognise as basically he is Australian). From this team, and specifically working with Michael, I learnt the value of diversity of skills and approach within teams, and the level of management effort needed to make this begin and then flow. I also learnt how exclusive and threatening a pair like this can seem to others, though
DC2 also taught me about my personal resilience. There were times when the whole thing was crashing down and I had to carry it. I discovered i was stronger and more competent than i realised.
I also discovered that there are those who talk about the work, and those that do the work. I learnt that once you know which ones are which, work with workers not talkers. The talkers will take the credit but just let them. They will only gain credit with those who don’t know the difference and they aren’t people you need.
I also learnt to lead with values — it sound facetious management speak but it isn’t. I genuinely believed that the DC2 project was great, that conveying to publics how collection-based science works and how it impacts the world was important and by saying so all the time it created the climate for success within the architects, designers, curators. This is what converted naysayers, not the logic or power of the project leaders. When I left i had one delightful conversation with a once-sceptical curator, ‘i said this project was nonsense for three years, i fought it and lobbied against it. But i was wrong. It’s awesome.’
Bob Bloomfield, a fiercely clever and insightful leader, taught me some key leadership behaviours too. There was a major political row at the very top, involving trustees and directors. Senior staff were petitioning in support of a faction. I wanted to be involved, but Bob kept me out. He told me that i was too early in my career to do this, that if it went the wrong way it’d damage me and i wouldn’t have the breadth of experience and projects under my belt to professionally recover. He also, when i was acting up after an org change i felt screwed me over (newsflash with hindsight; it didn’t really), wrote me an email to set me straight: ‘stop bellyaching, get on with it or leave’ was the message. But he never sent it: he gave me a printout of the draft and asked me what i thought and whether he needed to send it or not. Both these things happened around the same time, and they related to other things going on in my life at that point. I learnt that people can and will turn themselves around, but you have to show them they need to, and that being a great manager means doing exactly that.
From Gordon Rankmore I learnt the value of rigorous distance from teams. While a project was mired, the team working late, he still left the office on time, and he did not save us. He left it with us to fix, even as we teetered on the brink of a full fail. He also structured ways to stretch and develop people — such as using consultancy projects to stretch a staffer’s muscles.
And from our then Public Engagement Director, Sharon Ament, i learnt so much too. To pick a few… In leadership she was always totally herself, it was authentic and consistently trustworthy for that reason. You got what you saw. She carved out time in her week just for herself; by granting herself time to reflect and focus she made herself more powerfully present when she needed to be. She didn’t let her energy get sucked into minutiae. But most of all, her empowerment; she would trust you until point of failure and then beyond. Then she’d talk about it and get you back to work — with even more responsibility — and move the teams on from the failure. The reasoning being once you’ve failed at something you won’t do that again, so time to stretch you further. There are many times where I’ve thought ‘what would Sharon do?’ in managing my staff.
The next job at the National Railway Museum came up at the opening of DC2 — i left just as the project opened. This was really hard for me, but great for the project. Pioneers need to leave so others can build the garden. In its first year of operation, a few things were changed that i’d never have done but they made the project more responsive to actual audience’s current needs. Good that I was out of the way. From that i took how important it is not to let a project team linger too long after opening. Get an operational team in there as early as possible. And the other lesson — the timing is never right to leave an organisation. So just do it.
