According to an old Tibetan saying: “If you want to know your future, look at what you are doing in this moment.”
This captures our efforts at the NWFED (formerly the North West Federation of Museums and Art Galleries) to get our hundreds of members prepared for a dramatically changed future.
The saying works in two ways. First of all, it reminds us that we already have excellent examples of practice in the critical areas that will shape our future: whether it is working with healthcare providers, broadening our audiences or developing more innovative ways of doing business.
Examples that we have been drawing on for our Rethinking the Museum series of strategic insights include Norton Priory working with Halton Borough Council’s adult services team, Tameside Museums developing a Moments of Magic programme to improve mental wellbeing, and Preston’s partnership between schools and museums focused tightly on higher levels of literacy.
If we look at what we’re doing “in this moment”, we can find much to inspire us and much that we can and should replicate.
The second way in which the saying works is to remind us that with so much around us changing – “this moment” being so dramatic for our sector, politically and financially – we need to focus on the medium- and long-range future with ever-greater levels of intensity.
Our Rethinking the Museum series includes insights on partnerships, health and wellbeing, new business models and on how museums and galleries in the North West can help create a greater sense of place.
They are all intensely practical pieces of thinking, with examples to follow and suggested actions. I would recommend them, and they can be accessed through our website.
The wild card in our series of insights, however, is a vision of museums in 2030. Informed by futurology and some genuinely inspiring work overseas, it is intended to help us break out of pondering an immediate and uncertain future to undertake that most vital of tasks: long-range thinking and willingness to take a few risks.
So what do our museums look like in 2030? Well, some may be better known for their collections or the experience they offer than for the bricks and mortar that surround them, as museums come to represent a more virtual and “distributed” entity.
Whatever their shape, the successful museum in 2030 will be a place that unites; that engages; that takes the continued wonder of the original object and fuses it with shared stories and histories.
Some museums will not have survived the Great Transition, but many will have thrived and, according to some of our thinking, become much more important centres of civic activity: places of trust that are engaged in a democratic dialogue, that broach the big issues of our time, that reach out to all sections of society and not just the privileged.
What else lies ahead? There will be new ways to pay, and new ways to play, as technology continues to evolve. Museums will become social networks, we will use technology to share our stories, and in so doing make our museums a central player in defining who we are, and where we are going.
Most importantly, our future will be interactive and will be about listening, reciprocity and sharing authority as well as telling: it will be a conversation of equals.
And in that spirit, I’d urge each and every reader who has made it to the close of this article to go to the NWFED’s website, read our insights, and share your own visions of where our future lies.
Piotr Bienkowski is a consultant, academic and chairman of the NWFED.
www.nwfed.org.uk
