Honoring Institutional Culture

    Mission fit is only one factor in successfully promoting new types of audience engagement. Just as significant is alignment with institutional culture. In the OCLC report Beyond the Silos of the LAMs: Collaboration Among Libraries, Archives, and Museums, the authors reviewed several collaborative LAM projects and concluded that there were several repeated reasons that certain projects were not pursued or successfully completed, including:

    •    "The idea was not of great enough importance.

    •    The idea was premature.

    •    The idea was too overwhelming."

Great. Good to see that you have already captured Guenter's work with IMLS and collaboration. Suggest that you have a look at the continuum, and the increasing level of risk as you move toward collaboration. I believe that the institutional culture is critical for successful participation. In many cases, institutions think they already have a culture of participation.  SB   <-- yes, and people will heartily approve of things in planning that they later resent or fear in implementation.  MK

I'd add a fourth one (I'm wondering, do I always want to add ??) Now, seriously, a 4th point I consider important as responsible for unsuccessful projects is

. A poor/weak organisation (and confused or even contradictory leading instructions)  (CR)

    Each of these reasons could also be given for not pursuing any project perceived as risky. Many institutions and institutional leaders feel threatened by participatory design. It sounds chaotic and erodes the institutional ability to control the visitor experience. But by speaking in the language of these leaders' goals and ambitions for the organization, and by demonstrating that these techniques are especially able to produce desired outcomes, you can change something scary into a very appealing project. By connecting the project to mission, you can demonstrate that it is not just a "nice to have" but a preferred way to solve major problems. By building on the case studies pursued by other institutions, you can demonstrate that you won't be "going it alone" into a vast new universe. And by starting small and fitting your project to institutional behavior, you can make the project seem manageable and reasonable. 

    Institutional culture is at least as important as mission fit in making innovative projects succeed. If staff are slow-moving and like to have long editorial review processes for developing public-facing content, pursuing dynamic visitor-informed content development processes will meet resistance. But that same slow-moving institution might be highly amenable to personalized floor experiences or programmatic real-time dialogue. (This is an important distinction that could use more fanfare. Traditional institutions are not anti-participation by definition. The resistance and pattern is more particular. Getting to the particulars of the culture is key to introducing new ideas, approaches, participation. SB)  Just as the project must fit mission and programmatic goals, it must align with the pre-existing patterns at work in the organization. (If it does not fit within the institutional culture, pre-existing patterns, then culture change may be needed. This section needs more attention. Maybe it appears later in the book? SB)

Agree, I had also made a note top add that it can maybe provoke some stirring up and organisational change (CR)  <-- this is a good time to return to the "start small" suggestion...if an organization is resistant in 5 ways and open in 1 way, then you start with that 1 and build from there...it's almost always better to focus on what an organization can/is ready to do than what it can't/isn't ready to do. Unfortunately, most of the writers I know on this topic are in the Christian ministry field.  MK

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