Ed Rodley working in home office

Making the Shift

I will admit I’m a collaboration junkie. I’ve been very fortunate in my career to have had the privilege of working with interesting, interested professionals in a wide variety of fields. And when I think about the jobs and work I’m most proud of, they’re all collaborations. When I was younger, I used to think that there were companies and organizations that were innovative and cool. Trying to figure out where I belonged was something I used to fret over. In the end, I realized that, in fact, only people are innovative or cool. And while they work somewhere, that place has an aura of being “cool”. But people move, and when they do move, that aura moves with them. I became convinced that finding the right people to work with was much more rewarding than finding the right organizations to work with.

Being interested in working together naturally led to an interest in process.

“How can I do more collaborative work, and do it better? What are structures and processes that encourage collaboration? What are the institutional roadblocks that get in the way of an organization doing its best work?”

Being interested in building new structures inside inherently conservative organizations like museums often felt like an exercise in frustration. One classic outlet for that frustration was to daydream about “something different” at lunch, after work, over drinks. If we could bottle all the creativity and drive, could we make something better, less exploitive, more equitable? Throughout 2019, I was talking to people about organizational change, what might come next after the gig economy plays itself out, 21st century guilds, and unions. There was so much foment in the field that Suse Anderson and I did an episode of Museopunks on paradigmatic shift. It felt like the time might be right for…something.

We all know what happened next. COVID-19 spread globally, travel ground to a halt, businesses closed, and suddenly many of us were “working from home”. Now, instead of phone calls, and after work drinks, everything was a Zoom call. What would the world look like after, whenever “after” came? The opportunity of the pandemic as a chance to reset and rethink how we work was largely squandered by the sector, as museums, historic sites, and other cultural attractions all focused on preserving their capital and waiting out the storm. Then the layoffs started. In the U.S. It was amazing to see how quickly the biggest, best-endowed organizations moved to shed staff as soon as closures became a reality.

It was at this same time that my friend and former colleague Annie sent me an invite to talk about “Something New” with a group of interesting experience designers and educators. She had been thinking about ways of working together and recognized the opportunity the pandemic presented. Lots of people were thinking about what work would look like after, and this seemed like the moment to dream about the future. We had no idea what that something new might be, hence the vague title, but it seemed clear that there was a need to fill. So, we started talking. The meetings became more regular and the conversations ranged widely. I admired the way Annie was able to sit with the discomfort of not knowing what “Something New” was and allow us the time and space to explore and develop a shared understanding of what was going on in the world and what a small group of creatives might do.

In the midst of that, Jim and I were both laid off in mid June in that second wave of contraction that happened when Federal support expired. For me, our “Something New” conversations took on a new urgency. It had already been a hell of a year and the thought of finding a new position at a new organization seems daunting, and didn’t feel anywhere near as vital as our Something New chats. The choice boiled down to A) reinserting myself into a broken system or B) building something new and better with people I admire, and build it, as Mike Murawski said, with respect and love built in to its DNA.

Reader, I chose B, and haven’t looked back since.

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