There is a great scene in The Matrix that occurs after our gormless hero Neo has been exposed to the lie that he has been living and introduced to the terrifying reality of the “real” world by his mentor Morpheus. They enter a training simulation so that Morpheus can show Neo how they interact in the virtual reality (dare I say “metaverse”?) that the machines have created to subjugate humanity. At first, Neo can’t believe what he’s seeing isn’t real. Then Morpheus points out that moments ago, Neo was shaven headed and wearing rough homespun and now he has a full head of hair and street clothes. He says, “Your appearance now is what we call residual self image. It is the mental projection of your digital self.” This idea that we carry around an image of reality that we project onto the world has stuck with me. I’ve come to realize that we not only do this with our own self image, but with the image of where we work. This residual institutional self image we carry around of our places of employment is a powerful force, and not necessarily for the better.
The Experience Alchemists are currently working on a few different strategy building projects and we spend a lot of time talking with staff about their lived experience of work. It’s not unusual to find people working in cultural organizations who have tenures longer than are typical in the for-profit world. Ten years is nothing in museums, twenty years is not that uncommon. I can’t count how many retirement parties I’ve been to over the years for museum staff with 30+ years in the field. It is also not unusual to find people who have only worked at one institution and built their entire career there. As outsiders coming into organizations to work, we’ve been confronted firsthand with what a potential hurdle this self image can present, especially to transformation efforts. Several times recently I’ve talked with clients who have described their institutions in terms of how inadequate their efforts have been and how “behind” they are that seems divorced from what they’ve achieved for organizations of their size. And the correlation between length of tenure and magnitude of discrepancy seems to be pretty strong. There’s a real lag between their institutional self image and where the institution is in reality.
This year’s AAM conference in Boston provided me with a vibrant example of that. The evening party was at the Museum of Science, where I started off my museum career. Though it’s been almost a decade since I left, my residual institutional self image was every bit as sharp as when I still worked there. As I wandered the galleries, I kept being confronted with what I experienced as “wrongness.” It looked wrong, it sounded wrong, it even smelled wrong. And I realized that it wasn’t wrong, it just wasn’t what I carried around as my default image of the place, which was rooted in the late 1970s-early 80s. The disconnect I was seeing in clients when they talked about their institutions was something I also possessed. So, if you saw me at the party, leaning on a railing and staring into the middle distance, that’s what I was doing: having this mini-existential epiphany.
Why it matters
You might think, “This is all very interesting, Ed, but so what?” Bear with me, reader, and I’ll try to demonstrate via both an analogy and explanation. I worked on a big Chinese exhibition (I’ve worked on several over the years) and was talking with the curators about their goals. They waxed rhapsodic about the richness of Chinese culture and all the specifics of the show they were planning. And then we talked about how our visitor research had illustrated how geographically illiterate Americans were. They then realized how much extra work they would have to do just to get visitors to the place they thought had been their starting point.
The issue of residual institutional self image means that organizations tend to have unrealistic images of where they are, so that any future forecasting is based on an unreliable starting assumption. When it comes to the digital realm, this situation is only exacerbated. Organizations are already more complicated and thinly staffed than they should be. Their growth projections, strategy processes, and visions need to address this disconnect before they can even engage in the planning they want to do.
What you can do
Luckily, there are ways to overcome residual self image. In our case, the digital strategy parallel to the audience research in my analogy is a thorough digital technology audit. It’s a great way to come face to face with the reality of how the organization operates: what’s working, what’s not, what people wish would happen. Knowing where you actually are (as well as where you feel you are) in a quantifiable form is an essential first step. Your future planning can then start from the appropriate place and not fall short because you miscalculated how far the organization had to go.
And to bring it back to the Matrix, in order to live up to the institution’s higher calling (ie mission, vision, values), the people working there need to understand (and accept) where the organization really is as described in an impartial, fact-based assessment. Only then can they shed their residual institutional self image and begin living up to their potential.