How a museum can thrive amid chaos
One year after the pandemic hit, it's time for the cultural world to make some decisions
Covid triggered an unprecedented crisis that damaged everything.
What people still don't understand is that the changes triggered by this event are here to stay, including in the cultural sector.
The sooner we realize this, the better.
WARNING: this article touches on topics that may challenge your sensibilities, but if you are a director, a public administrator or a professional in the world of culture, I ask you to take the time to dig deeper.
A ticking time bomb
Beyond causing irreparable damage to the tourism sector for years to come, Covid-19 exposed the enormous limits of many museums, amplifying and putting under the microscope problems that already existed:
- business model based solely on on-site visits;
- little attention paid to the education stage before visitors arrive at the museum;
- no form of loyalty building over the medium to long term.
In simple terms, the coronavirus set off a time bomb the system had been sitting on, unaware.
What happened should have accelerated cultural institutions' awareness that they are in the middle of a deep transformation process affecting the whole of society.
However, while at first these institutions, driven by the need to evolve in order to survive, managed to reinvent themselves, in recent months, hampered by further closures and a lack of planning on the part of the political world, they have become hopeless and resigned to living day by day.
The need for a new value
Some institutions take advantage of shocks, thriving and growing when subjected to change.
And I'm not talking about the concept of resilience, which is often cited improperly: this can in fact be defined as the quality of returning to the same state without changing, of responding positively to traumatic events, of positively reorganizing one's life in the face of difficulties without losing one's identity.
What I want to talk to you about is a different value, one theorized by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in the book "Antifragile".
To understand the concept of antifragility we need to start from its opposite, fragility: a fragile system is continuously exposed to risks that can damage it or even destroy it.
To protect a fragile system, behaviors or changes are usually put in place to make it more robust, thereby implementing a concept of resistance and resilience.
But robustness and resilience carry a major limitation within them: breakage.
A resilient or resistant system is still equivalent to its fragile version, except that it has "something extra" designed to raise the level of its own breaking point.
An antifragile system, on the other hand, undergoes the traumatic event, makes it its own and uses it to improve.
That's why the true opposite of fragility is not resilience but antifragility:
the characteristic of a system to change and improve in the face of external stress factors, aiming not to protect itself but to adapt and innovate.
Caleb states that the institutions that truly survive in today's world have within them the extraordinary quality of being antifragile.
Evolution is not based on protecting organisms, meaning making them more robust or resilient. It is based on change: new organisms are stronger than the ones before them.
In the same way, an antifragile system that embraces the unexpected, uncertainty, positively takes on the risk.
This characteristic is inherent in all systems that have survived.
And it's the one you should aspire to for your institution.
Making a museum thrive
One of the greatest transformations in the history of this sector is underway, but most institutions are still not clear about the scale of this revolution, which will inevitably affect them.
"Protected" by a system geared toward controlling and regulating an "academic" standard for how things are done, many institutions have found themselves having to rethink their entire visitor acquisition system, tapping for the first time into the potential of digital channels.
Others, on the other hand, were able to adapt, to overhaul their museum model, their programming, a certain way of doing things.
What you too can do is help your institution get out of the current crisis: you need to get involved, to immerse yourself in the moment we are living through.
How can you explore this approach further? By taking part in the new edition of the Italian Museum Summit.
The three-day event will be built around the three fundamental themes of this particular moment in history: management, marketing and innovation.
As I've often called them, these are the three gears that every institution should start turning to relaunch itself.
What should you do now? Read the reviews from those who took part last July and join the event too, with over 30 speakers and which hosted nearly 900 protagonists of the sector.
