Intentional Practice
Welcome to the Intentional Museum Blog, an all-staff endeavor of Randi Korn & Associates. We intend to share our thoughts and questions twice monthly about compelling ideas we come across in our work and readings. The platform for our practice and the inspiration for our postings is the Cycle of Intentional Practice.
This cycle has emerged slowly, evolving over the last 10 to 15 years, as I started to think about all I had learned as an evaluator and researcher while pursuing my passion of studying people’s experiences in informal learning environments. In our work as planners and evaluators in museums, we have witnessed how difficult it can be to achieve results that reflect a museum’s original intentions. Likewise, we have witnessed that results surface when organizations focus their energy, decisions, actions, and dollars towards well-articulated ends. Thus, increasingly, intentionality is becoming a driving force in our work with clients, as we recognize how vital it is as an idea, action, theory, and practice.
Intentionality is not a new concept, as several well-known authors have written about it. For example, business author Jim Collins notes in Good to Great that the work of a great organization must “attract and channel resources directed solely . . .” to their intentions and “reject resources that drive them away from” their passion and unique value. Collins’ concept applies to museums, too, as described by museum scholar Stephen Weil in Making Museums Matter. He wrote, “The only activities in which the museum can legitimately engage are those intended to further its institutional purpose.” Collins’ and Weil’s concepts embody the essence of intentionality, where all actions are purposeful, deliberate, and focused on achieving the intended impact or results. With funders requiring evidence that their dollars are being used in the way they intended, intentionality rings of relevance. Likewise, with fewer dollars available to museums, how museums use those dollars is increasingly important.
The Cycle of Intentional Practice places “impact” in the center of the cycle and assumes museums want to make a positive difference in people’s lives, which is how I define “impact.” Intentional practice requires that the museum articulates the impact it would like to achieve (by writing an impact statement), align a museum’s practices and resources to support the impact it would like to achieve, measure the ways in which the museum is achieving impact, and reflect on the results to learn from them for the purpose of improvement. Intentional practice may seem insular, but it acknowledges a museum’s responsibility to its external community through evaluation and other efforts. The tension between a museum and its public is real and the museum may need to work hard to balance its internal aspirations and resources with its community’s needs. Balancing potentially conflicting ideals, though challenging, demonstrates that the organization is striving to be true to itself and its audience and community. I have learned in my 30 or so years of experience that when a museum applies laser focus to the center of the cycle, it creates an opportunity to achieve meaningful, measurable results that an evaluator can detect.
We invite you to share your thoughts—agreements or disagreements—in the spirit of our collective learning, as learning has always been the motivational force behind our work.
