Reimagining purpose, value, and dealing with pressure

This week's Museum Summit focuses on Mission, Values, and the Politics of Pressure, I’ve been struck by how often leaders tell me their organisations feel unsustainable in their current form. That pressure seems to be exposing some deeper and more existential considerations - if you strip away the buildings, the programmes, and the funding arrangements, what remains? What is the core without which we would no longer be 'us'?

I have had conversations with a few cultural leaders recently in which they admitted that, frankly, their organisations are entirely unsustainable in their current form.

Within that context, these leaders were having to ask themselves what their organisation actually was. If you took away the buildings, the programmes, the funding arrangements, what remains? What is the core without which we would no longer be us?

Recent research commissioned by the National Theatre reported that only 6-14% of responses (across business model 'types') were 'very confident' in their primary business model. With 40-61% responses Very Uncertain’, ‘Somewhat
Uncertain’, or ‘Neutral / Unsure’ about their primary business model.

Separately, I shared a piece recently about the extraordinary Helsinki Central Library, Oodi. In it, the team reflects on how they had to fundamentally rethink what it meant to be a library, and in doing so engaged in a meaningful process of co-design with the residents of the city. That act of redefinition didn’t diminish them, it made them more essential, more used, and more loved than ever before.

“It wasn’t us professional librarians deciding to create this,” says Annala. “It belongs to them. That’s clear if you look at how popular Oodi is now.”

That process of rethinking is at the heart of what this year’s Museum Summit programme is asking of museums. Workshops on values-based decision making, allyship, and social change roles all focus on this question.

I think these two things are linked. You cannot ever become truly valuable unless you understand what your central essence is, and your central essential thing is pointless unless it's configured in a way that is, in some way, valuable to the world.

When both are understood and acted on, that’s when organisations become truly indispensable. That’s when they gain advocates, and build real resilience and relevance.

In the piece about Helsinki Library they say “it was important for us to be able to motivate citizens in a new way”.

That now feels like a central challenge for cultural organisations, to try to build relevance not through the models which have increasingly proven themselves to be ineffective and outdated, but through new ideas and approaches.

It was fascinating how often these kinds of conversations bubbled up during the pandemic, when the buildings were closed and the default ways of working were no longer available. For a brief time, it seemed that many organisations were asking big questions like what are we here for? who gets to decide that? and who benefits?

But when the doors reopened and a 'return to normal' was possible, the urgency to change seemed to fade. Most institutions seemed to, perhaps understandably, want to focus on recovery, not reinvention.

And it’s worth acknowledging just how hard this all is, fundamentally reimagining an organisation is never going to be a tidy exercise. Even if you did decide to embark down this road it’s slow, uncertain, and emotionally taxing. It asks leaders and teams to engage with two truths at once: that the day-to-day pressures are already overwhelming and unsustainable, and that deep, structural change still demands their time and focus. Most cultural organisations don’t feel they have the spare capacity for that level of sustained reflection and experimentation and that’s probably why it so often gets pushed aside.

But if the sector is to move beyond perpetual firefighting, carving out that space seems almost non-negotiable. The paradox is that by finding the time to ask the harder questions, and by tolerating the slowness and messiness of genuine, thoughtful engagement, organisations can perhaps actually find their way to a more sustainable pace.

And undertaking this 'reimagining' is not an impossible challenge as a few recent examples (at scale) demonstrate.

The Brooklyn Public Library’s Books Unbanned initiative uses free digital cards to extend reading access nationwide in response to censorship, transforming its role from local institution to national access steward.

In the UK the National Gallery recently announced its plans to form a citizen assembly to shape its future, following on from initiatives like the Citizens' Jury at Birmingham Museum Trust.

In Finland, inspired by the approach taken by Oodi (the central library), the new Museum of Architecture and Design in Helsinki has placed public engagement at the centre of its transformation project.

These aren’t just examples of 'good engagement'. They’re signs of a more fundamental shift from institutions as providers of cultural content and knowledge to institutions as stewards of cultural meaning, meaning that is co-created, contested, and lived.

That shift is difficult - it will expose fragility, it challenges inherited structures, and it requires those leading and working in institutions to massively shift how they think about their work, and themselves. But it also clarifies purpose.

Because without clarity of purpose (stripped of funding formulas, programme cycles, and legacy infrastructure) cultural organisations are left exposed, and we're seeing that happen starkly, and increasingly regularly. And if cultural organisations can’t demonstrate what makes them essential, they won’t be treated as essential.

But when that purpose is understood and built with, not just for, the public, organisations become more than the sum of their outputs. They become a genuinely essential part of the civic fabric, the kind of institution people might fight to keep.

The 2025 Museum Summit takes place (online) on 15-16 October - tickets allow you to watch the sessions live and download/catch up with them until the end of 2025.