When You’re Changing, Don’t Miss the Opportunity to Change More
The best time to make changes is when you’re making another change.
The pandemic was a perfect example: every single organization was thrown into crisis, forced to become reactive to the current, constantly evolving conditions.
The best of organizations used this period of change to be proactive about their long wishlists. That process that never really worked well? It’s totally broken now, may as well rebuild it from the ground up. That change that may have unsettled constituents? Go ahead and throw it in with the nine thousand other changes they’re experiencing, it will go unnoticed.
The institutions that saw the opportunity offered by this period of instability made huge leaps forward, setting themselves up for greater success in the future.
Case study: the Obama Portraits tour
Planned before the pandemic, the Obama Portraits were scheduled to go on tour in 2020 and ultimately began their travels in 2021. At that time, masks and physical distancing were still legally required—making it challenging to take full advantage of the audience development opportunities offered by this unique exhibition.
The Art Institute of Chicago was the first stop on the tour, leading the charge with no precedent for how to install and manage a once-in-a-lifetime exhibition during a global pandemic. I stepped in to head the museum-wide effort, pulling experts from all corners to brainstorm how to enable everyone in our community to visit safely. And in the process of rethinking one exhibition, we ended up with a radical new approach to the exhibition planning process more generally.
For the portraits, we landed on a completely new type of exhibition design and an innovative visitor-management approach. For future exhibitions, we changed processes and staffing structures in ways that increased transparency, fostered shared accountability, helped control budget growth, and resulted in better audience experiences. We were reactive to the crisis and proactive about using it to make us a more effective organization in the future. And we were able to do that because we took on the challenge thoughtfully and with more than just the immediate future in mind.
Whether or not your transformational moment is intentional or unexpected, processes must adapt, structures must change, and strategy must evolve. As you do this, surprising opportunities will inevitably present themselves—but they can be easily missed if you’re not actively engaged in the process of transformation.
