 Hello and welcome to NEMO's webinar, Create Dangerously, Museums in the Age of Action. My name is Elizabeth and I work for NEMO. As the network for museums in Europe, our main activities include advocating for museums at the EU level, providing training opportunities, providing a platform for museums to exchange and learn from each other and helping museums to cooperate across borders. We're happy to have with you with us online today from across Europe and the world as we present today's webinar facilitated by Michael Peter Edson, Digital Cultural Strategist. Edson was the Director of Web and New Media Strategy for the Smithsonian Institution and Co-Founder of the Museum of the United Nations, UNLIVE, a startup NGO designed to catalyze civic effort toward the sustainable development goals. He was also named Tech Titan Person to Watch by Washingtonian Magazine. In this webinar, Edson will build on his keynote from the 2022 NEMO conference concerning the need to update our concept of museum practice and create a meaningful response to today's most important questions about culture, society, and change. At the end of the webinar, you will have an opportunity to ask questions during the Q&A round and we very much welcome you to join us on stage. Please simply indicate your questions in the chat and we will have you up with us for a wonderful conversation. So without further ado, I will hand this over to you. Michael, take it started. Thank you very much, Elizabeth, and hello, good morning, good afternoon, everybody. And not only am I the facilitator of this webinar, I am the speaker of this webinar. I hope to talk for, I don't know, this feels like a 40-minute talk to me, but I'll try and keep it to 30. It's either that or two hours. And this is all a contested topic. This is kind of cutting-edge research we're talking about here across one of the most fraught and hard to understand problem spaces I think humanity has ever known, if that isn't too grandiose. So I don't want to present myself as an expert here. I'm not academic. I'm not trying to score debating points. I'm here with you, and I hope you're here because we want to do something. We want to understand something for the purpose of doing. And to that end, I really hope that you weigh in at the end. We can bring you up on stage. We can talk about these issues and questions we're talking about. I have the slides I'm using with all the links and everything. It's kind of a weird format because we're doing this side-by-side thing, but that's all on my website using data.com. It's the top post. And Elizabeth and Rebecca in the background, Ty Rebecca will drop that link, drop a couple links in the chat now. Also, my contact stuff. Please reach out if you're interested in this. I'd love to meet you and talk. So just to set the stage so we know what we're talking about. Museums are used to operating within well-established boundaries of authority and trust, period. But the realities of 2022, including the climate emergency, armed conflict and rapid technological and social change, reveal gaps and flaws in the traditional notions, boundaries, practice of our work. How will we get across the big frickin' wall, and I'll tell you about that big frickin' wall in a minute, that separates conventional museum practice from deep engagement with societal challenges? And what can we do to get action started, regardless of the kind of organization we work in or the kind of job we have? That's what I'm working on. That's what we talked about in Lulay. I've been wrestling with versions of these ideas since the 2010s, when I was at the Smithsonian and when a lot of us discovered tech, when tech got interesting, and when we saw that we could rethink the traditional boundaries of our work, the traditional boundaries of museum practice or practice in any sector, because of these new tools that let us see through walls, talk to people, learn from people, work with people, benefit people that we could never involve before. It's really a miracle. And in some ways, that tech awakening was the mother tongue for all of this. I'm borrowing the talk, the title for this talk today, create dangerously from the title of a speech given by Albert Camus in Stockholm, Sweden a few days after he received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1957. And I'm not trying to be fancy or anything. I don't sit around and read Camus in my spare time, but this title, I saw this speech in a bookstore in Dublin and it spoke to me, create dangerously. In awarding the Nobel Prize, the Nobel committee noted Camus' important literary production, which with clear-sighted earnestness illuminates the problems of the human conscious in our time. Well, that's the kind of clear-sighted earnestness and illumination that I think we all should be striving for now. And what times those were in the months leading up to the award ceremony in 1957, Camus and the rest of the world had seen Soviet tanks crushing uprisings in Poland and Hungary, the beginning of America's war in Vietnam, Algeria fighting a war of independence against France. The U.S. civil rights movement was in full swing. Russia tested the first intercontinental ballistic missile in 1957 and not long before the Nobel committee, a few days before the Nobel Prize was awarded the Soviet Union launch Sputnik, which began the so-called space age. I'll end with a thought about that at the very end, quote from JFK. There was a pandemic, 150,000 people died of the Asian flu in 1957 and the European economic community, the precursor of the EU was formed. And that's just a little glimpse from my own super narrow, super weird, super privileged perspective here in America. And Camus said in his speech, to create today is to create dangerously. Any publication is an act. Any assertion into the culture by a creative mind is an act. And that act exposes one to the passions of an age that forgives nothing. In other words, I think there's no sanctuary for a creator. For someone with responsibility for a platform, a convening place, a tradition like museum practice, museum library gallery practice. And though it's very hard to make fair comparisons between 1957 and today, I think it's really safe to imagine that the news of the last few years here, global pandemic leaving more than six and a half million people dead that we know of, the rise of oligarchies and fascism, information warfare, a war in Europe, the election of Donald Trump, an insurrection and attempted coup in the States, systemic inequality and racism. It's a long list and I'm not saying this to bum you out, but to set the stage here. All of these realities, I think would leave a thinking person. Camus certainly badly shaken. Do we really think a writer with Camus's sensitivity would look at today's sclerotic, lethargic response to the climate emergency and say, yeah, whatever, I don't think so. And I don't think you think so either. So what would the other great thinkers that we celebrate in our collections, the Mavericks, the revolutionaries, the visionaries, what would they say about this moment in society when the main question is why are we so passive? Why are we so passive and slow? It's comical, isn't it, in a way? I mean, a pause for laughter. Why is the museum sector so passive and slow to respond to one of the most fascinating and important challenges of our lives, possibly of anyone's life? Why is that? You would think that we would be drawn to this challenge as an intersection of everything we study and care about, science, art, culture, the neighborhood, community, knowledge, well-being, truth to ourselves, studying the past so that we can illuminate the present and make great decisions for the future. You'd think we would be all over this, but it would be hard for an impartial observer to look across the cultural sector, look across the museum sector, and say that we're really getting the job done. And we're not alone. I mean, nobody is really getting the job done. And again, I'm not saying this to bum you out. I'm saying this to frame the problem for the way I see it so we can talk about what to do. And I was thinking about this talk over the last few weeks, and I was remembering that when I was a kid, my family donated a beehive to the Smithsonian Institution. I was a little kid, and my mom opened the kitchen door one day, and there was this huge, beautiful beehive hanging from a tree outside the kitchen door. And this was half a century ago. You couldn't sort of bring up a YouTube video what to do with the beehive outside your door. And so my mom thought for a second and did what any smart stay-at-home mom would do 50 years ago, and she opened up the yellow pages, which for those of you young ones out there, that was a printed directory of every telephone number in Washington, D.C., and she called up the Smithsonian a couple of miles from our house and got through to the switchboard. And a couple of days later, a nice Smithsonian entomologist took the bus out to our home to see what he could do. And as I remember it, he took the beehive, bees and all, and put it into a big plastic garbage bag and taped it shut and took it back down to the office with him on the bus, bees and all. And my entire rest of my life, I've always had the image of him sitting on the bus with that bag between his knees quietly buzzing with the rest of the passengers on the bus. I thought that was pretty cool, and I was pretty proud to have the family beehive in the collection of the Smithsonian, but it did raise some interesting questions about what a museum isn't does. Why did the Smithsonian Institution have an entomologist? Did they have anything better to do than to take a bus out to the, collect random beehives all day long? Why did the Smithsonian have a collection of First Lady's gowns and a Tropical Research Institute in Panama and not some other things? Or as Brand Farron said at the Smithsonian 2.0 conference in 2009, 2008 that I helped organize, when did you translate the Smithsonian's mission of the increase and diffusion of knowledge to mean having museums full of stuff on the Mall in Washington, D.C.? I mean, who makes these decisions and why? And it occurred to me that we all walk around in our daily lives with this unspoken dialogue we have between our practice as professionals, this little conversation we have that helps us decide what's normal and what's weird, what to do, what fits within the boundaries of our practice and what doesn't. And the question I'm asking you now in this talk is, does this dialogue give us useful answers about the world that we live in today? Are we going around collecting beehives while a bigger, more interesting, more important world is knocking at our door? And I often think about this drawing from Design in the Real World by Victor Papinac and it's about the designer's share. And one of the points I want to open up in this conversation today is that he makes, I think actually it's a point from Karl Popper, the famous design scholar, design teacher, that most of the time when you're asked to come in and work on something, what is our museum's climate response going to be? What's our strategy going to be? You're actually only being asked to talk about what's at the very, very top of that triangle there, the designer's share. All of the important decisions have already been made by the time that you've been invited into the room. And the real problem where that lower arrow is, which is most of the world, has already been, that most of those decisions have already been made in your absence. And what I'm asking here for us to do, what I'm asking you to do in your lives, in your professional lives, is to crank that door open again and reinterrogate the problems, the problem space, the problems being solved for what they are. And really that's down where our practice is, where our discipline is, and where our assumptions about what the job, the scope, the scale, and the speed of museum work should really be. Standard practice. We have this concept in our heads of what a standard museum practice should be. And I think it's based on an outdated notion of the world we live in and the job we have to do. Let me see if I can throw some evidence and some models on top of that that we can really work with. Fun animation, but standard practice, and then everything else in the world, the designers share. I was working at the Smithsonian on 9-11, 2001, the famous 9-11. We were launching an intranet site that morning down in the basement of the Asian Art Museums of the Smithsonian and all of a sudden we couldn't figure out why we couldn't get online, why we couldn't get cell service. We were underground so we couldn't see the smoke drifting across the mall from the planes that were crashed into the Pentagon across the mall. We hadn't seen the news from New York. We knew something bad was going on. It wasn't until later that night when I made my way home to sit with my wife while she nursed our infant daughter we watched the news that we could really begin to wrap our heads around what had happened. It was very difficult to understand what was happened. It was very difficult to make sense of it. It was a news event, yes, but it was also a cultural event. It was also geopolitics and geography and new ideas and new people. And there were very few places we could go to make sense of it as citizens, to make sense of it so that we could make intelligent decisions as a democracy about this world that opened to us was brought to our doorstep on that morning. And I remember over the in the days and months that followed I remember looking out from an office I had across on the mall in Washington I could look across to the National Archives I could look up to my right to the Library of Congress I could look across the Smithsonian's 28 museums and recenters research centers and the zoo close to Washington and I could think of this really billions of dollars of cultural infrastructure every year the world's largest museum and research complex dedicated to the increase and diffusion of knowledge and many of us were waiting for this institution and all the museums really in the world to help us make sense of this moment so that we could we could reflect on the past understand the past reflect on the present make good decisions about tomorrow and it never happened 20 something years later still waiting and I think many of us were radicalized in that moment realizing high on the dream of a connected digital world capable of making friends and doing work across the world reflecting on this model of an institution as I'm changing constant slow and feeling that something was very badly out of out of alignment and as a result not directly of the Smithsonian and the museum sector's failure but certainly America lost its mind and went to war for a generation and as I said I think many of us many of my brothers and sisters in cultural work were radicalized by that moment really understanding that we needed cultural infrastructure to do something more so not long after this and again sorry you know it's a little traumatic but this is really the this is real stuff this is real life not long after this we found a model an idea from the wonderful Kathy Sierra a thought leader in social media digital strategy and Kathy introduced this idea of the big fricking wall and she said that every institution has every organization has a big fricking wall right in the middle of it and on one side of the wall is where you're working this is where you do your patient incremental careful work you create a little garden you do a little better every year but basically you're within this this conventional mode of practice but on the other side of the wall is where you need to be the work you really need to be doing if you read the mission that's that's carved in stone over the over your doors and Kathy said that you can get up to that wall up to the face of that wall with that kind of slow incremental progress but you can never get across it you can't get over it you can't get through it and I use this model in a workshop in about a year ago with some European Museum and Library directors and one guy running a very very big institution immediately got up and said yeah I love this model I recognize this my staff love to we love to plant little gardens here on this side of the wall we love to tend the little garden and on the occasion we get over the wall we plant a little garden over there and there's a new wall and I think this is a very powerful and very constructive metaphor to think about our museum practice certainly among the people I met at the Nemo conference in Lulé and I've met over the years using this this big fricking wall looms large over our sector what does it look like in real you know what does that wall look like day to day well we live in a deeply confusing and strange time there's a joke going around that the world went off the rails into a strange alternate timeline when a weasel got trapped in the Large Hadron Collider back in I think this was 2016 that shunted us onto some sort of science fiction parallel world track that gave us President Trump and many other strange and unfortunate things you know remember 2020 that was a time every time I look at this list I see things I forgot happened wildfires in California in Australia Brexit George Floyd was murdered Black Lives Matter protests went global disinformation fascism still the aftermath of Cambridge Analytica and the dark side of social media wow the stakes are high and when it comes to climate we have 11 when I started giving this kind of talk it was 11 years now it's eight years to prevent irreversible damage from climate change again not to bum you out but let's not let's not talk bullshit between friends here okay yeah 2019 2020 Greta Thunbury was giving this these speeches our house is on fire she told the gang at the World Economic Forum in Davos adults keep saying we owe it to the young people to give them hope she said but I don't want your hope I don't want you to be hopeful I want you to panic I want you to feel the fear I feel inside me every day and then I want you to act I want you to act this is a moment wherever you stand in relation to this wall when action is at a premium and we in the cultural sector on this side of the wall we are not super friends with the world of action um a great George Monbiot piece where he confronted climate protesters in 2018 and said wouldn't it be better rather than shutting down streets in London wouldn't it be better to pursue some smaller incremental achievable goals and a young woman stepped up and said what is it that you are asking me as a 20 year old to face and to accept about my future and my life this is an emergency we are facing extinction when you ask me a question like that what is it you want me to feel sir and Monbiot writes we had no answer one of the most difficult things to understand about the climate emergency is that it operates on a timescale it's so very different from the model our institutions were founded on this Peter Schwartz that at the monitor group called it the model of enduring wisdom museums are set up with the model of enduring wisdom and you don't have to be fast and agile and react to the moment because wisdom endures well Bill McKibbin and Alex Stefan note that when it comes to the climate emergency winning slowly is the same as losing he says if we don't win very quickly on climate change then we will never win that's the core truth about global warming it's what makes it different from every other problem our political systems have faced reading Stefan's vegs memoirs New York Times a New Yorker writer reflected the excruciating power of the vegs memoir lies in the pain of looking back and seeing that there was a small window in which it was possible to act and then discovering how quickly and irrevocably that window can be slammed shut can you see where I'm heading with this action action action if you've wondered what you're doing during slavery the Holocaust the civil rights movement you're doing it now hashtag Charlottesville which is a reference to white nationalist protests and not far from my home in 2017 here's an example when Trump pulled out of the Paris Accords in 2017 I was very interested to see what the response would be from museum institutions science and natural history institutions who were thinking advocating that climate climate change climate emergency was a real thing and action was important so after Trump pulled out of the Paris Accord we're all freaking out justifiably and what what did these what did our institutions that we look to for understand the reflect understand the past reflect on the present playing for the future what did they have to say not long after this Trump pulled out or actually not long after the Charlie Hebdo killings in France the National Gallery of Denmark held a symposium on this very topic what is our role in a world on fire and the answer really kind of was not much I remember Francis Morris who I don't know and I'm sure is a is a fantastic museum director she was a panelist and she stood on stage and said we are super important but we're duty bound not to be activist but we're still super important and I think I think some quoting here what we're trying to do at Tate Modern speaks louder than any manifesto or action is that our galleries are full of artists from many places sort of mic drop we're done not a super impactful super strong manifesto from my point of view the American Museum of Natural History after Trump pulled out of the climate accords nothing on their website they were advertising their show for mummies Natural History Museum in London nothing on their website they were advertising sensational butterflies who was crushing it in the days and months and weeks after the Paris Accord Teen Vogue the weather channel which would not have to had to get involved in this fight and astonishingly through this and mostly through the war on information here in the States the Steakham Steak Sandwiches Company had a just a breathtaking social media account that took on the philosophical moral obligations of truth and information better than any cultural scientific site I know of of one one bright spot that didn't come from institutions themselves really it came from cultural workers Allie Hartley and Mara Kirlansky cultural workers in the DC area created Day of Facts I think because they were so pissed that no institutions are really leading the charge so I think in this kind of environment our response to climate in our sector acts like an x-ray on our practice it really reveals our motives and our thinking you know someone a professor told me once if you want to find out what an organization or individual values look at what they do when their decisions will cost them something most of our work has just been exceedingly cautious and I think in a few minutes I'll talk about how I think we underestimate our own agency and our own trustedness in society so incrementalism we've talked a little a little about these are the issues I see on this side of the wall I see practitioners wrestling with there's a question of trust I think our institutions feel that trust is something you accumulate but never never spend never take a risk with culture there's enormous confusion about the word culture when we say culture culture is important do we mean do we mean the high art of Europe do we mean street musicians rappers dancers do we mean informal culture do we mean cultural rights the way the UN talks about it it's every time I come to Europe I'm fantastically thrilled by how much we talk about culture and fantastically confused by exactly what the hell it is we're talking about digitality I think we've forgotten about the fundamental power of digital platforms to connect and teach and inspire and include politics there's a deep fear of politics and I feel that our institutions have ceded the high ground to others who's to power we've made it our job to serve power more often than serving our missions and our public I can talk believe me I could talk about any of these topics for for three hours join us for beer afterwards agency we did some sense making workshops with cultural practitioners in in the first months of the pandemic with the Europeana Foundation I think we talked to 40 or 50 cultural workers in 23 countries and terrific people fantastic people but in talking about their own responses to the pandemic and their institution's responses it was very clear that in our sector we do not have a very well developed sense of agency how we are positioned to to do work given the tools that we have at our disposal one practitioner said that they had a lot of agency within their institution and I asked I asked them to follow tell me tell me about that agency and this person said well when I asked to speak to my supervisor my supervisor takes my meeting like that's not that's not a really powerful statement about agency although I'm sure it's really good in that context and nothing against this individual who is a tremendous innovator in their own right I want to stick on this point for a second everybody has a boss everybody feels that there is some reason they cannot and should not act I talked to the head of the head librarian of one of the best and largest library systems in the world who confided in me that they didn't feel that they could be as activist and revolutionaries they wanted to be as was in their heart because they were beholden to government they were beholden to elected officials I go then and talk to the elected officials and they say well we can't really change things because we're beholden to voters or the prime minister go to voters and they say well we can't really do anything it's these big institutions that are stuck there go down to the people at the so-called regular workers inside institutions of all kinds inside museums of all kinds they say we can't do anything we have bosses we're no I'm only the curator I'm only the manager of events everybody I'll talk about this in a second everybody can find an excuse a reason not to act and yet and yet it turns wasn't that Galileo's Galileo's line and yet it moves where somehow someone has got to stick their neck out and and do something and it's often far easier to to find yourself on the other side of that break freaking wall than you think an incomplete change model so I think most of our work in the cultural sector in the museum sector is based on this information deficit model of change which says that if only people knew x came to our exhibit and read the labels and knew x or felt x had the experience of seeing the melting glaciers on the streets or the music then they would be changed they would become a different person and they would change their behavior and quite definitely it's been explained to me that the the impact model of librarianship is help people get access to the right information help them turn that into knowledge which then we can help them or they can help themselves turn into the wisdom I think there are some problems with that there's some gaps in that model it's really only two-thirds of a bridge I often talk to exhibit designers and curators who feel that the audience attending their exhibit about the art of the civil war in the United States will leave understanding truths fundamental truths about racism and become better voters and better parents and better neighbors but they can never talk about an instance when that's happened and they don't feel that they have design responsibility in that designer's share in the real world for making it happen if you don't design for it if you don't learn how to make those things happen it ain't ever going to happen and we're also fighting an uphill battle against neuroscience and behavior change facts mostly don't change our minds providing people with accurate information doesn't seem to help I've got a link to this article up on my website and in the slides that everyone distributed wonderful new book by and Christine Duhame a neurosurgeon at Harvard called Minding the Climate about the neuroscience of behavior change regarding climate she lays it on the table lays it out on the table one thing is clear just giving people information doesn't work to change entrenched behaviors she continues there remains a gap between pro-environmental intent in people's minds and the actual impact of specific behavioral actions even among people who have pro-environmental behaviors people can know about climate change or any other fact you want to teach them about can know about climate change intellectually but they have many justifications that can be utilized when it's just easier to keep doing what they've been doing without making bothersome changes the brain is equipped to adapt based on what's happening right now and can't find ways to attend to climate action longer term less clear less direct topics accordingly action is very hard for us as a species and it's very hard for us in the cultural sector this is not part of our education and I'm arguing that it should be and that actually it's really interesting and really fun so a tool that you can use to begin diagnosing your own institutions designs and interactions and this dynamic of thinking about things and doing things is this XY axis I first saw from a talk given by Ethan Zuckerman you know a famous MIT media lab professor founder of Global Voices all around interesting great guy and he proposed this matrix as a way to have conversations about civic engagement lays this out on the vertical axis from thin engagement so shallow temporary interactions to thick engagement which is deep involved you know often community work often group work and then from left to right symbolic outcomes to impactful outcomes and he uses as an example see if I did this right and sorry if this is a little fuzzy I'll read them out top left you know pledging something thumbs up for saving you know curing hunger in Africa thin symbolic there's no real policy aim there it's easy to do easy to scale and it's not bad but it doesn't have any real architecture underneath and any real any real policy or behavioral change intended to the right of that Ethan says maybe you could talk about voting voting is designed to be thin most places designed to be easy but it can have impact I think and I propose to you because it does infrastructure and training around it laws customs armies governments culture voting can become impactful even though the action itself is symbolic because it has a lot of support underneath it down in the lower left the occupy movement he says is symbolic but thick like people who did occupy movement really really worked hard but they didn't have a particular policy goal at first interesting story is 20 something years later here in the states the effort to give free college education really came out of the occupy movement and has been kindled by them by that movement for 20 years um Ethan uses an as an example for thick and impactful after hurricane sandy hit the east coast of the united states long island in new york the first responders the first people on the ground and the most effective responders before the national guard before the red cross were members of the occupy movement they dubbed themselves occupy sandy they took donations that they couldn't set up they weren't a nonprofit they were volunteers they set up an amazon wedding registry but instead of filling it with table settings and vacation gifts they filled their amazon wedding registry with requests for bandages and clean water and ibuprothin they raised almost eight hundred thousand dollars in a couple weeks that way the lesson of this is that with effort and design and intent we can take a symbolic action a one-off exhibit a public program a podcast and add design elements to it to make it increasingly thick and impactful and i can talk about some of these examples a little later on i'm gonna hustle through so i make sure we have a little time to uh to wrap up so all that being said don't obsess about what's holding you back on this side of the wall if you want to grow to work that's more consequential and relevant to society today don't don't spend too much time thinking about what's holding you back think about what's on the other side think about what's on the other side and as some of the examples i have will tell you the wall just kind of becomes irrelevant or disappears brooklyn public library started giving away books to anyone in the united states in response to library book bans seemed like an obvious thing to do very revolutionary the internet archive created the national emergency lending library and control digital lending hugely controversial huge they're being sued over it now by the public publishing industry but it was just a natural extension of their thinking and their understanding of the world that they live in that they it would be important for people locked up at home to get access to books for crying out loud lied in 2022 european city of science instead of creating a you know bunch of experts on the stage for a year they created a wildly freewheeling program of 365 days of events down in the neighborhood they created this cool flip calendar every day is an event that you can you could kind of sign up to own each the middle of each event is a qr code that you can go to to kind of claim the event participate get a micro grant meto knoll director and lucian green gilford I think is how you pronounce his name lucian so I know him the the maestros in charge of that event completely next level on the other side of the wall just the wall it was a lot of work and painful I know to get over some of the people with more constrained thinking but a wildly revolutionary event that brought citizens and science together in the neighborhood the why not lot a free community it's a shipping container filled with PA systems and chairs and benches that anyone in the community in baltimore can use to stage an event incredible story about a colleague of mine nick apostolides at the national portrait gallery instead of being threatened by teenagers who were hanging out on the steps of the museum invited them inside of course he did because that's what you do the museum of solutions in mumbai is an institution I'm involved in the creation of a new boldly child led institution in a city of 22 million people all of whom have a right to help create a future that's worth living for all of us it goes on and on and on and on two great examples here from an institutional perspective that organizations that through just strategic planning and thinking about the future decided to revolutionize their mission and their conduct famously the national geographic decided to become an activist after the anniversary of hundredth anniversary of the society being founded realized that the the next hundred years would depend on a healthy planet so I think the the program for all of us is to build our strength and confidence on this side of the wall Daniel Kahneman says confidence is a feeling that reflects the coherence of the information and the cognitive use of processing so the more coherent and clear we are on the obstacles on this side and the goals on the other side the much easier it will be for us to improvise create disrupt do what we need to do to be relevant and meaningful consequential today so really quickly there's another believe me there's another there's another hour in the chamber here but I think a really important question to ask among yourselves I've been asking it at workshops and design charrettes for the last couple years what are our obligations why are we obligated to act at all what can we just do our stuff I think there are five major things to talk about it's a little listy but here it is every sector in society is going to need to be transformed if you if you believe and if you understand and believe what science, economics, culture, civics is telling us about three degrees of global warming every sector will need to be transformed not least of which us culture is a really missing ingredient in the equation for how we're going to unscrew ourselves here we that I think especially in Europe the European Commission knows that we can't just deliver technical solutions to every neighborhood in Europe and have it have it work out fine that's never worked there's a cultural component to this but nobody can really figure out yet what it is I mean we know we can talk this is our moment this is the moment that is so well aligned with the core values of our sector as I understand them as I've been schooled in them when I talk to my practice my discipline it tells me very clearly that the ability to bring people together for reflection and decision making sense making in a in a ecosystem an environment of difficult ideas is what we're what we think we've got and I think also it's going to be very profitable is not the right word but there's going to be a lot of money on the table to do that my entire career in the cultural sector 30-something years now has been filled with diminishing budgets and worry about where the next dollar or euro is going to come from there is so much money on the table to help the world make this transition for those who are willing to go out and and do the work every there's a human absolutely a human rights driver here people have the right as individuals to determine the kind of world they want to live in there are very few organizations platforms conveners who can help people fulfill that right it is absolutely a right and maybe in q&a I'll talk about this one but I think basically the normal way that society is supposed to work with government and journalism and law and the carceral system and civil society working together exchanging knowledge and know how the world is changing too quickly sometimes intentionally people are trying to move it too quickly to break us for that normal handoff of responsibilities to work so this requires everyone who cares about society to have to do one more thing take one more risk be more opinionated have an opinion make an assertion draw your communities into focus on something that maybe they don't want to do it's not fair that we have to do one more thing but nobody said it was going to have to be fair but the last real question I think I'll ask I'll put on the table for you to ask among yourselves is what is what is consequential let's say we can muster ourselves to to actually to act we can rouse ourselves to act or we're looking for something to do what actually can we accomplish that's consequential I'm going to switch over to a little full screen mode here and that looks like that hi yeah so what is consequential what kinds of actions matter educate yourself I've got Neil Dash great essay about the web we lost the web we want first step is to know your SHIT know your shit and it's all out there I'm listing you know I have a list of the books and references up on my site it's in the chat there's so much amazing wonderful wonderful stuff to read to know I'm no freaking genius I'm not a scholar I just start just start reading is a great joy in some of this some of this material and information not easy but once you start to have a coherent pattern once you start to gain confidence in what this world looks like and how it fits together it actually becomes easier not harder you begin to understand where you are I think a lot of its pattern recognition and when you get burned out on all the all the you know the difficulty when you start pining check out and read some good pulp fiction these are two two of my favorites from the last couple months if you're all out of monster lesbian coffee shop fiction definitely read legends and lattes hard hard recommend move your work from symbolic to impactful lots of great examples of that something that starts with an experiment add a little bit add a little bit add a little bit becomes a campaign and bigger end I'll talk and talk about later now a lot of this doesn't work until you get a lot of people doing it more more people more hours is much more important now than the perfect design the freaking scouts boy scouts and girl scouts of the world just accomplished giving two billion hours of their effort towards the sustainable development goals and they pledged another four they pledged to reach four in the next couple years if they can do two billion hours of effort we can get some stuff done too I am so out of time but there is some wonderful wonderful important work to do European city of science with the free beer I will leave you on two final thoughts one is Tom Pravda one of the founders of avaz.com and a British diplomat speaking here in a informal basis proposed to us at a workshop in Leiden and in your go said actually the social problems caused by the climate emergency will be worse than are likely to be worse than the climate emergency itself if we let the problems of climate change force us apart and create divisions that in itself will become even more significant than the climate crisis they will dwarf the climate problem itself solidarity getting more people aware informed in acting these start to feel like things that I know that our sector can accomplish without too much problem these are consequential things that we can accomplish and finally I think we need to become friends with the world of activism I feel that I've been miseducated all of my life I was taught to think that over here was over here as being a good citizen paying my taxes reading the newspaper writing my elected representatives talking with my neighbors and then right next to it over here was anarchy throwing throwing trash cans through shop windows and setting buses on fire with nothing in between there was no repertoire between being passive good supporting power and anarchy and I was wrong I was so wrong I've been so poorly educated there's actually this beautiful rich world of actions possible between illegal violent harmful dangerous physical violence and basically doing nothing or serving power and the more I learn about this thing the more I learn about things like craftivism the more I realize that I as a strategist and a human being and a thinker and a collaborator have really undervalued underappreciated the repertoire of activism and if you start reading about this a little bit you will become feel that you can do this too so I should just wrap it the hell up I I've gone long how to make up for that but let me I'm going to fancify my screen and give it back to Elizabeth for I guess we've got time for a couple of questions I hope I hope and I sincerely do want to hear from you if you're interested in this and I hope to see you all and talk to you soon I want to learn from you Elizabeth hello Michael thank you so much this this was wonderful I mean as you said early on massive massive challenges really deep stuff that you're talking about here and I completely agree with your notion that it is the greatest challenge that we will likely ever face so thank you so much for being willing to dive into this I know we do have a couple questions I do want to reiterate though that we are happy to invite you on stage to discuss to ask your questions live just let us know if you have a question if you'd like to jump on stage and we will enable your camera but if for technical or otherwise reasons if that's not possible then of course I can also read out your questions allowed but I also I mean this this was early on but I found this the story that you shared earlier about the beehive really sweet I kept picturing this beehive kind of as a metaphor throughout throughout your discussion and I was just wondering because you know you mentioned spending time on this beehive when we have this fascinating and challenging world that we could be dealing with have you been able to pinpoint any beehives in your day to day work? Oh my gosh yeah so and let me be really clear we can do both like you need to do the beehives we need to do we need to collect the bees we need to do basic long-term slow science but I've made a link to provided a link to a presentation of mine called Think Big Start Small Move Fast that makes the argument that within that slow and patient repertoire that we're so comfortable with there's a lot of wasted time there's a lot of things that can be sped up um so so absolutely we tend my my uh experience has been that when you drop a big idea into a room I was uh working on a on a strategy project with a national uh a national gallery but one of the biggest in the world and someone put on the table the idea that they should do a basically like a big community crowdsourced national portrait kind of like flicker or image-sharing before that thing existed and that you involve every family in America and here this big huge thing and after we went through workshopping that idea and committee you know post-it notes you can picture the whole thing what came out of the other end was we'll do a website about family portraits and that to me really epitomizes the way we kind of down sample we down sample the big audacious vision on the other side of the wall that's so like there are already people on doing that on the other side of the wall what's the guy humans of New York great example right great also also a great example of moving from symbolic to impactful you know they became communities they became fundraising projects they became a non-profit amazing story exactly what I'm talking about um so we tend to down to discount Daniel Kahneman also says we have a bias if we're faced with a problem that's we find difficult to solve we substitute an easier problem for it without noticing we've done so so instead of you know gigascale wildly revolutionary and uncontrollable disruptive America portrait thing we're going to do a very controlled website on our little comfortable garden on this side of the wall and we'll check the check box we've done social media today you know we've done that thing we tell the board I think being aware of that pattern of behavior and calling timeout feeling that you're empowered in your institution to call that timeout doesn't mean you can't start with that safe thing but you have that design intent to to actually do something consequential more and more consequential not every and not every time out of the out of the door has to be you know the best thing that ever happened in the world happens over time happens through patience and persistence yeah yeah and and risk of course too it's I mean every time you take that leap it might not always turn out the way you want but it's a learning process so and I think that's the hardest thing I think the hardest thing about the way we're going to live our lives hopefully our nice long beautiful lives together Elizabeth all of you is is this moment requires all of us to do something more but well none of us are ever going to know very almost none of us are going to know with certainty whether that was the thing that helped you know Greta Thunbury the rare human being who got to see a very symbolic action turn into something that's scaled and really has changed the courses of the world but most of us will never know we're going to have to go to our graves not knowing whether our thing mattered or will ever but we have to do it anyways and that's a very feels like a very feels like that feels like the world we live in now to me yeah I have to say that's also very I think that's a very comforting notion as well though you know because even even if in the moment maybe you feel like you failed you can't know to which degree you contributed to the solution I like that anyone yeah so let me let me pull up another question from the chat real quick so the question here is could you talk more about the relationship between trust in our institutions and stepping up our advocacy you mentioned spending some of our current trust and the question here is trust at risk or can it be enriched that is I love whoever you are be an experienced on me great question I think I think beginning when people started doing things on mass online we've noticed that the equation by which the public calculates trust has is changing and actually Kathy Sierra's got a great line on this she said the old job of a brand in the old paradigm was you know by our soap because we're great by our car because we're great and in this new dynamic new as of 2005 six seven in the new dynamic it's it's by our soap follow us visit our museum because we help you be great and that dynamic comes with it an insistence an expectation that the brand the museum is transparent and forthcoming and accessible I had a colleague visit from New Zealand once who said your online museums this would be 2012 something are so welcoming and connected and open to me online and in person not at all like not at all I'm calculating my trust of you based on how much you're willing to to to be in my shared in our to have a shared world together online so that old calculation of trust is a zero sum game and the purse is getting smaller every day I would say and I think I ran out of time to include this in the show but there's was just an article in the Washington Post I'll put it up on the website later about the way that journalism is recalibrating this the old style is to be the voice from nowhere to be neutral you know well museums are not neutral really blew that one out of the water didn't they there is no neutral and I think it's incumbent on conveners now particularly Greta Thunberg said the bigger your carbon footprint the bigger your responsibility to act the bigger your platform the bigger your responsibility to act strongly it's up to us to help set the agenda with our communities and that requires risk that's spending a little bit of our trust you know if you can't spend your trust trust is like having a check you can't cash yeah it's worthless and there's so many amazing examples in f-ups Holocaust Museum in DC the hide and seek exhibition at the Smithsonian every time yeah so yeah I mean I I agree that it is becoming thinner and thinner and more obstacles with maintaining this level of trust I mean I know you didn't have enough time to dive into you know everything in detail but with with the way things are spanning also I mean I'm just thinking like you know deep fake technologies and stuff like that and the impact that that can have on already diminishing trust in our institutions and so so let me let me actually let me riff on that for a second I'm glad you brought that up I think since I've been in the museum biz everyone trots out the study doesn't such survey that says museums are the most trusted institutions or libraries are the most trusted and your curators are the most trusted professionals but I think we really need to call bullshit on that or ask for more they're trusted museums are trusted but trusted to do what you know trusted to kind of do the same old safe shit maybe not trusted to tell you something that you might not have want to have heard today or to challenge you or to challenge the community trustedness by itself like is not if we're trying to understand the museum sector for the purpose of doing something I think we really need to dive deeper on this notion that we're trusted I don't think we're anywhere near as trusted as we think we are yeah I mean I'm sure it really depends on you know what you're qualifying there yeah absolutely and whether or not what we're being trusted to do is what we really need to do is two very different questions I do have another question if I know we're a bit over time but at least one more perhaps I'll be here till I run out of oxygen in this one it's your it's your event so tell me tell me when it's time to go okay so so the next question we have here is you referred to the fuzzy notion of culture earlier earlier on I believe how might museums become bridges that mindfully connect institutionalized culture and living culture with a focus on cultural adaptation yeah that's exactly I mean yes yes yes I and you know don't don't get me wrong I you know I love going to the National Gallery I'm a painter and a print maker by training if I'm trained in anything I mean I love to go to a nice city and go into the art museum and walk down the halls and see all the beautiful paintings and not have anybody preaching to me about this that I really think that's great I think this is a place where I think digital has a lot to to teach us and there's another talk where I laid out the evidence that I've on slide my slide share called dark matter if you pick almost any topic that any museum says we're the expert at or good at you can basically do a Google search or a web search on that and exclude your own website from that term and you will I've been doing this for kind of 15 years almost always find unbelievably huge vital fascinating communities already doing the thing with great verve and dedication and quality like we didn't think anyone outside the academy could have quality so I think big part of the exercise is to interrogate why we think our canon of culture is valuable in the first place and if the answer we come up with is something that almost never we're the experts at we're not even really necessarily good at it but people in our so-called community are community with long distance locals that can be somebody in the other side of the world or next door so I can tell I'm babbling a little bit but the I think the first tactical exercise is to flip the script a little bit and instead of saying what can we do to perpetuate canonical state culture because of XYZ and instead what can we do to help people connect with the things that they love and care about and understand there's another great example I could talk about from the Urban Institute that's in a couple of those slides shows that I talked about you know people space making and community building I think it was yeah yeah and it's you know it's already there yeah we just have to help absolutely yeah well I will give one more opportunity for questions if anyone does want to jump on stage and if not I would have one personal last question if that's fine so you mentioned briefly this confidence building that needs to take place this is something that I guess we should be working on while we're tending to these gardens what would you say is like a question that one can ask themselves or perhaps a sign that they might be getting close to making the jump over the wall um well I think I think being I mean mindfulness sounds like a cop out but have a have a meeting you know put that Zuckerman quadrant up on a wall in your next sort of team meeting haul out draw the big freaking wall and chalk on the floor and stand around and talk about where you are in relationship to it I think the more you're talking about the actual lives people are living in their communities at the Museum of Solutions any problem they have I just fell in love with that team they said any question we have any problem we have our first instinct is to go and talk to people and they mean everybody they talk to everybody and what I find is that the I start to develop I start to hear patterns in the way people talk and think about the ideas that mean a lot to them and my own confidence arises from that and over the course of a year or two I begin to develop a hypothesis a working model of what needs to be done based on that in it it Malcolm Gladwell's 10,000 hours was a bit overstated and has been undermined I think but the basic idea begin you must begin we learn by doing and I'm going to drop into chat if it goes I don't think it goes to everybody but climatethings.org HDTPS slash slash climatethings.org are two initiatives that we're starting for us cultural sector in our communities to try and build up especially the project called 23 climate things built on a venerable web 2.0 training program that came from the library sector that we will learn how to do this and build our confidence and our comfort with and for each other we learn best when we learn from each other and we learn best by doing so with the 23 climate things project I think this is something coming soon to a website and community and friend near you we can learn this together so maybe that's a great place to end yeah a great place and a great place to begin as well for us all to get started nice working on this together yes absolutely thanks thanks thanks great thank you thanks for having me yes and thank you so much for for leading this this was really wonderful thank you so much for your time and thank you to everyone who joined us really such a pleasure to have you with us in discussing these massive challenges in front of us that we all need to get acting on together so think big start small move fast excellent all right thank you so much bye bye bye everyone