Introduction
The Museum Leadership Institute is a globally recognized leadership program presented by The Getty Leadership Institute. The MLI is delivered as a three-week intensive residence in collaboration with Claremont Graduate University, and prepares creative leaders for the next step in managing a museum organization.
In this installment of the trending series, we examine how the concepts of Lean Startup can be incorporated into an interactive build of the collaborative learning management system needed to support the hybrid MLI delivery for 2014 and beyond.
Vision
The Lean Startup philosophy of “measuring progress in the context of extreme uncertainty” works well for the MLI project (Ries 2011). The residence has traditionally been three weeks long. Upon arrival, students are issued a printed binder with all the materials they will need for the course. Several questions arise when discussing what to build for MLI in order to support the residence with technology.
- Will this be a simple digitization of the printed materials?
- Will there be a public as well as private facing aspect to the site content?
- Will there be a need for students to collaborate and work socially through the materials?
- Will there be a need for post-institute follow up in terms of activities, content and alumni connectivity?
The authors describe the three aspects of startups and how they play out over time. The vision of what will remain more constant over time. The strategy may need to evolve, or pivot, as we build and learn about what works and what our customers need. The product will experience the most change as we build new features and optimize existing features to address new requirements.
Validated learning will allow our team to demonstrate progress during the build phase. The authors note that while learning can often be an excuse for failing to meet project expectations, being proactive about putting a measurement system in place early allows us to demonstrate positive results empirically (Ries 2011).
The vision for MLI is to create a digital experience that facilitates collaboration and sharing before and during the residence. Moving forward, this same environment would become both a platform and catalyst for ongoing engagement between alumni and with the outside world. The MLI digital presence would therefore become a thought leadership hub where new art leaders can be inspired, and potentially become GLI and MLI attendees, and where MLI alumni can grow and expand through social engagement, mentorship and collaboration with other museum thought leaders.
Leveraging the concepts of Lean Startup, an iterative approach would begin with building the basic digital engagement path that includes the following:
- Create an account and build a profile other cohorts will view.
- Upload PDF documents for students to download.
- Create web pages for other non-PDF content.
- Create a small set of short videos introducing students to the MLI and topics to be covered.
A more robust strategy as we build and learn from the initial effort is to manage curated news feeds, social sharing and commenting, and ways for students to engage beyond the institute.
Steer and Accelerate
The Build-Measure-Learn feedback loop is an instructive approach to measuring our progress along the way. As we build out each of the components of the digital engagement, we can employ techniques for gathering qualitative as well as quantitative data about how well our design meets user needs. Breaking down the overall app into smaller components enables our team to use testing approaches (e.g., Five Second Test), surveys and analytics to determine how easily users are able to complete the associated tasks.
Our measures would eventually lead us to the question of whether our strategy is the right strategy. If we find that a digitization of printed materials, for example, is good but users are expecting something more social and supplemental, then we would need to pivot our strategy and determine what those new requirements are.
This measure is done on what is called the Minimum Viable Product – the smallest unit of working product needed to deliver and measure results towards the product vision. Involving the client through requirements gathering sessions and demos will be critical to testing our concepts even before we have built code. As we build functionality, the learnings will become richer and more informative as we move towards creating a digital platform to support the future of MLI.
Article References
Ries, E. (2011). The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses. New York: Random House.
