Thirty minutes every month every employee works directly with visitors in the museum. A micro shift on the gallery floor.  The marketing intern, the IT director, even (nay, especially) the CEO.

Know your visitors.  Meet your visitors.  Watch your visitors.  Overhear your visitors casually make dismissive jokes to each other about your life’s work.  It’s important for staff, all staff, to remember what the product is.  (Not what the product aspires to be in your membership mailers.  What the product is.)  The most difficult and important step in problem solving is problem identifying.  And the problems that matter are the problems that visitors have with your museum.  (And, sister, there are lots.  Brother, get started.)

The goal of a good museum is to be a good museum.  And if a good museum gives you money by the hour, that is a goal that should be on your personal radar.  It is no use to have cubiclefulls of creative problem solvers if you don’t point them at the right problems.  Does your IT department think about how they can proactively invent tools to enable museum professionals to make a better museum?  Please.  They don’t even wonder what a “museum professional” does all day (besides jam the printer and forget his email password.)

If your employees mutiny, you didn’t implement it right.  Working in a museum is neato; that’s why you’re not making twice as much for the same work at Verizon.  Caring about whether or not you work for a good museum is rewarding.  The pitch is: “Our museum sucks and we want our best minds on the floor figuring out why.”  You may tweak the wording.  And don’t give me “not-a-people-person.”  Your Photoshop guy can put on a clean shirt and be pleasant for half-an-hour a month.

Get good minds and get them museum-oriented.  The first part is useless without the second.