I call it the scarcity mentality trap. It has spread in all museums at the speed of light since the pandemic. The logic of ‘There is no resources (i.e. money) for more’. With this, we have justified massive layoffs, overloading work teams to the point of making them sick or leaving them, and above all, it is seen as logical and natural to decide and act in ‘survival mode’ without any possibility of imagining, innovating, or thinking differently... to live with purpose and dignity instead of survive. This is the zombie big trap-tomb. One day we will know the true extent of this hamster wheel mentality we have got ourselves into. The priority seems to be able to keep going round and round for another day. At whatever human cost. Even all we know that the wheel will stop sooner or later.
Last night I attended the session organized by MuseumExpert.org where Walter Staveloz, Laura Lott, Micah Parzen, and Anne W. Ackerson presented the provisional results of a survey conducted in the museum sector in the USA with 530 responses on the barriers that professionals encounter in order to carry out their work properly. The data are overwhelming. At all levels of the organization, there is a hegemony of the ‘Keep doing things in survival mode’ mentality.
Cultural Inquiry was born in this context precisely to support museums that are caught in the trap of the survival mental model to get out of the Hamster wheel. A mental model based on scarcity and transactionalism that forces us to cannibalise each other, in a stupid struggle of all against all. It is doing so by facilitating new mental maps, tools, and capacity building based on abundance, on mutual care, on the joy of reconnecting with the inner child and from there with your co-workers and the community, creating a new language and a new storytelling.
The recorded session will be available soon on MuseumExpert's YouTube channel and is highly recommended.
https://lnkd.in/dyB4DRAa
