By Janus Boye
Michael Peter Edson is a strategist and consultant working at the intersection of technology, culture, and global social change.
“We all carry within us a set of assumptions about what is “normal” in our professional disciplines. But the realities of 2023 - including the climate emergency, armed conflict in Europe, and global technological and social change reveal gaps and flaws in the assumed boundaries of our work.
What are our obligations in this new world? What do we think digital technology is and does today? And how can our work become more consequential in an epoch of disruption and rapid change?“
- Michael Peter Edson
In a recent member call, digital cultural strategist Michael Peter Edson hosted a short talk and discussion, where he drew on 20 years of work at the forefront of digital transformation in culture and society. Michael was the Director of Web and New Media Strategy for the Smithsonian Institution, the world’s largest museum and research complex, based in Washington, DC; co-founder of the Museum for the United Nations; and has just been named Director of the Museum of Solutions, Mumbai.
With big questions used to frame the call, Michael in the call took us through quite some stories and started with another big and appropriate question.
What does it really mean to be a professional?
During the past decade, Michael has been thinking deeply about what it means to be engaged in work that impacts work at scale.
As a digital cultural strategist he’s beginning to see some patterns emerge, which impacts how work should look like, but before we get to these patterns, Michael shared a few examples from his childhood and career themed around one of my personal favorite questions ‘what is normal?’:
Drawing on a childhood memory growing up in the DC area, back when the word ‘online’ had no meaning, his mother looked up the Smithsonian in the yellow pages and called them to take a look at a basketball sized beehive in their garten. The friendly guy from the museum came to his house on a bus and took the bees back to the museum. As Michael said: Someone decided that it was a good use of resources for the world’s largest museum, education and research complex to have a person on staff to collect local beehives, while also doing all the other things.
Fast forward to the time around “9-11” 2001, when Michael was working at the Smithsonian and sensed excitement at the potential of digitalisation. Throughout the business, people were high on the belief that open information and communities could help citizens to understand the world and make wise decisions about the future. But when terrorists crashed airplanes into the World Trade Center in New York, Pennsylvania, and the Pentagon outside Washington, D.C. museums and cultural institutions like the Smithsonian were reluctant to get involved. As he said: “Someone, somewhere decided that our museums had nothing to say about 9-11, one of the most significant events in American history, and today many digital leaders are still waiting for museums to get involved in contemporary issues.”
In 2008, Michael curated the Smithsonian 2.0 conference and rocket scientist Bran Ferran stood on stage and openly wondered when museum leaders decided to translate the mission of their institutions to mean “having museums full of shit on the wall” in Washington DC. In other words, how do we decide what’s normal and what’s not.
In 2017 Trump pulled the US out of the Paris Agreement on climate change mitigation and when that happened, Michael did a survey shortly afterwards on how that changed things at about 30 cultural institutions. Interestingly, when the responses came back it was really business as usual. In the days and weeks after Trump’s declaration the big news on the Natural History Museum in London website was their big exhibit on Mummies and in Chicago the Field Museum was still selling tickets to their butterflies exhibit as if nothing had changed. He couldn’t really find anyone grappling with the big challenge. Instead, and perhaps surprisingly, Michael saw organisations like American online publication Teen Vogue killing it with exceptional journalism, the Steak-umm sandwich brand with their piercing digital presence and also the Weather Channel delivering facts about the climate emergency. So these commercial companies surprisingly decided it was normal for them to do something, while other institutions whose missions were closely tied to climate and the environment did not.
So what’s normal for work and what’s not? Following these milestones, Michael moved onto the patterns that are shaping work. Let’s look at the first one
The Big Frikin’ Wall
Firstly, Michael pointed us to a concept initially coined by American programming instructor and game developer Kathy Sierra called The Big Frikin’ Wall.
As Kathy said:
Inside every organisation there’s a big frikin’ wall
On one side is normal work and on the other is the work we should be doing. Michael relayed Sierra’s insight that, you can get to the wall with careful incremental change, tweaking around the edges, but you can’t really get on the other side.
Michael shared this simple illustration of a big wall during our conversation - it’s adapted from Kathy Sierra’s work. For more, see usingdata.com/usingdata/a-selection-of-awesome-graphics-about-user
Given the pace of change today, a mentor of Michael once told him, that if you are not racing towards and through that wall each and every day, then the wall is likely to be racing further away from you.
Michael has been using this image for a couple of years in conversations with museum directors and other senior leaders to talk about the work they ought to be doing and the work they are doing. One memorably said:
Yeah this resonates. We love to plant little garten’s on the left side of the wall, but how do you get to the other side?
Inner dialogue with our practice
The second pattern that Michael is seeing is a realisation that we all have an inner dialogue with own, internal “sense of practice” around the topic of what’s normal.
To quote American writer Clay Shirky:
“Institutions are like frozen decisions”
Michael interprets this as meaning that your staff shouldn’t have to reinvent the core purpose of your organisation from first principles on the way to work every morning, but the problem is that the way we govern things is really designed and built for a world where we could lock our assumptions down for 10 - 20 years.
Going a bit further back, Michael cited famous science writer William Gibson for saying that when he first started writing in the 1960’s you had time to build plausible futures, but today the distance you have to work with a construct has shrunk to almost a news cycle.
Similarly, our sense of practice is based on the education and training that many of us had decades ago. That training was based on practices going back an additional decade or two, so essentially many of us are trained on concepts and understanding rooted in a time before much before the Web and even much of it even predating the European Union.
How might we update our sense of practice, so that when we ask it hard questions, like what do we do when the US President pulls out of a big international agreement, it comes back with a better answer. Similarly today with big questions around the ethics of AI and monetising attention what can our practices offer rather than just being mute and continuing with business as usual?
The handoff between sectors of society
The final pattern is around what Michael described using handoff as the keyword.
To quote:
Our Western society is built on the idea that we have different sectors that do different jobs, information and responsibility moves between them.
To illustrate this, he went back to the Watergate scandal in the early 70’s and described the orderly way the world was supposed to work back then:
Law enforcement and journalism were supposed to expose a problem
Journalists would then fit the news into print
Lawmakers would respond with potential new legislation
The judicial system would respond in a certain way
Voters would take the information and act on it locally and nationally
Today, it doesn’t work like that. Now, the handoff between sectors of society, is as Michael called it, is broken. The paradigm of education and museology in the US is still based on this notion of sharing information in a world that’s relatively stable so that over 20 and 30 years, the children will become better informed adults. That still happens, but according to Michael it is inadequate for a moment, where change happens so quickly — often faster than our institutions and communities can react. Like incidents with the Facebook - Cambridge Analytica data scandal a decade ago and now the entire discussion around artificial intelligence right now.
If you believe that the handoff is broken, Michael says that it calls on every actor in the system to take on a little more responsibility for achieving positive societal outcomes. Michael pointed to both journalism and business that they’ve had to take more risks with neutrality, e.g. to fight misinformation and really everyone has to do a little more.
Break down the wall using what’s sometimes called activism
Summarising on the gaps and flaws in the traditional boundaries of our work, and reflecting on the definition of normal, Michael pointed out that many of us have been miseducated about our own agency and our ability to make change.
As Michael said, he was really educated with a belief of two simple choices, aligned right next to each other on how to behave.
You could either be a good citizen, pay taxes, read the newspaper and perhaps occasionally write to your congressman.
Or, you could throw bricks through shop windows, set cars on fire and attend riots in the streets
What Michael has recently realised is that there’s an “incredible glorious repertoire”, sometimes called activism, that almost nobody knows about, but really is all about agency and the ability to drive positive change. Activism is often misunderstood, but it’s a goldmine to teach us how and why to behave tactically to make our business and communities more sustainable and thrill and delight our customers.
In the Q&A, we looked a bit more about how to get on the other side of the wall. It all comes down to change, eventually, as Michael said. He did share two thoughts that might help:
Everybody has a boss. In his conversations throughout the years, he has heard many say that they would have liked to do more change, that they couldn’t be activistic, as they had a boss who would disapprove. Up and down the organisational chart, and also in government, where politicians say they might like to do more but for the will of voters, Michael has heard the story over and over again. Michael found that there’s a problem with our knowhow about activism or agency, but models like the wall can be good tools for having constructive conversations with your teams about how they are empowered to take action in new ways.
Confidence can get you far. Much of what stops us at the wall is a lack of confidence about the moment we are in. As Michael has watched people learn more about topics such as climate change and what their peers are doing in that field, the wall actually kind of dissolves. There’s no magic act needed, and there are often people on the other side of the wall that you can go join. Clayton Christensen is widely recognised as among the world’s top management thinkers and in his work on disruptive innovation, he found that some organisations are very unlikely to disrupt their own safe practice and rather than disrupting the established organisation, it might be better to do a thing on the side, in order to increase confidence and drive the change in your team members, while still relying on the established organisation.
In closing, Michael also suggested that “how we compose our teams” can be thought of as a design variable that can create a big impact. Diversity and inclusion, also when it comes to having younger team members, can help your team break through the wall. As he said “Young people don’t have all the answers either”, but good organisational design will make sure your team avoids the usual blind spots.
Learn more about how innovation begins within
Back in February 2023, Michael challenged participants in a webinar hosted by the Network of European Museum Organisations and made them think about the role of museums and their purpose in the modern age. He concretised the discussions by focusing on how museums deal with the climate emergency, a topic he finds to act as a kind of x-ray on museum practice.
Michael was on stage at a European museum conference in Portugal in late 2022 - giving a keynote appropriately titled: “Dangerous creations: The inspiring new reality of museum practice”. Photo: Jorge Gomes.
This webinar build on his well-received keynote speech at the 2022 NEMO European Museum Conference in Loulé, Portugal. The keynote was titled: “Dangerous creations: The inspiring new reality of museum practice”
Also, on the Museum Next website, you can find a blog post that has more on this topic, including getting over the wall. See Culture, activism and the Big Frikin’ Wall: in conversation with Michael Peter Edson.
Photo from the opening of the Boye Aarhus 2011 conference. Michael Edson on the left, Aarhus mayor Jacob Bundsgaard in middle and Janus Boye on the right.
You might also remember Michael Edson as our keynote speaker at the Boye Aarhus 2011 conference. His talk back then was called ‘Going boldly into the present’ and was all about our changing relationship with “the future” and how organisations, governments, and businesses should adjust the way they think about strategy, planning, and work.
Finally, learn more about Michael on his blog and website and you can also lean back and enjoy the recording from the call. There were no slides, except the wall illustration shown above.