the funding for TWM that the service was being given its last chance to put its house in order, or dire consequences would follow – in effect, the probable collapse of the “joint service” arrangement entered into by the five Tyne and Wear local authorities.
The febrile atmosphere at the time was captured in a Museums Journal article entitled “Lifting the Fog on the Tyne” (Davies 1991). Having been created as a joint local authority service in 1986, TWM was unstable, and had already been condemned by the Museums and Galleries Commission in 1988 as “unworkable.” I recall one northeast museum director described TWM at the time as a “critically injured patient.” Nonetheless, a series of attempts had been made to stabilize the beleaguered museum service, which led to a new staff structure in 1990, though this had been done in such a way that a senior member of TWM staff commented that “someone had a vision of how it’s all supposed to work, but they didn’t tell me.”
Within weeks of this article appearing in print, a second Museums Journal article appeared entitled “All Change at Tyne and Wear Museums Service” (Murdin 1991). This described the latest upheavals that resulted in my appointment as director. While this is all now seems like ancient history, the point is that TWM was able to go on from the unhappy situation in 1991 to become, over the next ten years, arguably, the most successful of all UK local authority museum services. The potential that many observers recognized in TWM needed to be unlocked. How did this happen, and what role was played in the TWM saga by a new mission, new values and a re-envisioning?2 First and foremost, I believed that what TWM needed was a change in its “culture”: namely, “the shared assumptions, beliefs, values and norms of an organisation, which shape patterns of behaviour” (Fleming 1993). In an address to the Museums Association Conference in 1993, I explained that TWM had had “a major change of philosophy” that meant we saw “the museum as an agent of social change” (1993).3 In a 1994 lecture, I said:
I believe that museums should play an active role in society, and engage with as many people as possible. This means breaking down those barriers, which museums themselves have erected, which dissuade too many people from using museums … I believe that museums in towns and cities have an important role to play in combating societal decay, in encouraging disadvantaged groups of people to increase their understanding of their environment. Because I believe this, I have made it my business to change the culture of Tyne and Wear Museums. (Fleming 1994)
It seems obvious to me now that, at the time, we were groping toward a new mission for TWM, but my instinct was that what we really needed was a change in attitudes and behaviors, which I described as “culture.” I spoke of using the reorganization of a museum to “change culture,” of recruiting new staff, and promoting others, who would “carry the new culture,” of using modern management techniques to “lever in culture change” (Fleming 1994).
I still believe this. There is nothing more pointless than a mission that is not based on attitudes and behaviors, as well as beliefs and values. Without culture change a demoralized museum service such as TWM could never have thrived. One member of TWM staff wrote to me on the eve of his retirement and referred to the “amazing job” we had done at TWM, which, he wrote “was doomed without your intervention. The apathy was writ large for all to see.”4 The problems that had to be confronted were insularity, departmentalism, negativity, lack of ambition, and lack of realism. I felt that we had to reinvigorate TWM, and give it a new sense of purpose and direction. We had to learn how to cope with change, and take control of our destiny. We needed a mission.
But in order to create a workable and worthwhile mission, we had to understand the context in which TWM was operating. The Tyne and Wear area was characterized by widespread urban poverty, arising out of the post-industrial collapse of the local economy: coalmining, shipbuilding, and heavy engineering were all things of the past. Museums do not exist in vacuums; rather they are functions of contemporary society, and need to key into what is going on around them. This is why it is so important to conduct research on audiences, existing and potential. Consider the question: “If you do not understand the audience, how do you know what to do tomorrow?” This is a rhetorical question I have posed a number of times at National Museums Liverpool (NML), where at the beginning of the twenty-first century it seemed to me that we had not done sufficient to learn about our audience.
It took time to crystallize a mission at TWM. It always does, if it’s done with rigor. More urgent was the need to improve morale and bring about behavioral change. This involved a range of changes; breaking down of artificial barriers; creating new staff structures, new line management, some new posts; and switching resources between operational areas. In the early days of effecting culture change, the senior management team had to be dictatorial. There was nothing optional about the changes, although there were people who resisted it. My new management team had to steam ahead, as we felt we had no time to spare if we were to save TWM. This concentrated our minds wonderfully. Nonetheless, this approach can only be sustained for a limited period, and sensing the right time to ease off and adopt a more inclusive style of management is crucial to the successful implementation of culture change.
The importance of supportive governance needs to be stressed. Museums always have governing bodies, whether they are local authorities or a board of trustees, and culture change is impossible without their agreement. At TWM our governing body was the Joint Museums Committee, a body made up of elected councillors from the five local authorities of Tyne and Wear. It was the potential threat of these five authorities ending the joint funding agreement that always hung over TWM like the Sword of Damocles.
In fact, the Committee could not have been more supportive.5 The councillors welcomed the improvements that the new culture brought about. In particular, they could hardly fail to notice that visitor numbers began to increase as we invigorated the museum service with education work, capital developments, an increasingly varied exhibitions program, and a new emphasis on attracting non- traditional audiences and on professional marketing and fundraising.6 In 1994 TWM was cited as a success in that year’s Newcastle Labour Party Election Manifesto: an extraordinary turnaround, and proof that successful museums can prosper even in the most skeptical political environment.7 Anecdotal evidence and independent evaluation has confirmed that the revamped museum service has been successful in terms of social impact and other factors (Calzia et al. 2005).8
Committee support meant that we could take risks. And one of our biggest risks was to take over the management of the Hancock Museum from Newcastle University, which subsequently became the core of the Great North Museum. This was a major undertaking that could have gone wrong in so many ways, but in fact the new arrangements led to significant gains for the Hancock (including increased profile, audience growth, several awards, and improved fundraising) and a huge amount of credit for TWM (Great North Museum 2013). Moreover, assuming management responsibility for the Hancock meant that TWM staff were exposed to all manner of new practices and issues, and our success in turning around the museum’s fortunes acted as a demonstration of how good TWM could be, and a motivational example. It became a catalyst for change elsewhere in TWM.
During the 1990s, as TWM developed into a radical and effective museum service, we developed a written set of documents that culminated in our Statement of Purpose and Beliefs. Along the way we wrote a number of mission statements. The (rather clunky) one from 1995 reads: “Tyne and Wear Museums assembles and protects evidence of human and environmental development in Tyne and Wear and, where appropriate, elsewhere; and provides the fullest access to that
