The museum field is full of fear, and not the fun kind.
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Who's afraid this season? Let's count a few:
- User manuals are like ouija boards, left unused in a dusty box until brought out into the light.
- Bosses and leaders are afraid of that new boogeyman, the Great Resignation. And it's getting worse! (But—like a monster not really dead, are regretful workers going to ask for their old jobs back?)
- Leaders should also look out for the demon of power-driven corruption. (This wouldn't be a problem if more workers had more power, right?)
- Speaking of demons, here's my piece from earlier this year about whether museum workers need a productivity imp.
- What if passion in the museum field is overrated? Scary for any leader in a mission-driven sector.
- Why do we see ghosts anyway? I have my own theories about genetic predispositions to believing in the unseen, which is sort of mentioned in this piece.
- No link, but I thought that my institution, The Met, should have used the Breuer building for a themed haunted house. An opportunity missed.
- My generation, X, is afraid of the current job market.
- Changing workplace culture is frightening. Read this NOBL article which isn't afraid to talk about how culture change is felt and dealt with emotionally and how people resist loss.
- Afraid of climate change? Better get ready to change your eating habits.
- Spend a spooky night in a graveyard for liberal democracy.
- Finally, the current ghasts (if you played D&D you know that these creatures are a more powerful subset of ghouls), surrounding hybrid work schemes like so many Dementors, are the supply-chain nightmares of insufficient tech for workers to be productive both at home and the office.
Enjoy the links and Happy Halloween!
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cover photo by Sabina Music Rich / Unsplash [description: a human skeleton arranged to look like it is screaming]
Links of the Week: October 29, 2021: Museum Field Scares by Robert J Weisberg is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
