By Milton J. Bloch

This article was published in Museum News May/June 2005.

Creating mission statements has become something of an international cottage industry. Google, the Internet search engine, lists more than 8 million references to the phrase “mission statement” and 1,600 entries under “how to write a mission statement.” There are many books on the subject and innumerable consultants stand ready to help. We are advised that a mission statement provides an organization with its enduring focus, reason for being, guiding light, stepping-stone, motivational statement, ethical position, primary goals and objectives, meaning, focus, challenge, and passion.

For some time, however, I have been accumulating doubts about mission statements and whether they do, or can, perform the heroic functions ascribed to them.

First let me present my I-am-not-a-crank credentials. Over the past 38 years I have been the director of four museums and currently lead a multicultural institute with a fine museum at its center. I have helped develop mission statements for all of them. I also have conducted accreditation and MAP visits for more than 20 years and recently received an award from AAM for outstanding peer review service. I believe in and support the peer review program, but I have begun to wonder about the utility of applying the mission statement yardstick to my accreditation and assessment visits.

A hypothetical example: If I never visited the Seaport Whaling Museum I would still expect it to have a collection of whaling memorabilia from the relevant era with information and educational programs on the history of whaling and possibly an extended contextual exposition about the area. I would be surprised if the mission statement did not refer to collecting whaling materials and other related objects in this town. If I asked a passerby about this museum’s mission or purpose, even if he had never been inside, his answer might be: “They have a lot of things about whaling for people who like that stuff.” As crude as I have tried to make that sound, it is not very far from being a workable mission statement. If I make an accreditation visit to this museum, short of finding an exhibition about martial arts or a class in tax preparation I will, more than likely, affirm that its activities conform to its mission. And so it is with county or state historical museums, natural history, art, or any other museums. They know what they do for a living and they do it. Their mission statements will nearly always reflect this as well.

The explanation is simple enough. Mission statements typically are created after the fact. That is, they are nearly always retrofitted to describe the operation and seldom set out in advance to shape it. For example, if a museum specializes in works of contemporary North American art and a donor gives it a wonderful collection of contemporary Central and South American art, we can be sure that the mission statement soon will be expanded to include “collecting art of the Americas.” It also likely will include a new emphasis on serving the Latino community. This is a classic case of function follows form, or content follows collections. It also serves to explain why I am unconvinced that a collection policy, or any museum activity, “flows out of the mission statement.”

Another factor that aligns the museum’s activities with its mission is that all museums have pretty much the same purpose. They are nonprofit organizations that collect and preserve objects and then exhibit and interpret them for the benefit of their respective constituencies. We know this because it is part of the definition of museums espoused by AAM, the Association of Art Museum Directors, ICOM, and others. Museum mission statements often incorporate all or many key elements of these definitions, which in part assures that they will fulfill their mission simply because of what they are and what they do. Furthermore, mission statements can be written in a manner that would make it difficult for a peer reviewer to challenge nearly any activity or collection as being unsuited to the mission. This device employs the phrases “related activities” or “related materials” or “related programs.” Using these generalizations, it might be possible to write a generic mission statement that could be adopted by any number of museums.

The mission of the (your name here) Museum is to collect and preserve (your specialty here) and related materials; and to use these collections for exhibitions, educational programs, and related activities for the benefit of (your constituencies here).

The word “related” places an umbrella over anything the organization wishes to do short of the preposterous (e.g., art museums teaching small engine repair).

One important question is, other than AAM, whom does the mission statement actually serve? The answers vary but often cite the beneficiaries as being the public, the stakeholders, and board/staff. As for the general public, I cannot detect in the average person the slightest interest in an organization’s verbal introspections. In fact, I believe that people tend to treat all such statements as a form of self-promotion.

In nearly four decades in this profession I have never had a museum’s stakeholders ask for our mission statement, with the sole exception of AAM during re-accreditation. To my knowledge, no sponsor, granting agency, or donor has ever predicated financial support on what was written in our mission.

Perhaps it is the board and staff that benefit most from this process. In fact, this is the position that some experts take: that the real value of crafting the mission statement lies in welding together the staff and board in a common cause and shared vision. This, too, seems to be a victory of verbiage over reality. Would serious museum professionals actually be prepared to say that, until they sat down and reviewed their mission statements, they were unclear about their purpose or whom they serve? This is why the roadmap analogy does not work; most organizations are not lost in the wilderness or clueless about what they do or why or how. Most of us do a creditable job every day whether or not we are following a written template.

On one of my accreditation visits to an art museum, a class in Tai Chi caught my attention. The director vigorously de-fended the class as presenting an important art form that brought people into the museum, increased membership, and “demystified” the operation. I noted the programmatic anomaly in my report, but as a single questionable activity among a multitude of others, the class had no power to influence the accreditation outcome. At a time when we have such tendentious offerings as “The Art of the Motorcycle” at the Guggenheim Museum, it becomes increasingly difficult for a visiting reviewer to challenge a given activity, especially when just a little parsing or tweaking of the mission statement can bring all errant lambs back into the fold.

On a visit to another art museum, I found a display of gems and minerals in a custom-designed case built into a long wall. The collection had been given by a donor who continued to favor the museum with his considerable financial generosity. The director maintained that inculcating sources of operating funds is a legitimate part of the mission. Considering other museum activities, this is not so farfetched. What of the ubiquitous annual fund-raising galas among museums nationwide? Nothing about a wine tasting or a dining-and-dancing soiree has anything to do with the museum’s mission other than to provide funding for its other activities. Some will rationalize marginal advantages such as rewarding donors, creating an introductory experience and building membership, but such events remain primarily fund raisers. And if galas (or chamber music or poetry recitals) are acceptable, then why not a series of hot-air balloon competitions or a small gallery of video games whose proceeds also help balance the operating budget? After all, why can’t there be the “The Art of the Balloon” or “The Art of the Video Game?”

At one time, the self-study that preceded every accreditation or assessment asked whether each museum activity met the museum’s stated mission. The answer was invariably affirmative and it would be astounding were it otherwise. What self-respecting director would not insist that his or her museum is following its own mission? I would be equally amazed to learn that any reviewer since the inception of the accreditation program has encountered any other response. AAM’s more recent references to mission (the Accreditation Commission’s 2004 Expectations Regarding Institutional Mission Statements) states the need for a “clearly delineated mission statement,” which the Commission “uses . . . to evaluate the museum’s performance.” It also says that for an accreditable museum “all aspects of the museum’s operations are integrated and focused on its mission,” and that the “activities of the museum should support, directly or indirectly, the mission.” However, the reframed emphasis on mission has struck some museum professionals as AAM’s foray into political correctness, designed to spur wayward museums to meet their societal obligations—as though merely being a worthy museum would not be nearly sufficient to fulfill that role.

So let us return to the Accreditation Commission’s guidelines, which say that mission statements should address public accountability, why the museum exists, its unique identity, who it serves, its public responsibilities and environment. If this is puzzling to a reviewer it is likely due to a confusion between mission, goals and vision. Mission is what we do. Vision is what we want to become. Goals are the specific initiatives as set forth in the long-range plan. Objectives spell out how we intend to achieve the goals. In essence the long-range plan—not the mission—is the roadmap.

This is why so many admire the simple, straightforward mission statements of organizations such as Disney (“to make people happy”); the 3M Corporation (“to solve unsolved problems innovatively”); Mary Kay Cosmetics (“to give unlimited opportunity to women”). One notable virtue of these statements is that they cannot possibly be confused with plans, policies, or goals or programs.

So, one may ask, if the mission is not an especially useful measure of a museum’s activities, what would be a better one? One way to determine whether exhibitions and other programs align with the mission would be AAM to evaluate the suitability of each museum’s mission statement. Perhaps this would result in sufficient parallelism and standardization among all museum mission statements to make this part of the peer review relevant. Another possibility is to evaluate the goals of each museum’s long-range plan instead of the mission statement. My preference would be to apply an adapted version of AAM’s recently approved Characteristics of an Accreditable Museum as the measure, rather than the mission statement. This would have the clear advantage of being a uniform standard for all museum activities instead of the evolving, ambiguous, arguable, and sometimes quixotic profusion of mission statements now in circulation. Mission statements cannot, and should not, carry the whole load because we have better mechanisms to do the job. Our collecting policies, deaccession policies, exhibition guidelines, conflict of interest statements, strategic plans and other such devices are specifically designed to do the heavy lifting. And they fit far more logically within a museum definition than under a mission statement.

Given the complications attending each of these alternatives, I doubt I shall see any of them explored or adopted in my lifetime. Meanwhile I will continue to perform my peer review duties as diligently as I can. When confronted with the question of how each program meets the mission, I will conduct my best analysis to fathom the answers, but I do confess to feeling that I’ve been asked to measure the temperature with a ruler.

Milton J. Bloch is president of Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute, Utica, N.Y. He also is an active peer reviewer who recently received an AAM award for outstanding service to the field.