Los motivos también pueden clasificarse de acuerdo con distintos criterios contra puestos o complementarios, como los que se indican a continuación.

The finding of the previous section does not mean, however, that the Museums have been strategically unsuccessful in recent years. As I have hinted in the definition of strategic management at the beginning of this chapter, strategies by definition can take shape without formal planning, or they emerge in practice in the areas not covered by the plan. This has been the case with the four Museums we are examining.

While the plans were being introduced, the management at the Museums has taken on a more political dimension and a greater opportunism, or dynamism of quick responses to external resources. This has been a common trend among the four Museums, despite their size differences, in recent years. Birmingham is a typical example, in a city where cultural policy was developed during the 1980s in accordance with urban regeneration and city-marketing

2

The Tyne and Wear Museums Service has been asking the Finance Officers of the relevant museums services across the UK to submit relevant data, circulating the completed table in return. For the director of the Tyne and Wear Museums Service, the purpose is to demonstrate to its governing body (the consortium of five local councils) the cost-effectiveness of its performance in comparison to other services of comparable size. How the Table has been used by others is unknown (David Fleming, Director, the Tyne and Wear Museums Service,

strategies to revitalise its economic strength. As such, a ‘Heritage Development Plan’ existed in the mid- to late-1980s. This might be a part of what we call a Forward Plan today, though it specifically referred to major developments of the museums, set within the context of the city’s Tourism and Economic Strategies.

In the Plan, developments were proposed, including the establishment of new museum sites as well as refurbishment of the extant ones. The political and economic climate of Birmingham in the 1980s enabled a number of major events outlined in the document to happen. New capital projects, rather than refurbishment/renovation of old facilities, jumped the queue. The Jewellery Quarter Discovery Centre particularly attracted the interests and resources from the Planning and Economic Development Departments, and was quickly opened in 1992. The opening of Soho House followed in 1995 with a similar support from the Council, while redisplay and refurbishment projects which were top of the Museum’s own agenda were delayed.

The Gas Hall tells another interesting story which shows its birth in an unplanned, serendipitous way. The idea of converting the space into an exhibition hall, then being used as an office of the Council which was planned to be vacated, came from the Chief Executive of the Council in 1986. A feasibility study was made by a senior curator. For a while nothing happened. Then, in 1988, a Soviet Festival was being planned city-wide, including major exhibitions from the Soviet Union, but a lack of proper exhibition space was a stumbling block. Delegates were sent to Moscow to discuss details of the festival, but people were stuck when it came to the matter of the exhibitions, which the Russian party was keen to see at the heart of the city. The curator delegate from the Museum cannily suggested that the Gas Hall could be a possibility.

Things were quickly arranged back in Birmingham and the exhibitions took place within six months at the Hall, transformed as a temporary gallery through hasty work. Though after the Festival the space was returned to the previous office, the Council was made aware of the high profile such a space could have, and offered permanent use of the Hall to the Museum. The Council made it clear, however, that it would only meet the cost of development and other fixed costs for maintenance, but exhibitions would have to pay their own way. For the Museum, always desperate for more space for a major temporary exhibition, this was an unmissable opportunity.

Within a year the service was successful in raising the capital cost, £1.5 million from the ERDF, matched by the Council, £2 million from the business sector, and £1 million from a public appeal. In the meantime, a number of preparatory works were carried out. They include large-scale research for the opening exhibition featuring Canaletto, programming of subsequent exhibitions, and other technical and engineering matters. Worries mounted as to what kind of space it could and should be, what facilities such as lighting and lifts should be installed and so on. As the Council provided no extra money, more and more staff time was dedicated to the preparation work. Finally the Gas Hall succeeded in opening in 1993.

If the birth of the Gas Hall shows a positive example of unplanned development, however, the subsequent story of the same venue can reveal in a different sense how a museum’s work cannot always develop in a planned way. As was mentioned, the Council stipulated that the Hall should be self-financing, that is, the expenditures for exhibitions should be met by business sponsorship and admission charges.

Both sponsorship and admission charges turned out to be, however, very difficult to obtain despite the strenuous efforts made by the Museum staff. The reason has been attributed to the location not being London and the economic recession of the early 1990s. The Museum had a bitter experience of losing a major sponsorship deal at the last minute for an expensive programme. Visitor numbers were significantly lower than estimated, though the forecasts were conservative, based on comparable experiences elsewhere. It is difficult to single out the reasons for the disappointing attendance. It has been suggested that perhaps the public were not yet prepared to pay, while the main site next door was free. There is also a suggestion that exhibitions could have been mounted at lower cost.

Another factor is the varied menu of the exhibitions, ranging from a traditional art ‘blockbuster’, historical artefacts shows from other parts of the world, to a photographic exhibition of contemporary art. This has made it difficult for the Hall to acquire a clear identity and core audience. Though the Museum’s original ambitions were to broaden the demographic profile of Museum visitors, to present quality works in innovative and unconventional ways and to provide a platform for debate, the financial loss incurred in the first eighteen months made a radical re-think imperative.

While the original objectives have not been abandoned completely, two polarising approaches to exhibition-programming have appeared in recent years. One strategy is to mount exhibitions whose financial viability is fully researched and understood to be sound.

A variant on this strategy is the letting of the premises for commercial hire, where the Museum has no involvement with the content. 1997 is seeing two exhibitions of this non- risk-taking category.

In contrast to this hard-nosed approach to rectifying the financial position of the Hall, local community-oriented exhibitions constitute a second strategy. For example, a major exhibition on the social history of Birmingham in the post-war period is being scheduled for half a year’s duration in 1999, which will be free of admission charge. For source materials, this will draw on the permanent collection, which will not require such costs as hire fees and transport. It will, however, involve a large-scale preparatory research on oral history and living evidence, which would push up the cost of the whole project. This makes it all the more necessary for projects in the non-risk-taking category to be profitable, so that they can cross-subsidise community-based projects.

The other three Museums have pursued different types of development, which are more or less similarly opportunities-driven. The first seed was sown when the Glory of the Garden strategy by the Arts Council of Great Britain began to be implemented, whereby new positions related to art gallery sections of the Museums were created at all three of the organisations. Walsall and Wolverhampton in particular have had a strong basis in their art collections, on which to capitalise and build the art exhibition element in the Museums’ activities. Bidding for the Sunrise Scheme (post-Glory) and more recently for the Lottery Arts Fund distributed by the Arts Council of England, which they have understood is easier to apply for than the Heritage Lottery Fund, may have been a logical development. The Directors however would emphasise their own conscious approach:

It’s not that we’re reacting [to arts side resources], but it’s extremely fortuitous that the way we’re going is also the [way the] funding is going....A whole thing starts to play to your strength once you create your momentum....It’s very much like niche marketing ourselves.”

(Director, Wolverhampton) What is clear here is that a conventional, linear pattern of strategic management—goals identification, followed by implementation of plans and progress check—does not fit in neatly with our examples of ‘success’, as equated with growth.

Obviously, these described developments have taken place prior to, or in parallel with, the strategic planning they were formally engaged in. However, a more convincing explanation can be provided for the limited role strategic planning has played. It is that as part of the local council, whether a director likes it or not, the Museums’ success depends firstly upon

being sensitive to the political mood of the paymaster, and secondly upon making the most of given opportunities rather than sticking to written principles. Such flexibility may be important, particularly in recent years, when on the one hand the environment is changing quickly and large sums of money are available for specific projects (eg ERDF, the Lottery and urban regeneration budgets), but on the other hand revenue budgets are shrinking.

Conclusion

The four Museums were engaged in formal corporate planning in the early 1990s, and they systematised work plans. However, progress checking, when it comes to overall, mid- to long-term objectives (as opposed to operational goals of business plans) is rarely seen. The use of Performance Indicators, at least in this context, is under-developed. The Museums’ recent developments have been made possible by the favourable opportunities exogenous to them. Whereas the value of planning has been noted, flexible adaptation to the political and economic climate has proved to be a key to success.

This observation is confirmed by a larger sample of over 100 local authority museums, surveyed in 1992 by Davies (1994b). He finds that although over half of the respondents state Forward Planning to be essential, there is widespread scepticism about it. A number of interesting comments which he obtained through in-depth interviews point to the inflexible and static nature associated with planning, and the practical difficulty of meaningful planning under current economic and political pressures (ibid, pp54-56).

Davies (1994b) also notes, however, that not all of the plans are strategic in content (p56), suggesting a discrepancy between managers’ stated belief in the value of strategic planning in principle and the amount of consideration given to it in practice. The quality of the plan—the degree to which it is coherent, visionary, imaginative and yet realistic—substantially varies. This finding is endorsed by Davies’s other article on Mission Statement (Davies 1996b). Despite the Mission Statement’s top position in the pyramid of the Plan, many simply list museums’ functions (ie collect, exhibit, research etc). Its quality varies greatly, which leads Davies to suspect that “little thought has gone into mission statements because little of their potential is understood” (Davies 1996b, p38).

The quality of the strategy documents that the four Museums have been produced is generally high, demonstrated by their success in bidding for external resources. However, the

frustration and scepticism about the value of the documents Davies (1994b) finds among museum managers seems to be shared by our cases. This leads us to doubt the appropriateness of Forward Planning, and the issue of performance measurement as well. This is the topic for further analysis in Chapter 8.