LEANING INTO VALUE:
BECOMING A USER-FOCUS MUSEUM

John H. Falk
(Rowman & Littlefield – 2025)

WHY READ IT

What is the value of your museum? How would you, as a museum professional, answer this question?

Do you truly understand the value of your institution as your audiences perceive it, as opposed to only as you might hope to convey? Were you able to describe your museum’s value clearly, succinctly and with concrete details? Did your answer  acknowledge the complexity of serving diverse audiences with varied expectations? Did your answer make clear how your museum, your value, is distinguishable from all the other institutions doing similar things in your community?

If you found it challenging to answer any of these questions, then Leaning into Value  might be a book worth reading.  To be successful in these challenging times, a museum should understand what makes it uniquely positioned to serve its audiences. What distinctive assets it offers, and what it contributes to the public good that no other institution can. Leaning into Value provides a guide for helping you think more deeply and strategically about these questions; a guide for building a value-focused museum.

TOPIC

To be truly successful, an institution should begin by gaining a deep understanding of what its users hope to achieve, what they perceive as their needs and expectations. This “bottom-up” approach to strategic planning and operational success is known as Value Realization. It is a process rooted in listening first and consistently placing the fulfillment of user needs at the center of decision-making.

This book helps museums envision how their institutions can engage in a continuous Value Realizationprocess. Unlike linear approaches, it operates as an ongoing, iterative cycle, a continuous loop of action and reflection. Falk’s cyclical Value Realization process includes four key stages, what he calls: Calibration, Articulation, Creation, and Validation.

Calibrating Value: This stage requires dedicating time to thoroughly understand the diverse needs and interests of a museum’s user groups. Rather than relying on traditional demographic categories, it is recommended that museums will have more success if they segment their audiences based on the public’s goals, motivations, and/or interests. Falk specifically advocates for using well-being-related needs as the basis for this segmentation, as it offers a more meaningful framework for understanding real visitor behaviors and preferences.  Described are studies that have consistently shown that museum visitors are motivated not by a single reason, but by multiple overlapping reasons. Although these outcomes may vary in form, they tend to fall into four broad well-being-related categories: intellectual, personal, social, and physical benefits.

Recommendations for deepening understanding of the visitor experience include engaging with the literature on museum audiences, observing users directly in the museum, and speaking with/interviewing users deeply and thoughtfully. For maximum effectiveness, it is important for insights gathered to be shared across the organization and incorporated into a process that ensures all staff members recognise and respond to user needs.

Articulating Value: Historically, the museum’s mission and vision were defined from the top down. It is recommended that in today’s user-focused world, it is better that the institution’s purpose emerge from the bottom up—through active consultation with users. This approach significantly increases the likelihood that the organisation’s activities and rhetoric align  with the real, everyday needs and concerns of the publics the museum seeks to serve.

Suggested  are three essential strategies for more effectively and accurately articulating museum value:

1. Defining a User-Value-Centered Organizational Purpose: this involves a strategic planning process aimed at clarifying and expressing a mission and vision that place user value at the core of the institution’s purpose.
2. Fostering a User-Value-Centered Organizational Culture: this entails cultivating a shared understanding across all levels of the organization – staff, leadership, and trustees – that the primary goal is to enhance value for users.
3. Communicating User Value: this means ensuring that all institutional communications clearly and deliberately address the value-related needs and interests of key audiences, including stakeholders, funders, policymakers, current users, and potential visitors.

Creating Value:  This stage focuses on the design and delivery of experiences that are both meaningful and satisfying, and directly aligned with users’ expectations. A powerful museum experience supports a person’s well-being, making them feel good, inspired, relaxed, connected, or intellectually stimulated, and unfolds as a continuous journey that begins before the visit and lingers long afterward. To foster lasting engagement, museums must create experiences that resonate deeply, drawing on user-centred design principles. Described are recent insights from the gaming world, where game designers have figured out ways to maximise user’s sense of satisfaction, challenge, choice and control, and emotional connection. Collectively, these research-informed practices have helped to make video game-use the most popular, fastest growing leisure activity on the planet.

Ten, concrete “principles” of a quality, user-centred approach to design are suggested and described. By following these principles, Falk asserts, museums should be able to better engage and maintain current audiences, as well as attract and satisfy new audiences.

Validating Value: This stage refers to the use of data and analytics to support increasingly informed, evidence-based decision making. A process Falk believes will be key to museums being able to enhanced their impact over time.

To adopt this approach effectively, museums must embrace three essential practices:

1. Define the “what” and the “why” of what it is the institution is trying to achieve. Only by clarifying what value creation actually “looks like”, i.e., what “success” looks like, is it possible to actually recognise and measure it.
2. Identify the key indicators of success, trackable behaviours and patterns that correlate with positive outcomes and guide continuous improvement.
3. Foster a culture of evidence-based learning, one that not only collects data but also encourages all staff, from leadership to the front line, to engage in ongoing questioning, reflection, and refinement.

Clearly articulating audiences, goals, activities, outcomes, and the underlying assumptions or theories of change that guide experiences toward impact is invaluable, not only for measuring success, but also for improving strategy and practice. A thoughtfully constructed logic model or theory of change enables museums to move confidently along a data-informed path, one that supports decision-making, promotes accountability, and cultivates a shared culture of knowledge and learning.

The book concludes by acknowledging that the path to institutional value and success is neither easy nor straightforward. However, by engaging in this kind of on-going Value Realization process, museums can steadily improve their effectiveness and measurably enhance their long-term viability.

GLOSSARY

Personal Well-Being: The sense of confidence, identity, and self-worth that visitors gain through experiences that spark curiosity, wonder, and personal reflection.

Intellectual Well-Being: The stimulation of thought and understanding, where visitors connect ideas, comprehend complex topics, and gain new insights that inform future decisions.

Social Well-Being: The strengthened connections with family, friends, or community that emerge from shared museum experiences, fostering a feeling of inclusion and respect.

Physical Well-Being: The museum’s ability to provide a safe, beautiful, and calming space—physically or virtually—that supports mental and physical well-being

Success: Success in museums is measured by their ability to create meaningful, long-lasting experiences that enhance visitors’ personal, intellectual, social, and physical well-being. A successful museum visit fosters curiosity, wonder, and a sense of connection while deepening comprehension of past events and processes. It strengthens social bonds, promotes emotional respite, and contributes to mental and physical well-being. True success is not limited to one of these outcomes but encompasses all of them, enriching the lives of countless individuals and generating significant value within the community.

Value: Although value can be ascribed to both the material objects in a museum’s collection, as well as to the activities and experiences a museum might support, the actual value of these objects or activities entirely depends upon how the publics perceives their museum’s value.

LINKS

AUTHORS

John H. Falk