John Robb’s Standing Orders

John Robb scares me. Not through any kind of intimidation, but the fact that his blog Global Guerrillas is such a treasure trove of articles analysing the future. Robb’s focus is the future of military and warfare, but mainly how a massive bureaucratic money pit of a nation’s army can be brought to stalemate by a loose organisation of insurgents with a fraction of the budget. This is what terrifies me most: the movement into the next generation of doing things, in this case, war.

Robb has put up 11 (I’m sure they’ll increase) Standing Orders for the modern insurgency. Let’s ignore that the ultimate end of these insurgents are death and destruction and opposition of “freedom”. Those are the ideological extras. When you look at these Standing Orders, you notice that these are just models of management. This list could have come from a silicon valley analyst. Through simple translations into other languages of industry, you have a very powerful list of actions. This is the new way of Doing Things. You see how this interests me in relation to Metrocurators, but also the way museums will struggle using old methods of structure.

Here are John Robb’s Standing Orders, I suggest looking at the original link for background because I’ll be strictly talking about this is terms of museums. (I also don’t want to plague John Robb’s blog with museum related links)

1. Break Networks – Not communication networks. This means getting in between people and their closed systems. What does this have to do with museums? Well, how many people in the industry got jobs through people they know? How much is the industry lacking innovation because people haven’t been allowed in? Think about what has the most influence in museums and whether they are still fully deserving of such a position. Just how progressive are those giant membership organisations?

2. Grow Black Economies – Originally meant to fund insurgency through organised crime, the reasons for doing so are noteworthy: independence. Now, museums are going to be running protection rackets, but the idea of finding new income sources to obtain autonomy has to be a priority. This would allow much greater freedoms in innovation. Things like Giuliani punishing Brooklyn museum by cutting off funding. Or the Cambridge museum losing funding by refusing to splatter a logo over everything. Museums are currently slaves to too many outside influences. There needs to be a growth in Museum Economies in order for growth in Museum Thinking.

3. Virtualize Your Organization – Not so much about greater use of IT (although that may help) this is about having a greater flexibility and possibly a modular approach to organisation: “They do the job and go away”. Could an entire museum be run be freelancers? I’ve seen it done with some collections. I also wonder about the motivation is could cause. A person sitting on the same job for 20 years isn’t going to have the same hunger as a freelancer who has to hustle every day. Robb’s say that a specialisation of skill sets emerge in a short time because of this. Also, I must say, I’ve found more interesting things come out of the blogs of museum freelancers than anyone else. This is because freelancers have equal amounts of having to be employable and being innovative with an added extra of not having to “follow the rules” (a plus from being self-employed).

4. Repetition is more important than Scale – I wish this was true in museums, where the trend is for several-month long blockbuster exhibitions rather than weekly changes of new things. “Simple, low cost, easy, and repeatable… are both sustainable and generate the greatest potential returns.

5. Coopetition not Competition – Museums have systems already in place (mostly) to share information but are used in rather narrow parameters. This could be run parallel to great transparency in museums. This is about working towards common goals by using the same things.  To me, this is the difference between ArtBabble and Creative Spaces. ArtBabble is a platform run by IMA, but they’re working hard to have the involvement of other museums to create content. Creative Spaces had too much singular interest that, I think, removed its greater purpose.  To quote Robb, “rivals sharing common platforms… reduce costs… widen variety, increase flexibility, etc.  For example, coopetition is the basis for Internet standards and the Web“. You want to be like the Internet, don’t you?

6. Don’t Fork (the Insurgency) – This one’s a bit harder to translate, but I take this to mean not being on the offensive against your fellow museums/staffers. Such as the amount of criticism against museums “breaking taboo” (see: Prissy Fatwas). I think this also means resisting internationalism/global issues for the sake of being a “local museum”.

7. Minimalist rule sets work best – Oh God Yes. There’s no point replacing the old systems with carbon-copies of them. For museums, this is about policy and ethics. I remember one museum’s collection policy that defined OS Gridlines, for God’s sake. What was more ridiculous was they ignored them anyway, often accepting objects from 40 miles away. Let’s remember that the reason Neil MacGregor became so important and rescued the British Museum was his adherence to a founding principle from 1753.

8. Self-replicate – Create other versions of yourself, in short. This is related to all the other Standing Orders, in that nothing will work unless it spreads to other organisations, possibly third-parties. Even if you don’t find the idea of becoming something like a metrocurator, you have to imagine this is the best way to advance whatever your goals are. Whatever the priorities are, they will be helped with similar satellite organisations. I think means more than just outreach and education programs. You want to be copied, not just learnt from.

9. Share or copy everything that works – Think about Creative Commons and Open Source. The sharing of ideas, forming them and them kicking them out into the wide world for anyone to pick up. This is related to 5. The idea of hording ideas helps no one. Think about how the entire industry as a whole benefits from an Open idea, which can therefore lead to greater benefits to individual museums. I know several museums are already doing this.

10. Release often and early - I can’t say anymore than how John Robb puts it: “Innovations, from tactics to weapons, should be released as soon and as often as practicable.  Perfectionism, sclerotic planning processes, excessive secrecy, risk aversion, and other plagues found in hierarchical organizations are the enemy of success.” Right on.

11. Co-opt, don’t own, basic services - I get there this one is going, but not sure how to translate it into museum practices. I will leave this one up to the comment to help me unpick. What are the “basic services” and who has ownership of them? Part of me thinks about education and schools, but still not sure how it fits. Comments welcome. What do you think?