Talking to Ourselves

In an amazing conversation, MODA's Curator of Connectivity, Maria Cramer, reminded me that organizations are often so busy surveying the people they serve, i.e. looking from the inside out, that they often forget to gather the thoughts and opinions of those charged with moving the organization's mission forward — the staff.

It was an enlightening moment that got us started thinking about how we could take the pulse of the MODA staff on a daily basis, in order to find out what they're thinking and feeling and in order to learn from the ideas and observations that come out of the everyday practice of working in our museum. Because it's never enough to talk at MODA — why not get your hands dirty and start making a prototype? — we imagined creating a wall in the MODA office with a series of sassy questions (that's how we roll here) that staff could answer at will, using magnets to respond to inquiries that pertain to our everyday efforts to be radically friendly, to work as a high-performance team, to build friendships, to share knowledge, and to make the world a better place.

Now we want to take this up a level! Can we put the questions on a wall and use an abacus-style sliding scale to respond to them? Can we build an internal app for use on our phones that lets us register responses at any given time and notifies others that a teammate has done something remarkable or needs a bit of encouragement? How do we record this data and learn more about the answers registered? How do we use this as a tool to get better?

Stay tuned as we keep prototyping and testing this idea!