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our guest today is Julian sega's director of the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and
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anthropology also known as the Penn Museum and we're going to talk to him today about reinventing museums for the
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21st century Julian welcome thank you for joining us today in knowledge at Wharton it's my great pleasure I wonder
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if we could start with something that I've found quite paradoxical museums are
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institutions that are that excel at preserving the past but as a leader you have to focus on preparing the
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institution for the future so how do you as a leader how do you manage this balance between the past and the future
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right what do you think well it's a very interesting question I mean as you say
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this museum has around a million objects and it contains the whole past human story from you know two million years
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ago from the beginnings of the evolution of our species but really what we do as
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a museum is we bring that to life and we show the museum go earth through our exhibitions for a permanent galleries
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and pre-programming the relevance of the past to the present and that's something
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that's a sort of a lens that we filter everything through and you can you know
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you can see it particularly in our new galleries of the ancient Middle East where we we look at a story that seems
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to be a very distant one the first cities but as you go through this exhibition you see how in fact so much
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of what we're showing you is relevant to us today as city dwellers so it's that
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the ability to connect the past to the present is really what we're we're
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trying to achieve and so many of the different things that we do so that's really interesting so when you think
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about connecting the legacy of the past to the present one thing that becomes really important is how you engage with
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with your audience or audiences and increasingly it seems to me that a big challenge that many museums seem to face
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is how do you connect with younger generations who go beyond sort of the the cultural elite but who are the
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Millennials or Generation Z or whatever you know acronym you choose to call them
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would you say this is one of the biggest challenges that museums face today it's
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certainly one of the big challenges that we face and you know as as you look at what's available to Millennials I mean
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there is the marketplace for your time gets bigger and bigger every single year also the actual the notion of a museum
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has has changed then you know museums now not necessarily automatically considered to be a voice of authority
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and so in engaging younger audiences is a really important part of what we do but it actually often means we have to
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change how we work and how we program and it's usually a more consultative process where you're actually asking
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younger generations what do you want to get out of the museum experience you have to design galleries with them in
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mind I actually have a great deal of faith in Millennials I mean they are they're a very engaged generation and
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they're looking for content and they're looking for authenticity and of course
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that's really what we do so as you think about how museums are trying to cope
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with this challenge what are some of the more innovative strategies that you have
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found museums practicing in engaging with Millennials and younger audiences well I think even more diverse audiences
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right well I think the key thing to remember here is you just can't program for an audience without their
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involvement and so I think what museums are doing increasingly is being more aware of the communities that they want
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to serve and that means often partnerships of those communities where they become actively part of the
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programming process themselves you're essentially asking them what they would
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like and we're about to open a series of galleries that highlight our African
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collection and we have set up a steering committee of community members to actually get it what are the issues that
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you would like to explore in a gallery with content like that and I think I see that with museums all over the world now
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that it's no longer here's our content that we we've curated for you it's
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mr. joint curatorship but at the same time you know museums contain this enormous pool of intellectual capital
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which we want to give as an act of generosity almost to the people to which are some of the more innovative museums
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in your experience around the world that have figured out ways to overcome the limitations just of serving people in
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their immediate region but using say digital strategies to engage more broadly with other audiences the to the
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release prince mine the Brooklyn Museum has done some amazing work with their digital content they have a whole team
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of basically content producers much like yourselves and they actually program for
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a level of membership that's purely digital and so there's new programming
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there are podcasts there's you know deep dives into the collection and I think
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they've done an amazing job the British Museum did an interesting thing they
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want it to be the classroom to the world and so they put a great deal of their collection online and would put on a
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range of teaching resources that are really first-rate and that's one of the
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things that that we set out to do about eight years ago is we have these million
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objects most of them aren't on display but now we've digitized around 700,000
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of those and we also put all of our contents lectures we filmed them and we put them on our YouTube channel and it's
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it's amazing I mean so we can have a lecture in you know one of our lecture halls it could be on something that's
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reasonably esoteric like the early cities of of Mesopotamia and we found that you know within a year that lecture
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has had in thirty thousand views from all over the world and you know we get we get contacted by people in Australia
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who are using there are content in their classrooms as well as for their own personal edification some of the lessons
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you think other museums can learn from some of the strategies you described well Mike Khan def who's the head of our
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website his strategy is more is more and er the more material that you put up the better and it just it tends to build
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on itself and so I think this idea of like record everything have everything available to everyone everywhere and
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also make it free and that's something that I think a lot of museums are realizing we used to you know charge for
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images of our collections we used to actually not let people take photographs in our gallery but in fact what you're
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doing is you're missing this potential advocate to go and post your material on
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social media download your images from your website and use them in ways that you couldn't have even figured out and
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it's a wonderful marketing and free marketing for for museums and getting our message out so as you think about
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implementing some of these digital strategies what would you think are some of the biggest obstacles that museums
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face in trying to implement digital transformation it's not easy and and and
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so any thoughts on what are the biggest challenges well a couple of thoughts being putting material online is is time
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consuming and it's costly but it really does pay dividends but it needs a concerted focus from the top down to do
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it the bigger challenge is actually the digital realm in galleries and to get back to your earlier points about you
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know how do how do young generations learn so much or how they learn now is through a digital interface and so they
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expect that to be in the galleries but the thing about digital technology is it dates very quickly and it's very
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expensive and so you're always trying to find that careful balance with having
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technology that allows visitors to drill down into the information that they have
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but that won't become obsolete I mean that we can never compete with you know
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the video game world but so that's that's how balance we have to tread and
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also you don't want the digital technology to take away from the integrity the object that's right in front him you
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don't want it to overwhelm it right now in addition to the display and the many
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educational institutions are experiencing disruption at three three levels with may as a result of digital
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transformation one is on the research front so secondly there's the teaching
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and thirdly is the engagement with the public do you see the same thing happening at the Museum and if so what
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has what has been so well have been some of the things you've done to address
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these issues hmm well those three realms are very interesting one for a museum like ours
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because they're at our heart where a a research and teaching institution but in
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many ways that's what makes us the most interesting now we all live digitally
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all of our researchers are students who come visit us and the public and so the key is is how do you unite all of these
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different digital arenas so they're all informing each other so for example you
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know in our galleries I've often said you know the most interesting thing about archaeology is archeologists and
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so we actually update what our field archeologists have been doing in the field in the galleries and so the
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research angle comes through and you through to the public so they know that all of these different areas are all
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sort of working to together to sort of cross fertilize each other that's great
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now I was talking the other day to to a colleague of mine who works with a lot of different companies on their digital
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strategies and she was telling me that one of the biggest mistakes that she has found people make when they are trying
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to go through this digital transformation journey is that they just hire a chief digital officer and they
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expect that one person to change everything and and of course it doesn't work and then you know after some time
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the chief digital officer is out and they try something else I was wondering if you have encountered similar thinking
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it museums around the world and and what do you think might be a good way to implement digital strategies if
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don't think this is the right way right well many museums have actually employed
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a chief digital officer I think the Met is probably the most famous example that
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we've seen in recent years and they do sort of think well that'll be the Silver
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Bullet that will cure everything I think that there is potential for a chief digital officer for this reason is they
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can find ways of uniting the different platforms that are happening digitally anyway in the museum and bring some sort
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of order to chaos from the research angle they can all be somebody who can you know look at a researcher who saves
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working in Egypt with a with a the projects out there and he could basically help inform them of digital
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tools that they didn't really know about but it's certainly in and of itself not
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going to solve your problems but I think museums are sort of feeling their way with this one but it's certainly in the
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last few years many museums have gone down this route and not always successfully know you've been at the
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pennmen since July 2012 if I have seems like yesterday and before that you were at museums in Toronto and in London and
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I was wondering you know what the lessons that you learned early on any of career that that were helpful to you in
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in what you are doing today and what some of those lessons might have been well I think when the lessons I learned
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very early on was that the best way to communicate with anybody is with storytelling and that really doesn't
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matter which museum you are in but that's really that's really at the core
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of what we do you're trying to transform somebody's understanding of themselves
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by stories of the past or whatever your discipline was I've always known that in
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fact nothing is more powerful than actually meeting the people who are doing the research and finding ways to
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get them out in front is is paramount you know everybody responds to a person and that is always a challenge for a
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museum because we're often galleries with nobody in them there's one thing
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I've really learned from being at the Penn Museum though which I didn't know I
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mean the other museums I've worked at have been very large fairly hierarchical
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mostly government-funded so Penn has is a university environment and so you have to have a much more
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consultative approach to leadership which is of course the Academy's way and
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you know I mean initially I thought well that'll probably slow things down a bit
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but in fact I think it makes things a lot a lot more effective and it's a it's
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a part of my own leadership thing that I that I really whose great to discover it
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and I think it it leads to more substantive change and of course the other big difference is from coming from
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a you know government-funded institutions to institutionally Penn is of course fundraising is a huge part of
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leadership here I mean if you want to do something you have to fundraise for and
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Penn is enormous ly supportive in that process well I wonder since and you've
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been at Penn for six years what has been the biggest leadership challenge I have
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faced in your time here how did you overcome the challenge and what did you learn from it
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well the biggest challenge has been a building transformation project so this museum is a really remarkable and unique
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one you could never create a museum like the Penn Museum today and our focus has
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been teaching and research but we have collections that some of which are in like every single textbook of the whole
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of the history of art I mean these are incredibly important objects but we sort of let our public spaces go some of
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those galleries have been around for 70 80 years in some cases and so this was an enormous opportunity and an enormous
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challenge was to basically redo 44 thousand square feet of the museum so we embarked through our strategic plan of
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the largest project we've ever done but of course it comes with a fairly hefty
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price tag of over a hundred million dollars so that our biggest challenge has been
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been adopting a fundraising strategy that can help us meet our goals and luckily were at Penn which you know
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which gets very excited by big ideas and so we are we're well over 60% of that of
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that total so far but you know that is and will always be there that the heaviest lift that I have as a leader
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here serve is to meet those goals and we will thinking about the future now how would you like Penn museum to be
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positioned for the future and how would you measure its success right well right
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now anybody who's an archaeologist or not historian deals of the ancient world
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knows about our Museum when these galleries are reopened and with the marketing campaign go with it my gauge
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of success will be bought public facing and I would like any visitor to Philadelphia to be very upset if they
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don't have an opportunity to come to the Penn Museum it has to be an absolute
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must see for coming to Philadelphia and I mean there there are sort of obvious ways to measure that success and one of
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them will be which we we are around 200,000 people come and visit us a year and I'd like to double that and I think
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it's imminently possible I mean where else in the world outside of Egypt will
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you be able to see a Egyptian veronik Palace at full height it's going to be
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spectacular well Julian thank you so much for speaking with knowledge at work and it's been great speaking with my
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absolute pleasure you