Thackeray Museum of Medicine.

How Can We Make It Better? - Collaboratively planning a major redevelopment.

Beginning 

The museum was at the start of their £4-million redevelopment and their Chief Executive was interested in how we could help them use the idea of story to focus the whole team on their development project and its potential to create a more compelling and more collaborative story for visitors throughout the museum. The museum prided itself on its role within the community and nationally to tell the history of medicine while also inspiring future generations of big thinkers. 

Middle

We delivered a one-day workshop with a dozen staff from various visitor facing roles to explore in small teams how visitors could best experience the museum and what was in everyone’s powers to achieve it. The workshop looked, by creating stories of visits, at current and desired visitors and what they wanted and needed from the museum, at what staff could do now to offer a richer experience and how the redevelopment could realise bigger ideas. The stories created were shared at the end of the day to identify key learning and ideas to be put into practice and to highlight themes and narratives that could inspire overall approach.

End

When the workshop finished it was pleasing to see that the participants decided to stay back, there was more to discuss and plan inspired by the work they had done in the day. Individuals’ enthusiasm stimulated them to take responsibility for what they could do straight away and together they defined ways to start to realise the new approaches they wanted to take, ahead of the redevelopment. They had decided they wanted to make more connections between the history of medicine and what is taking place now. To reach out, to pose more questions and stimulate responses from their visitors and even those who walk past the museum.