Accidentally
agile: An interview with the Rijksmuseum’s Taco Dibbits PART I
The director of the national museum of Dutch
art and history describes the central role of agility in the museum’s massive
renovation project—and in its drive for perpetual renewal.
When its current building was
completed in 1885, the Rijksmuseum, the national art museum of the Netherlands,
was intended to serve as a cathedral to house the greatest treasures of Dutch
art and history. Throughout the 20th century, it was increasingly deprived of
its glory: its decorations were painted white, and it slowly became cluttered
with modern offices and archives. To some, it had become a dusty labyrinth
where people struggled to find their way.
At the turn of the
millennium, the Dutch government, along with a group of corporate sponsors,
offered a singular opportunity in the form of a major monetary gift: the chance
to transform the entire museum all at once. Despite bumps along the way,
including a surprise discovery of asbestos in the building that stretched the
museum’s closure to ten years, the museum’s physical transformation ultimately
spurred an organizational one as well. As museum director Taco Dibbits
describes in this interview with McKinsey’s Wouter Aghina and Allen Webb, the
museum’s staff inadvertently embraced agile organizational principles—forming,
dissolving, and reforming teams that were more interdisciplinary than those it
had employed in the past—as it worked to redesign its galleries.
After a successful reopening
in 2013, Dibbits, as director of collections at the time, first stepped back
with his team from an agile process, then reintroduced it when he and the team
embarked on a 21st-century vision for the museum. Along the way, Dibbits says,
he learned a great deal about the characteristics of great teams, the power of
constraints to inspire creative solutions, and the role of the leader to get
people out of their comfort zones. Although the Rijksmuseum differs in many
respects from the typical company experimenting with agile approaches,
Dibbits’s experiences as an accidental agile leader should be thought-provoking
for a wide cross section of organization leaders.
The Quarterly: How were things organized at
the museum before the renovation?
Taco Dibbits: In the old museum, the art
was arranged by specialization and was, in a sense, a reflection of the
organizational diagram of the museum staff. The curator of ceramics had her
gallery of vases and bowls, the curator of glass had his gallery of champagne
flutes and pitchers, and so on. Within these galleries, separated by medium,
the materials were then organized chronologically. So, for instance, in the
paintings galleries you would start with the Middle Ages and walk up to the
20th century. With each new category, the public would have to start all over
again.
The Quarterly: What was the motivating idea
for a new approach? How did it change the way things worked?
Taco Dibbits: What we sometimes forget is
that when visitors come to a museum, they don’t generally know what they’re
supposed to get out of it. We sought to change that by creating an experience
that would give the public a sense of time and a sense of beauty. We thought
the best way to do this was to create a more sweeping chronological arrangement,
because a national museum like ours also serves as the physical memory of the
nation. Therefore, if you want to create a historical narrative for the public,
you have to start mixing all the collections that traditionally had been
arranged by material.
We decided that we
would divide the gallery installations century by century, starting in the
Middle Ages and working all the way up to the 20th century. The question we
wanted to answer was not how to assign objects to spaces but how to place
objects in groups that are linked aesthetically and historically in some
significant way.
This would mean a
change for our curators, who had previously worked quite autonomously. Now,
everyone would have to start working together. We did this by establishing a
working group for each century made up of different curators, as well as a
person from the education department who would think about the right
interpretation approach for the public.
The Quarterly: Were these groups completely
self-directed or was there some leadership role involved?
Taco Dibbits: Each working group was
chaired by the person whose expertise was right for that century; for example,
in the Netherlands, the 17th century was the Golden Age—with paintings by
Rembrandt, Vermeer, and others—so the curator of paintings would chair that
working group.
We encouraged the
chairs to behave, to some degree, like enlightened despots, because we knew
that otherwise, the groups would have tended not to make rigorous choices. We
Dutch are all about consensus. But that kind of approach would have created a
result that was too homogenous. We needed people in each group who could make
their mark and say, “Well, the 18th century is the century of decorative arts.
So that’s how we’re going to organize it.” You need a few people who push
toward the highest-quality result, and those who are inspired by them to do the
work and follow their lead.
The Quarterly: How did the proposal and
selection process play out?
Taco Dibbits: It took about a year and a
half for the groups to craft their proposals. There was very thorough research
involved, and after that, each group presented its proposal to what we called
the steering group.
Then the question for
the management team became, “How are we going to slash the number of objects?” The
17th-century group, for example, presented far too many objects, around 3,000,
which would never fit in the galleries. Any decision to cut down objects would
naturally be frustrating for the working groups. It’s very difficult to “kill
your darlings.” Our solution was to basically dissolve the task forces and
assemble new ones. Their new mission was to create a selection one-third the
size of what the first groups had proposed. They also had to write an argument
for why they wanted to keep particular objects in, why they would be
interesting to the public, and how these objects related to the others in the
proposal. In this way, it gave all the specialists a feeling of ownership in
the creation of the museum’s offerings, even beyond their own area of expertise.
The Quarterly: Did the reopening go as well
as you had expected?
Taco Dibbits: We could not have imagined
the scale of the success. The year of the reopening, in 2013, we had 2.25
million visitors, and the following year, the number of visitors increased by
250,000. At the time, we were so happy with how well things had gone—and so
exhausted as a museum—that we didn’t immediately shift to new priorities. After
two years, the previous director left, and I started in this role. Because I
had been on the board in my previous role and I was an internal hire from
within the museum, we could move quickly to draft a new vision and strategy. We
didn’t include anybody else in that process, but once we had it on paper we
opened it up for criticism. And we came away with a stronger vision, I think,
because of those discussions with our supervisory board and works council.
CONTINUES IN PART II
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