What can we learn from the science museum? (Apart from the science?)
A few years ago I was able to visit The Exploratorium - an interactive science museum in the heart of San Francisco. Now working as a coach, it’s got me looking at this museum in a brand-new light, and has raised some interesting questions about how we can take learning from the museum into how we approach our own learning, growth and development…
What if we prioritised the process over the end product?
What’s so special about this museum is that its central philosophy is ‘the conviction that knowledge and ideas are perpetually emerging, changing, developing.’* This plays out directly on the floor of the museum, with the understanding that if there is no fixed answer or finished product, the focus is therefore in the process of discovery and awareness.
For ourselves, it can be a revolutionary idea to recognise that we are never a finished product. We too, are perpetually emerging, changing, and developing.
Sometimes we can have in our head the idea that there is some kind of ‘perfect future version’ of ourselves that we are reaching towards. But this can create the feeling of always falling short, never quite reaching that ‘perfect result’, and can even overwhelm us into not taking action at all, in case it’s not as ‘perfect’ as we think it should be.
What would it feel like to recognise that we’re in a constantly evolving process?
What would it feel like to say: ‘where I am now is exactly where I need to be’?
Instead of focusing on a mythical fixed end-product, we can look at where we are, and what we have right now;- our unique strengths, our skills, our experiences, our resilience, our resources, our wisdom… and we can focus on the experimentation and discovery of what can come out of the test tube when we put all of these ingredients in? What can we create right now, with what we’ve got?
What if we weren’t attached to the outcome?
The museum staff behave in the same way they encourage visitors to behave. Each exhibit is a ‘work in progress’ – just as they encourage visitors to play around, so do they. They try things out, they put new exhibits on the museum floor and see how they land. They might work, they might not. But either way, they can take useful learning nonetheless, to help them develop the exhibit further and make it even better.
This is a really practical example of having a growth mindset. With a growth mindset, you are not afraid to test things out. You’re not worried about the fact it may not work, as there is always positive learning to be taken, sometimes even more so from when things ‘don’t work’.
When you take away the fear that something won’t work, it releases a freedom. A freedom for play, a freedom for risk, for experimentation, for trying things out.
In her book, ‘Mindset’, Carol Dweck outlines the incredible difference that can be made to people’s lives, growth and development, when they adopt a growth mindset, that prioritises the process of learning and growth, over getting everything perfect first time.
What would it feel like to not care about the end result?
What would happen if you gave yourself the freedom to get it wrong? And know that that’s ok?
What if we created our own specific space for discovery?
The Exploratorium works with the idea of ‘planned discovery’ where the visitors are the ones who lead the experiments themselves, they can get curious, they tinker and play around with the exhibits. But it’s the museum that offers the tools, the environment and the prompts to help them discover and bring new thoughts and ideas to light. They even have staff called ‘official noticers’ that support people to really notice and bring about a new level of awareness of the world around us.
So how do we create our own science laboratory?
How can we create space for us to get curious, to play around with ideas, to test out hypotheses, to have discoveries about ourselves?
What are the tools, resources, environment and support that can facilitate us to do this?
This is where I see a great connection to the power of coaching conversations. Just like the science lab, the coaching space offers a dedicated, focused area for discovery, building self-awareness and growth.
Just like the role of the museum, the coach can help support, prompt and partner with the person to support this investigation. Like a lab assistant they may offer to use certain tools, techniques and methods of approach to support the work.
What if this changes how we show up in the world?
The Exploratorium led a project called ‘The best things in museums are the windows.’
This highlights how the real impact of a museum actually happens when the visitor steps outside the museum walls and back into the world again. It is here in which real significance happens, where the person collects up all their newly found learning, ideas, inspiration and awareness, and takes that into how they show up in the outside world.
For example, visitors may get inspired in the Exploratorium about the impacts of climate change and decide to take action on this in their own lives.
So too can a person leave a coaching space, with their newly gathered awareness, thoughts and discoveries, with a clear idea of how they want to show up in the world differently, and go on to create actionable, positive change.
*P37, Made you Look, Made you Stare, Clare Hughes, Feilden Clegg Bradley Studios