Taking risks: strategies for personal, professional and institutional change
The act of risk taking is of increasing importance in both our professional and personal lives. This session will ask the following questions: What is risk? Why do we take risks? What is failure? What does risk-taking look like from an institutional level? How does your perspective on risk change throughout your career?
Participants will be given a worksheet that will parallel the conversation, asking them to identify their goals, fears, and vision of success and will be invited to engage in group activities to brainstorm on risk-taking strategies. What risks are you willing to take?
Panellists will briefly share their own risk-taking journey, how they decided to take their risks and what the outcomes have been. The conversation will then shift to discuss what risk looks like from an organisational standpoint, which requires not only personal vision, but also institutional support. Panellists will share strategies in relation to “controversial” or “sensitive” topics and discuss how they socialised their risk-taking strategies with both board and staff. They will also discuss how their risk-taking philosophies have changed as they moved into senior leadership roles.
Facilitator
Co-chair, International Committee of Exhibition Exchange
Washington, DC
United States
Session speakers
Canadian Museum of History
Julie LeClair is the Director, Travelling Exhibitions at Ingenium - Canada's Museums of Science and Innovation. She is currently developing an exhibition on the subject of Failure, a topic directly liked to the idea of risk.
Carina Jaatinen is the Head of Exhibitions at Heureka, the Finnish Science Centre. She recently left her position at Espoo City Museum. Carina will discuss the personal risks she took in leaving a cultural museum for a science center. She will also discuss what risk looks like from a managerial perspective- creating opportunities of her staff to take risks, and fail.
Co-chair, International Committee of Exhibition Exchange
Washington, DC
United States
Hillary Spencer is the Director of Nomad Exhibitions. Hillary recently left the American Museum of Natural History to open the US office of Nomad. She has been moderating conversations on risk and leadership while developing a new business strategy for traveling exhibitions.
Francesca Polo is the COO and co-founder of Vastari, a company that uses technology to connect curators and collectors. Starting Vastari was a risk that Francesca took in the first decade of her career, now that she begins her second, she will reflect on how her perspective on risk has changed.
