As stated earlier in my text, museum professionals have voiced their need for practice in order to fully engage themselves in value discussions. This paragraph will introduce two concepts that help to address this need. The concept of self-di- recting offers a good point of departure. The contemporary working environment is all about completing projects, meeting deadlines and being able to contribute your daily working hours outside of the traditional office. After their academic years, students enter a relatively different working environment than was the case few decades ago. Studies show that any vital and effective organisation has three properties: a healthy hierarchy, self-organisation and resilience (Raworth 2017, p. 159). The people in these organisations need to be able to self-direct themselves in order to make all these aspects work. Especially in organisations that consist of highly educated and expert-based work, the ability to self-direct one’s day becomes vital. A study made in 2011 by the Institute for the Future listed skills that will be needed in order to cope in the working environment in the future (Davies, Fidler & Gorbis 2011). The study calls them the key work skills that will become essential in the next ten years, namely sense making, social intelligence, novel and adaptive thinking, cross-cultural competency, computational thinking, new-media literacy, transdisciplinarity, design mind- set, cognitive load management and virtual collaboration. All of these skills are
properties that an individual will need in order to be able to navigate and make sense in the world of a cross-cultural fast track.
In an edited volume Itseohjautuvuus – Miten organisoitua tulevaisuudessa?
(Self-directing – How to get organized in the future 2017), Finnish philosophers Frank Martela and Karoliina Jarenko point out why the ability of self-directing will become a basic requirement in the future. By self-directing they mean a person’s ability to function without the need for outside supervision or control.
In order for people to be able to self-direct themselves, they must possess three properties: motivation, initiative and skills. They must have initiative to do things without outside force or traditional management supervision. They must have a clear goal toward which they are focusing their self-directing actions. Finally, they must possess the required skills in order to reach set goals. If these skills are lacking, the person will need extensive supervision and guidance, and the idea of self-directing will not be fulfilled. In addition to the technical skills needed for the work process at hand, the required skills for self-directing will include properties such as time management, resource control and prioritising, all of which could have previously been outsourced to one’s supervisors (Martela &
Jarenko 2017, p. 12, p. 14). The importance of self-directing is connected with the need to be able to react fast and to be flexible in a society that is under constant change. There are three reasons as to why self-directing will be more and more important in the future. The first is that the reaction time to address change in contemporary society is much shorter than a few decades ago. The second is the fast replacement of human labour by technological solutions and applications in various fields. In turn, creative expertise remains a sector that will be more difficult to replace by these technologies, thus intensifying its role.
The third is the democratising effect of information technologies, in which hier- archical structures are no longer so needed, because information has an ability to flow fast and openly within any given organisation (Martela & Jarenko 2017, pp. 18–25). These changes require a flexible organisation in which strategies are created in co-operation with participants and non-functioning structures can be abandoned without heavy decision-making processes. More and more contemporary companies are transforming their operations according to these more flexible and cooperative methods (Martela & Jarenko 2017, p. 15).
With the help of new economic thinking and the methods of self-directing it will be possible to join efforts in the field of cultural heritage with ideas of economic sustainability. These viewpoints come from the Systems Thinking perspective, where things in the world are interconnected and one cannot ex- pect either singular or linear answers to complex questions (Meadows 2008).
According to SearchCIO (an online platform for IT management strategies)
“systems thinking is a holistic approach to analysis that focuses on the way that a system’s constituent parts interrelate and how systems work over time and within the context of larger systems”. This means that we need to acknowledge the complexity of the world and face this fact with a set of tools that contains elements from outside our own box.
The doughnut is about sustainability and understanding the big picture. It talks about finding a balance between the earth’s resources and our need to consume them, so that the distribution of consumption can be in balance among all the earth’s inhabitants. It also talks about how we need to include other layers in our economic identities than just our identity as a consumer, worker or capital owner. These layers can be summed up as constituting a great deal of our daily lives. The economist Neva Goodwin calls them the core economy, which “comes first every day, sustaining the essentials of family and social life with universal human resources of time, knowledge, skill, care, empathy, teaching and reci- procity” (Coote & Goodwin 2010, p. 3).
How to reach global sustainability is the core question of our lifetime. The mag- nitude of the question goes beyond one individual’s capacity, and shared wisdom is needed. Raworth talks about the need for shifting our attitudes. We need fluid values to be able to act in a more interdependent and reciprocating way. We need to see our role towards others as dependent partners, and take approximation instead of calculation as a tool in navigating through global issues (Raworth 2017, pp. 103–116). In this process, the capability of heritage sciences to see connections between the core issues of different historical eras will be essential.
This insight will help give a perspective for present and future decision-making.
To gain knowledge of things in the past and to learn how these things connect to our contemporary everyday are fundamental for understanding one’s own identity. Furthermore, they are building blocks for identity within any given community. This is precisely one of the points where the humanities, especially museums, will have a substantial role in carving out our sustainable future. As historian Tuomas Heikkilä and philosopher Ilkka Niiniluoto wrote in their book The Value of Humanistic Study, it is time to break the myth of humanistic study belonging to the margins of contemporary achievements and consider humanists to be key players in creating sustainable environments (Heikkilä & Niiniluoto 2016, p. 104). On an individual level this challenge becomes more manageable if one holds the required skills for self-directing.
There are three levels of operators at the core of the Doughnut concept: person- al impact on planetary boundaries, business branding according to Doughnut principles and a new design of the global financial system (Raworth 2017, p.
56). From the sustainable heritage point of view, it is easy to fulfil the demands of the first two. To preserve and to educate have always been at the core of mu- seum operations. For the third level, museum operations will offer one way of sustainable thinking, a broader context than monetary metrics has been able to offer. Again, this is not a new idea, but on a global level the search for more sustainable ways to think of the globe’s economic growth has already started (Jackson 1996; Holden 2006; Scott 2013). Museums as tradition-bearing in- stitutions have the ability and know-how to guide this new kind of thinking in society. In Robert Putnam’s terms all this is strong social capital (Putnam 2000, p. 290). The scenario drawn with the help of the Doughnut helps us to understand the bigger economic picture and guide us to include sustainable heritage into the Doughnut way of thinking. It gives us a global perspective, but
that alone does not suffice. The adaptability of any given change depends on the individual’s ability to guide themselves through the change. In general, any argumentation to move towards solution-seeking methods is more rewarding than discussions that merely state the fact that something would need to be done. As we have seen, museum professionals have lived up to this challenge and continue working toward a sustainable society.
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