Amy Akino-Wittering from Young V&A on taking a museum from blank sheet of paper to launching and thriving.
Young V&A is a museum for children and young people. It's located on the site of the former Museum of Childhood but re-launched under a new brand and with a complete re-imagining in July 2023.
Amy Akino-Wittering (Head of Operations and Commercial at Young V&A) runs the day-to-day operation of the museum and played a key leadership role in its planning, design and launch. In this episode she shares with host Tom Dawson her learnings of "starting from scratch" with a new museum concept, plus gives insights from her career in the arts and culture sector.
There are really useful lessons here in prioritisation and vision - when you start with nothing but a blank page, what are the pillars that you build around? Amy also gives great direction in the crucial area of team management - how do you create the best platform for your staff to shine and, in turn, provide a great experience for visitors?
Children and young people are a notoriously hard audience to really serve well - it's easy to miss the mark. Amy gives great advice about observing and adapting. Plus, Amy's passion for constant improvement (through gathering feedback from the team members on the floor) really shines through.
Find out more about Young V&A here:
Tom Dawson: [00:00:00] Welcome to episode three of the arts and culture podcast, taking you behind the scenes of the cultural sector. I'm Tom Dawson, director of digital at the Association for Cultural Enterprises. And today my guest is Amy Akino Wittering. Head of Operations and Commercial at the Young V& A in Bethnal Green, East London.
Tom Dawson: The Young V& A is a museum where children, young people and families can imagine, play and design together. Amy gave me a tour of the museum one morning before the doors opened to the public, and then we sat down for a chat.
Tom Dawson: Hi Amy. Hello. Good to see you. So we are at the Young V& A today and we are sat in your lovely reading room surrounded by books. It's very calm, although we are front of house in the museum, aren't we? So there's lots of little people running around outside, very cute. There's a little bit of background noise on our podcast today but I think it gives you a good sense [00:01:00] of where we are.
Tom Dawson: Describe to people listening the room we're in. We're surrounded by lovely books and chairs. What's the, what's this room used for?
Amy Akino-Wittering: Amazing. Yes, this is our reading room, somewhere where people can just sort of relax, um, kind of go out of the kind of sometimes overstimulating sort of gallery spaces, sort of being carpeted and quiet and a bit off the beaten track of the rest of the museum.
Amy Akino-Wittering: So we kind of recommend it as a kind of a quiet space, um, for people to kind of decompress, um, from the busyness and the loudness of the museum. Great.
Tom Dawson: So before we get into the madness that is Young V& A, um, just so our listeners can get to know you a bit more, I'd like to ask two truths and a lie, if you've got them, Amy.
Tom Dawson: And potentially, you know, the lie could be something you might wish to be true. And I will try and have a good guess what I think is which
Amy Akino-Wittering: So my two truths and a lie is that I have worked under a bunker above the treasury, a Second World War like cruiser and Sir John Soane's country estate. I have had to [00:02:00] navigate around the Secret Service while performing a tour at a previous role.
Amy Akino-Wittering: And that I had got to the final round of being Cho Chang in the Harry Potter movie.
Tom Dawson: Amazing! I want, obviously I want all of them to be true. Um, well I, I think the Secret Service, oh no, I don't know, well I don't know. Maybe you were, maybe you did some acting when you were younger, I don't know. I'm going to go for the Secret Service one, is that a lie?
Amy Akino-Wittering: No. No. It's the Cho Chang one. I can't act. You can't act at all?
Tom Dawson: Okay, fine.
Amy Akino-Wittering: It literally fills me with terror.
Tom Dawson: So you don't wish that to be true? No, absolutely not. Okay, fine. There's no yearning to be on the stage or anything, is there?
Amy Akino-Wittering: No, not at all. I'm more behind the scenes, you know, making things happen.
Amy Akino-Wittering: From a distance.
Tom Dawson: Brilliant. And you've given me a quick tour of the Young V& A, which I have to say is absolutely stunning. And so your role here is head of commercial and building operations? Yes. So you look [00:03:00] after a lot. Is there a typical day in your life, Amy? I'm guessing not. Particularly in a museum with children.
Amy Akino-Wittering: No, not really. I don't think anyone does have a kind of typical day working in this kind of sector. Especially with visitor facing, because your day can change from Morning to afternoon, generally speaking, I kind of look after the front of house operation for Young V& A. I manage the catering contract, as well as doing kind of the more back of house sort of building operations.
Amy Akino-Wittering: As we sit as part of the wider sort of V& A museum, I work a lot of our sort of central stakeholders and teams to make sure the museum It's running as it should.
Tom Dawson: Wonderful. And so we've just had a look around the town square, your main space, and we've looked at the three galleries which are Play, Imagine and Design.
Tom Dawson: Design. Yeah. Amazing. And so again, if someone was to walk in and had never been here before, how would you describe that main space as they walk in? I think it's a bit of a wow moment actually for a museum.
Amy Akino-Wittering: Hopefully people kind of walk into the space and they just kind of get this sense of I suppose joy and doing is kind of what we wanted at Young V& A.
Amy Akino-Wittering: The town square is like the kind of central heart of the [00:04:00] museum and so it's mostly open, um, sort of on the space nearest the entrance slash exit, and then we've got the cafe on the other side. But it's very much a kind of space for people to socialise and kind of come together as a community. And we've got the gallery sort of surrounding the town square space as well.
Tom Dawson: It's wonderful. It's very colourful. It feels very warm and inviting. And so for people who aren't familiar with the Young V& A You used to be Museum of Childhood, and then you had a big refurbishment and opened July the 1st, so just over 5 months. Yeah, wow. So, and were you part of that process? When did you join Young V& A?
Amy Akino-Wittering: Yeah, so I joined in autumn 2021. Previously used to work at South Kensington Visitor Experience Team, and then I moved over to be head of Ops and Commercial. So when I first started there was only myself and Jaz, our Young V& A coordinator, in the Ops and Commercial team, and so, yeah, I've been able to hire Kind of the entire team, including front of house, volunteering manager.
Tom Dawson: Coming to, um, create and design the young V& A. I feel like what is really unique about this. This place, it was created with children as well, [00:05:00] not just by a curatorial team or architects, very much with children in mind.
Amy Akino-Wittering: Absolutely, yeah. So the museum was kind of co designed with children. The galleries themselves were made as a joint team between the curatorial team and the learning team.
Amy Akino-Wittering: So we sit in the learning division as well. So that kind of partnership is really embedded throughout all the different things that you can see in
Tom Dawson: gallery. Yeah, and it struck me when we were walking around what a tactile museum it is, which again is really unusual. I sometimes walk around museums and I just want to touch the stone or the sculptures and all the big no nos you're not meant to do.
Tom Dawson: It feels very much designed at lots of different heights, with lots of different ages in mind. So we had a look at the mini museum, which I love. Tell us a bit about the mini museum.
Amy Akino-Wittering: Yeah, so the mini museum is designed for naught to three year olds, and it's very much kind of a sensory kind of playground, a sensory space.
Amy Akino-Wittering: There's lots of things to kind of touch and feel because, you know, naught to three year olds, they experience the world through touch. Fluffy kind of carpets, there's like a grass sort of facade on one, and then it's like shiny boots and mirrors, colour totems, which were basically, the objects were [00:06:00] chosen because of the colour, and there's like a Hockney and the Caller, which is all about splash to evoke, you know, those kind of sounds.
Amy Akino-Wittering: So it's a very much kind of a different way of kind of curating and displaying as well. The Mini Museum is a really kind of fun place to be. It was one of the places when we first opened, you can, you can plan and plan and plan. And then the reality of when people actually start using the space, they kind of have to kind of tweak your operation and things like that.
Amy Akino-Wittering: It was very much one of those. So we found that people above the age of three. Also want to enjoy the space. Cause it's very inviting, um, very tactile, but they were often quite boisterous, um, kind of in that space. And, you know, it was designed for nought to three years as kind of a safe space. So we do have to kind of install like a baby bouncer as we call them to be able to kind of like manage that space and make sure that it's kind of a safe space for those nought
Tom Dawson: Yeah.
Tom Dawson: I love that. Only here. Which is what I'm trying to get at. What is, what is unique about this place that's amazing. I mean there's some incredible gallery spaces here. One of the ones that really struck me was the, the stage space. You've built a whole stage, again, [00:07:00] very interactive. How are children, in fact, adults? Using a space like that.
Amy Akino-Wittering: Yeah, it's a really really lovely space. So each of the galleries have a space for learning in there as well So the stage is the kind of one for imagine So, um, it has kind of various different modes throughout the day or depending whether it's a holiday or a weekend or turn time So there's a video which plays for 30 minutes every hour shows performance art and videos and things like that And then the other 30 minutes is where there's no kind of video playing.
Amy Akino-Wittering: And that's an opportunity for our visitors to go and perform and play. So we've kind of got dress up elements in one corner, shadow puppets in the other. And it's really amazing actually, just seeing how people really have that sense of ownership in the space, walk through and just see people lying on the steps.
Amy Akino-Wittering: Cause it's a really lovely sort of soft red carpet, which is very inviting. It makes you just kind of want to curl up, um, and people really take advantage of that. I think that's one of the things across the whole of the museum, actually, is that kind of sense of ownership that people come in and they feel like.
Amy Akino-Wittering: They can just be themselves and they can behave. Almost as if it's their home, which is nice. Some challenging [00:08:00] sometimes, but also nice.
Tom Dawson: Yes, I bet. I'm sure we'll come on to that. So there's obviously these spaces of play, action. It also struck me that there's some quieter spaces as well. Maybe it's just that moment where you need to calm down, maybe the people are a bit overstimulated.
Tom Dawson: What's the room with all of the dolls houses in?
Amy Akino-Wittering: Ah, place. Um, yeah, so that's kind of insulated by Rachel Whiteread. So it used to be displayed at the Museum of Childhood and then it's been redisplayed for Young V& A. The lights are low. The built up sort of doll's houses are done in such a way it's just really beautiful, and there's some amazing sort of audio that you can listen to as well whilst you're in that space.
Amy Akino-Wittering: There's seating everywhere for both sort of the grown ups who are with the children who just need a bit of a rest, as well as the kind of children who are in there as well.
Tom Dawson: So it's cliché when they say don't work with children. I mean, do you find that? I mean, what are the challenges of working with such a child centric museum?
Amy Akino-Wittering: I mean, I think that's probably the obvious. So there's like, I was reading the week report this week and it's like, oh, you know, we had projectile vomit the other day. So it's like the kind of gross bodily fluids, I suppose, which kind of comes through working at a children's [00:09:00] museum. It's really interesting, which I didn't quite anticipate until working here, that people just whip out their sort of portable potties.
Amy Akino-Wittering: And sort of go in the town square. Wow. Because, you know, I suppose that's potty training, and so they don't have time to go to the toilet downstairs. So they just do it in the middle of the gallery. I love as well there's zero filter of children. They just kind of say what's on their mind, what they see, what they think, which is kind of lovely and hilarious.
Amy Akino-Wittering: Especially as we have a few sort of interactives where people kind of create and design and do their own stories or drawings. And so when we kind of go through them at the end of the day, at the end of the week, there's some real amusing ones.
Tom Dawson: Where does the income come from for the Young V& A? You've got amazing shops in here, which I encourage people to come and shop at. What's your kind of mix looking like in your kind of commercial side of your work?
Amy Akino-Wittering: So we have two shops at Young V& A. We have our kind of main shop, which is on the ground floor, and then we have our exhibition shop. And then we also have donation boxes, so kind of card and cash, and we also have our catering partners, uh, Benugo, who [00:10:00] operate our cafe in the town square.
Amy Akino-Wittering: We have a paid for exhibition, so exhibition tickets, and then the donations and the gift aid on top of there as well. We also have the membership scheme, which is across the whole of the V& A. So you can do it across, you know, that's Kensington sites, Young V& A, et cetera. And then venue hire. So that again, that's kind of managed centrally by the events team and then development, fundraising, front end aid, that kind of thing.
Amy Akino-Wittering: Brilliant. So yeah, it's quite mixed.
Tom Dawson: Thinking about your audience, who are you trying to attract? Is it a lot of locals, a lot of local school children I imagine, I mean, are most of your visitors Londoners or do you get a lot of international tourists? What's the mix like here?
Amy Akino-Wittering: Yeah, so we very much see ourselves as like part of the community, you know, we want to be a kind of community kind of asset and somewhere where people just kind of come and rock up, whether it's just for a cup of tea, just for something to do.
Amy Akino-Wittering: So the majority of our kind of audience is hyper local. Also slightly wider London, a lot of school groups coming through. I think last week we had like 11 school groups in sort of one day, which is for the kind of busiest run for a little [00:11:00] while. And that's kind of really driven through our kind of volunteering and our front of house recruitment as well.
Amy Akino-Wittering: We really wanted to attract kind of local people, be part of this museum and kind of see it as a space for them.
Tom Dawson: Really felt like a huge amount of thought had gone into the exhibitions. A lot of theory, so it might seem on the surface very fun, almost frivolous, but it really isn't. There's a lot of educational theory gone into the spaces and the exhibitions.
Amy Akino-Wittering: Absolutely. I mean, we sit within the learning division of the V& A and that's very much, lots of rigor has kind of underpinned all the things that are happening in the gallery. So yeah, that's absolutely kind of like the heart of Young V& A as well.
Tom Dawson: And there's a, um, a workshop space up in your imagination gallery, isn't there?
Amy Akino-Wittering: Yes. So in design, um, we have the open studio and so that's a space where people can kind of do self ed activities as well as kind of workshops, which are facilitated by the learning team. We've also got the shed up there, which is where our designer in residence lives. So we've got someone called who is our current designer in residence in there.
Amy Akino-Wittering: And yeah, it's a really kind of amazing space where it's kind [00:12:00] of her workshop. And then a few days a week, she kind of opens up and things of like. Talk to our resident kind of designer and she kind of runs workshops and things like that. So there's some really amazing workshops and programs which go through as well.
Amy Akino-Wittering: Which reminds me, actually, we also have, in terms of our income streams, we have paid for learning activities and informal learning as well as informal.
Tom Dawson: So, obviously, Young Young V&A is part of The wider V& A group. Yes. This building is Grade II listed building from I think 1870s It's always been owned by the V& A group, but it's a really unusual building I mean, do you know much about the history of the space and how it came into being?
Amy Akino-Wittering: Yes, very top line not very detailed But yeah, so this building has been around for quite a while So actually used to sit at South Kensington's the Brompton boilers and it got transported across in the late 1800s been here ever since So yeah, people are quite surprised that it's actually a V& A Building and we kind of chatted visitors and things like that They didn't realize that the Museum of Childhood was part of the V& A, but it was and so hopefully it's more obvious now
Tom Dawson: Okay, so they actually physically took yeah, the contrsution and moved [00:13:00] it over here.
Tom Dawson:
Amy Akino-Wittering: Yeah, and like the flooring up in the town square was I think was made by women prisoners
Tom Dawson: I was just about to say, I read that on a London blog, so I wasn't, if you've said it Amy, I believe it. Fact checked, yeah. It's from female inmates in Woking Jail, apparently I read.
Amy Akino-Wittering: I don't know the exact detail of which jail, but definitely
Tom Dawson: female inmates. Very cool. And so thinking about that link to the wider V& A site, how does that work with your job there? Are you You're not just working with colleagues in this space, you're working with stakeholders across the group, is that right?
Amy Akino-Wittering: Yeah, that's correct. I think that's one of the kind of things which I enjoy kind of most about the role, so like I can think very kind of like locally about, you know, what do we want kind of young V& A to be and how do you want it to operate, especially with things that I kind of directly manage, such as the kind of the front of house teams, volunteering and things like that.
Amy Akino-Wittering: And then we kind of work with our kind of wider V& A family. So we've kind of got these central teams such as the people team, finance, technical services, design, they are all, and marketing, you know, et cetera. [00:14:00] They are all sort of centrally, they sit across all the different sites. And so a lot of my job is as well as, is kind of talking and sort of working with my colleagues to be like, okay, well, how are we going to get this It's, you know, how can I sort of advocate for young V& A, how can we work together, you know, it's a new model, so even though it was always part of the kind of V& A before, I think we're much more integrated now as young V& A, so a lot of the kind of last sort of year before we opened was very much kind of talking to our sort of centralized colleagues and be like, What do we need to do to open, basically, and how's that going?
Amy Akino-Wittering: And I think now that we're kind of five months in, it's that moment where we've kind of opened, we've bedded in, we, we know just about enough to be able to connect. Okay, well, how can we tweak, how can we iterate, how can we make it even better? And I think that was very much the way of thinking as we were gearing up to opening, is that, okay, well, we need to open the doors, we need to make sure that we've got really good, sort of, strong foundations.
Amy Akino-Wittering: And deliver the basics really, really well. You know, we need to have a really amazing visitor experience. We need to make sure that the building can run kind of smoothly. And then we can like, build upon that. And, you know, do more [00:15:00] complex things. And, and try branching out a bit more. But at it's heart, for opening, we just want to make sure that people have like the best visitor experience that they can.
Tom Dawson: So I read in a blog you wrote for the website: “It's the people that visitors encounter that can transform a visit into an experience. You remember I want to share, repeat and support”. And I thought that that really encapsulated the difference between just working front of house and being part of visitor experience.
Tom Dawson: And it struck me when you were showing me around. Does the museum rely on really talented front of house staff engaging with children and encourage them to use some of the exhibits? You know, there's lots of things about storytelling, which I imagine might need a bit of pointing out, a bit of steering, a bit of guiding, maybe.
Tom Dawson: How does that work with your team?
Amy Akino-Wittering: Yeah, absolutely. Though I am obviously quite biased. Um, but yeah, no, I fully believe that, you know, it's the people that people encounter that can really make the difference. An old colleague of mine always had this really great analogy. Shamelessly stealing it. Um, it's like, you go to the fanciest restaurant and have the most amazing food, but actually if [00:16:00] the customer service that you receive and the waiters are really rude and they're just like not very informative, then actually that's what you'll remember and that's what you'll go and sort of talk about, about the experience of going and eating at that place.
Amy Akino-Wittering: And so that's kind of always kept with me. We need to kind of enable our staff and our front of house teams to provide the experience and have the kind of knowledge. It's kind of in their back pocket, but actually have their personalities to engage with people, people are just people, you know, um, what we look for when we're Recruiting is can you engage?
Amy Akino-Wittering: Do you enjoy talking with the public if you don't enjoy talking with the public? Probably isn't the role for you and that doesn't mean you need to be extroverted We've got plenty of introverts in the team and you know All these different kind of skills and personalities can kind of come out but at its baseline you need to kind of enjoy Interacting with people and so a lot of our training we had a three month induction For the assistants, when they came in, that was all about, well, a lot of it was about team culture.
Amy Akino-Wittering: So we spent a lot of time, you know, building this team and creating that sense of [00:17:00] trust. Also sensing that kind of sense of joint direction in terms of where do we want to be? What kind of team do we want to be? I very much believe that, you know, if you've got a kind of a happy, supported and empowered staff, that will translate into the visitor experience.
Amy Akino-Wittering: If you're kind of miserable and negative and you're not kind of enjoying work, then that will also bleed into the visitor experience. So I think, you know, the employee experience, as well as the visitor experience, absolutely go hand in hand. And so that was kind of really central point of our kind of inductions, as well as all the kind of like the nuts and bolts of how would you do the tail?
Amy Akino-Wittering: How'd you do the fire evacuations? Here's all your kind of safeguarding ins and outs. But actually the layer on top of it is like, okay. How can we kind of engage with our visitors? And because our museum is so, you know, it's very specific in its audience type, it's 0 14 year olds, we did a lot of work as well in terms of working with families, so we had training from kids in museums as well, in terms of like what's kind of best practice, we kind of make sure that You know, we talk to the kids as well as the grown ups, and so, you know, they very much feel like this museum is for them.
Amy Akino-Wittering: You know, about providing that amazing welcome when you come in, making sure that you greet people, [00:18:00] and just being open and friendly.
Tom Dawson: And do you think the appreciation of visitor experience and all kind of front of house staff, including commercial, has grown for museum leadership, potentially from the pandemic?
Amy Akino-Wittering: I think so. Yeah, I think I can definitely, I mean, I've worked in front of house like my entire career, so yeah, I think I can definitely see The difference in terms of people are really They appreciate, I think, more. And I sort of like the front of house and the skills, actually, that's needed. We have done kind of shadowing from kind of back of house colleagues to kind of come and shadow our front of house colleagues during kind of the peak summer weeks, which is probably the busiest and the most crazy that Young VNA was.
Amy Akino-Wittering: I think that was a really great experience, um, as well for people who are traditionally kind of not. Front facing where they can actually recognize the skills that are needed to not only just greet people and talk about the museum and how to Engage with people but also in terms of the skills needed for de escalation.
Amy Akino-Wittering: The kids, they just love climbing on everything So it's like how do you engage with the children to kind of [00:19:00] like distract and deflect in a nice kind way? So they don't do it again, but they don't feel like told off and that's a skill, you know I hate the phrase soft skills. I hate it Because it's really hard to be able to do that and those are much harder to teach I think Then actually, you know, how do you still things like that?
Amy Akino-Wittering: So that's kind of what we look at when we recruit as well is, you know, how is that kind of customer interaction and kind of experience?
Tom Dawson: That's really interesting. I mean, that's one of the things that cultural enterprises were constantly advocating for which is front of house commercial staff are often the only people a visitor will speak to.
Tom Dawson: They often are the face of that organization. And so that's so important that they get the training, the support, the pay, because they are so vital to that organization's brand, to that person's visit. So Love what you said. You mentioned your career. I mean, I think you have a very cool job. So before you worked for the V& A, you were at HMS Belfast, Churchill War Rooms, very cool places. How did you find working there?
Amy Akino-Wittering: It was really fun. So yeah, so I worked at the Imperial War Museum for [00:20:00] five years. So I was able to kind of work at both kind of the Lambeth Road branch during the Reopening in 2014. And then, yeah, I moved on to work in the HMS Belfast and Churchill War Rooms. I mean, they're just very interesting places.
Amy Akino-Wittering: I mean, I worked in a bunker, I worked on a ship. Very unique. It's very unique. It's just very cool. But it's also, like, very different atmospheres. Like, you have to, like, climb up the ladders or climb the Belfast to kind of get to your office. Or, you know, in the bunker, like, if the lights were, like, down low, if it was the end of day, it's just, like, a bit spooky.
Amy Akino-Wittering: And, yeah, it was just a very Looking back on it, it's not a normal place to work. No.
Tom Dawson: Was your office in the Belfast on the ship then?
Amy Akino-Wittering: Yeah, it was. Yeah.
Tom Dawson: Not below the waterline or something?
Amy Akino-Wittering: No, like, on. But yeah, there's definitely certain elements, like if you're one of the kind of, there was a meeting room at the front of the ship where, if it's a very, like, Windy day.
Amy Akino-Wittering: You'd feel a bit sick. I mean, I get seasick. So generally it was quite stable. So it was okay.
Tom Dawson: Incredible. Incredible. Um, it sounds like you really enjoy your job. [00:21:00]
Amy Akino-Wittering: I do. Yeah. It's really fun. It's just a really nice place to work. And I just, I love working front of house. It's something that I've always done.
Amy Akino-Wittering: And one of the things I've kind of enjoyed is the more senior you get, the more decision making you can do. Um, so like all the kinds of experiences that I've kind of had kind of up to now, I can then sort of. Actually implement sort of things that I would have wanted to see when I was more junior or things like that Which is really a privileged position to be in because I started as a sort of a retail emissions assistant And then like supervisor, deputy, manager And so I've kind of done most sort of front of house sort of roles throughout my career and so there's just lots of things that you pick up and things that sort of I So the thing I enjoyed and got the most out of as I was kind of going through my career was having opportunity.
Amy Akino-Wittering: So I'm a big believer of sort of empowering teams to give really valid and great feedback, listen to it, and then action it. You know, obviously you can't action it all, because you know, when I do this kind of like lessons learned or things like that, you'll have a list of like 500 things. And that is just not practical on any level.[00:22:00]
Amy Akino-Wittering: But what you can do is like, listen to kind of the key kind of themes that are coming through and then like prioritize in terms of. What it is that we can kind of get out of it. So one of the things that I really champion is getting kind of team feedback and like listening to it because they're the ones who are on the floor all the time and interact with our visitors the most.
Amy Akino-Wittering: Um, and sort of like pick up all these amazing sort of nuggets of information. Also a big fan of efficiency. Making things as simple as possible and effective as possible. Um, so it might mean doing a lot of groundwork in advance. Giving people autonomy to do things themselves. Um, so we've created kind of a lot of internal systems and forms and processes to make sure that, you know, it's almost like a self service sort of element to it.
Amy Akino-Wittering: And when it's things like, you know, something's broken in a gallery, you log on the building ops log, and then we can talk about it every week through, just go through every single thing that's happened in the week and see where, what the status is like. So all those kind of like efficiencies where it doesn't need to be a meeting or an email per thing.
Amy Akino-Wittering: You can just go on there. batch deal with it all at once. I think as [00:23:00] well in terms of variety of the day, so thinking more about more assistant sort of layer of the team. I used to get really bored, I suppose, when I would be there for, like, many, many hours at a time. I liked having to do lots of different things.
Amy Akino-Wittering: So one of the things that I did for when we created the Front of House team here is that they do a bit of everything. So they work on the retail shop, on the tills, ticketing, the learning check in, in the galleries. So it's a very, kind of, varied job and they can do lots of different things. And so they rotate, sort of, every half hour, every hour.
Amy Akino-Wittering: When we're in peak times, when there's a queue out there as well, they kind of Manage the cues as well. So there's a lot of variety in the day and that keeps things fresh. Keep things focused It also helps to re energize throughout the day. Also when it's really really busy during peak times you don't want to be on a cue all day or you don't want to be like kind of at On the till all day because it's it's a lot So you need to kind of have that almost like Change of pace, change of energy to be able to kind of like refuel throughout the day to keep kind of that peak performance going through.
Amy Akino-Wittering: So that's one of the things that we kind of [00:24:00] did, um, quite early on. I think just team culture as well makes all the difference and kind of put your money where your mouth is as well. Just making sure that people are listened to. One of the things that we did, every layer of recruitment. So when I heard like the senior manager and the volunteer manager, and then the second when we did all the floor managers, and then when we did all the assistants, we created team charters.
Amy Akino-Wittering: I did the same exercise, like, three times. At the end of it, we kind of created this amazing sort of document, and this team charter's like, well, these are the standards which we're all going to abide by from a, in terms of staff, and how we interact with each other, but also in terms of our visitors. How do we interact with our visitors?
Amy Akino-Wittering: And so it's like, that kind of thing, and that real kind of, like, team building, I think is kind of really, really important. I remember when I first started at the Imperial War Museum, it was a reopening team. So it was for when the museum was going to be open for when it was built. It was partially opened for a bit and we did this really amazing sort of induction program and I always remember that and I felt actually having the time to talk about our jobs, talk about visitors, rather than sort of being thrust [00:25:00] on the shop floor, um, we actually had that time to really kind of talk to people and understand our role and how it feeds into the wider museum and how our roles impact the running of the museum.
Amy Akino-Wittering: I think it's so important to kind of have that pride in kind of what we do as well.
Tom Dawson: That's fantastic. And the word empowering, I sort of picked up there with your team. That's really, that's really interesting. And so, do trained the team to be cross working then across all of your, you know, retail?
Amy Akino-Wittering: The senior managers and the floor managers have done an amazing job in terms of doing that.
Amy Akino-Wittering: They are all amazing, all very hands on, and they're all very kind of like giving. And sharing and that as well. I think that kind of hiring in terms of when we went through the hiring kind of process and things like that is to kind of look out for making sure that Yeah, it's a good atmosphere to kind of be,
Tom Dawson: is it some of that process you talked about?
Tom Dawson: Is this the, the, the kaizen approach? Yes. To continuous improvement. I've read about,
Amy Akino-Wittering: Yes. So I think that also feeds into kind of like team empowerment, but also like efficiency, being operational. There's always so many things that you can do better. Like there's, there's [00:26:00] always things that you can improve upon.
Amy Akino-Wittering: There's always things that wanna get round to. The approach that I've kind of taken for many years now is there's always room for improvement and I don't always know best what that improvement is, but I know that we can do something better. So what I always like to do is kind of bring as many voices into the room as possible, get the feedback, see what are the challenges that we're facing, and then kind of prioritize it in terms of like, okay, what is the kind of like the top things that we kind of need to change?
Amy Akino-Wittering: And then we kind of find some solutions together, in terms of, okay, well, what, what is the fix for this? How, how do you want to go about it? And how can I help you get there? And then we kind of measure that. So it's like, okay, well, what's the impact of Changing this, how we're going to measure the impact of it, and then we kind of review it, like, okay, that's worked, great.
Amy Akino-Wittering: It's not, okay, let's go to the cycle again. So I think it's just putting those mechanisms in place and those principles in place to be able to always Strive for better, I suppose. And the, you know, operations and museum operations, they're always changing. So there's always things that have changed or moved on or there's always new things [00:27:00] to learn and it's getting like best practice across the sector, but also like outside of the sector as well, seeing what other people do and steal their ideas.
Tom Dawson: And that's, that's, so that comes from the. Japanese word Kaizen, which means like continuous improvement, is that right? Yeah, that's correct. Really interesting. Talking about sort of learning from outside organizations, are there other venues or spaces you like to go to where I go, Oh, they do that really well, or I'd quite like to take inspiration from that?
Amy Akino-Wittering: Loads. One of the things, yes, one of the things I always love doing kind of with teams as well, especially when we're kind of creating this, we did a lot of comp shopping or like museum visiting or not even museum visiting. So, um, from things like. The logo store to the welcome collection of the science museum or theaters or whatever.
Amy Akino-Wittering: And we spend a lot of time talking about good visitor experiences that you've had also bad visitor experiences that you've had or customer experiences that you've had, you know, thinking about the Disney store, thinking about John Lewis, you know, all these kind of like really great kind of services that you get.
Amy Akino-Wittering: And so I think it's just good to absorb any kind of. [00:28:00] Service interaction that you may have. And there's always things to learn from there. At the end of the day, it's, it's about people, isn't it? And it doesn't really matter what sector you're in. It's all about, you know, how you interact and how you kind of like work with and serve your customers.
Tom Dawson: I feel like you said earlier about, you know, children just say it how it is. Yeah. So I feel like you, they can tell. It's a, you know, they can tell if you're putting on a kind of fake customer service persona. They, you know, they want that human interaction, which I feel like comes through, shines through here.
Amy Akino-Wittering: That authenticity, I think is really important because they'll just see you through it. And that's something we've really encouraged as well with the kind of the teams is be yourself. Obviously there's frameworks and there's guidelines and you know, et cetera, et cetera, but ultimately We want to see personality.
Amy Akino-Wittering: That's what people are kind of engaged with, and things like that. So we kind of encourage it, even from like our uniforms. You might see them when you're going up later. Um, but like the guys kind of wear aprons, and then they can wear basically what they want underneath there to kind of help show their kind of own kind of personality and self expression.
Amy Akino-Wittering: I mean, we literally have a gallery called This Is Me. So, that kind of fed into that.
Tom Dawson: [00:29:00] Brilliant. Do you feel as a museum for young people, children? Is there a kind of social ethical responsibility to how you're approaching things like the commercial operations in terms of the stuff you stock in the shop, stuff you sell in the cafe? Is that part of your decision making?
Amy Akino-Wittering: Yeah, absolutely. So the retail buying is all done centrally through our amazing retail team. Um, and so they've got such amazing products and there's, when they were kind of doing the research of it, they spoke with the curators and did all the stories through there, but also looking from sustainability and point of view in terms of materials that's used, is it kind of ethically sourced as well as price points as well.
Amy Akino-Wittering: So yeah, absolutely. That's very much core to the way of thinking. Same with the cafe as well. So we did a new tender for, for when we did the catering contract for Young V& A. And when we did it, it was all about. Audience centric, you know, everything that we do at you can be an is all about the kind of the audience And so we looked at things through like price points through the menu High chairs, bottle warming, micro [00:30:00] disposable, you know, all things like that are very much kind of like embedded in it.
Amy Akino-Wittering: So yeah, absolutely. We are a museum for young people, so we need to be able to cater in every sense of the word.
Tom Dawson: Brilliant. What are your biggest challenges in your job day to day that, um, maybe stress you out a bit and go what's going to be the big challenge for the next six months? Hmm.
Amy Akino-Wittering: Well, I think because we're newly opened, I think there's always that kind of element of, well, we've just opened, so all the things, everything was theory.
Amy Akino-Wittering: Actually, you know what? I think it's the robustness of the building. Actually, so our visitors are very, very boisterous, as I've kind of mentioned before. And I think it's It's making sure that all the lessons that we've learned in this first, what, five months, we take on board and we move forward to make sure that actually we've got a really sustainable kind of operation and we can kind of resolve things quickly if things were to break or things go wrong.
Amy Akino-Wittering: It's like, how can we make sure that we go back to even keel as quickly as possible? So I think that's probably one of the biggest ones, but we're still learning things. We've not done a full year yet. We only just had our first like non summer [00:31:00] holiday half term in October, which is also when our exhibition had just opened.
Amy Akino-Wittering: So up until October. We hadn't had an exhibition open, so that's an extra shop, a ticketing point, and an exhibition to run, which we hadn't had before. So that was a new way of learning. You know, we've started doing all the schools pilots and things like that, so soon we'll have like a full schools program.
Amy Akino-Wittering: That'll really hit off in the new year. So, we've not really experienced everything yet. And I think first year openings are always a bit of an anomaly, because obviously it's brand new and things like that. So I think, once we've done a full year We'll be able to see, kind of, and experience everything and see what the key learnings are for the next year.
Tom Dawson: Exciting times. Yeah, it's really fun. Sounds good. Sounds good. So, coming into a brand new space, obviously full of opportunity, full of challenges, if you could kind of go back and do it again, what would you do differently? What would you say to someone in a similar position to
Amy Akino-Wittering: you? So, I was actually part of the Pitshanger Manor and Gallery sort of opening project [00:32:00] team as well.
Amy Akino-Wittering: So I think I was very lucky that I'd had an experience of sort of opening somewhere from scratch, especially from the operational side of things, before this role. And I think I definitely took a lot of lessons learned from that experience into this role here. And I think the kind of overriding one is.
Amy Akino-Wittering: Start with the basics. Make sure you have really, really strong kind of foundations to work from. If you really smash, you know, the vis the Vista Welcome and the Vista and the team, and you know, that front facing sort of element of it, you know, you embed that commercial culture in, and that's, you know, it's not It's not a hard sell, it's a sales through service.
Amy Akino-Wittering: You know, if people have a good time, if people know about the opportunities in which they can support the museum, you know, people often will, and it's creating that kind of atmosphere where people want to spend time here, people want to dwell, people want to purchase, they want to take away a memento, a memory, etc.
Amy Akino-Wittering: That, That goes a lot of the way in terms of kind of like having those really kind of positive memories of the space, because it's a new space. People will be bowled over by the amazing galleries that they're kind of going into. That does a lot of the heavy lifting in terms of [00:33:00] kind of those new spaces.
Amy Akino-Wittering: So I would say for those who are sort of working in front of house, really concentrate on the team. Do they have the tools to succeed? There's loads of things you can do. And it's like not getting sort of pulled down the rabbit hole of all the possibilities of things that you could do. You could do it, like, in a year, in two years.
Amy Akino-Wittering: It doesn't need to be all on day one. And I think that's probably the most kind of valuable thing that I took with me when I came to this one. It's like, you know, do the basics really well. We can build upon it once we're open and we know what we're doing. And it's also kind of making sure that there's really good kind of communication and frameworks as well.
Amy Akino-Wittering: So for kind of the side of things where we do sort of like the building management and sort of. Uh, getting all the feedback from the teams, making sure that there's processes in place to capture that information so that you don't become a bottleneck. Automation or sort of like self service element of sort of running the museum.
Amy Akino-Wittering: I think spend the time to get that done and socialize it with the rest of your organization so they know that that's kind of the expectation and the way of working and that will just save you so much time when [00:34:00] it's, when you open and it's crazy. And you've got to deal with things that you didn't think you'd need to deal with or just just the busyness because you're a new space.
Tom Dawson: And I already have a couple of favorite spaces in here. I really enjoyed you had a kind of sand. What do you put the sand? Oh, the sun spinner. Sun spinner. That was really calming. ASMR videos of people making crafts and things. I could sit and just chill and watch that after a stressful meeting. Get that.
Tom Dawson: What's your favorite space?
Amy Akino-Wittering: I think it depends on my mood. It depends on my mood and how busy the museum is, I think. I think one of my favourite spaces I love play. Which, yeah, there's just so many joyful things which happen in that space. I think the mini museum is always a joy. Because you've got like The little baby's just having a great time.
Amy Akino-Wittering: And I think also actually just sometimes when, if we have like team meetings or something like in the cafe, because it's in the heart of the museum as well, you can just see visitors and see how they react in the space. I always remember opening day, we did like a countdown in the queue to opening, and then like the first kind of visitors came [00:35:00] through, and the children were just like, just running in and like, windmilling their arms, being like, Whoa!
Amy Akino-Wittering: And it's like those kind of stuff stays with you, I think. So I think it's probably, yeah, the reactions of the audiences as they come in.
Tom Dawson: Great. Well after this we'll have to go and, you know, draw our portraits or write a story. Yeah. In ‘Play’. . Brilliant. Thank you Amy. Thank you. It’s been absolutely fantastic.
Tom Dawson: I have a newborn and so I think I will be spending quite a bit of time here. Please, you won't get rid of me, . Uh, so I, I hugely recommend it to anyone who's not been. It's definitely worth, you know, it's, it's a destination space if you are not from London. It's fantastic and it's been an absolute pleasure talking to you.
Amy Akino-Wittering: Thank you very much. You too.
Tom Dawson: Thanks for listening to the Arts and Culture podcast, brought to you by the Association for Cultural Enterprises. We are the only organisation dedicated to income generation in the arts, with a community of over 400 organisations and thousands of professionals across the UK and beyond. Sustainable income [00:36:00] generation is vital to the future of our museums, galleries. national parks, historic houses, theatres, and so much more. We exist solely to provide an extensive programme of education and support, and within our large community, our mission is to help the cultural sector to not only survive, but thrive. Find out more about our mission and how you can get involved at culturalenterprises.org. uk. Thanks for listening, see you next time.