Imagine starting a job surrounded by people, animals, and questions about an extended winter. Then imagine having to shut down and pivot operations less than 3 months in. Don't fret this happened to Eric Dorfman who became the Director & CEO of the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences in Janurary. I chatted with him about how has he been adjusting to his new job, what nature may be teaching us, and the future of natural history museums, and much more.
Website: https://naturalsciences.org/
Eric's Blog: https://ericdorfman.com/
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The Future of Natual History Museums
Facebook: North Carolina Museum of Natual Sciences
Twitter & Instagram: @naturalsciences
[00:00:00] Kenneth Brown Jr: Eric Dorfman is relatively new to North Carolina. How new you may ask?
Eric Dorfman: My first official day was the 1st of January but my first actual day in the building was February 2nd, which happened to be Groundhog day and so I spent my first day with a Groundhog and a whole lot of excited people wanting to know what, if it would be a long winter or not.
(music plays: "Base Camp" by Blue Dot Sessions)
Kenneth Brown Jr: Yeah. Very new and has he was transitioning to North Carolina he traveled back to Pittsburgh in March intending to stay for a long weekend.
Eric Dorfman: I flew back and there were a whole lot of people coughing on the plane. And, um, of course, you know, this was all the, just, nobody knew anything at that point. So no masks, no nothing. So about three days back into my long weekend, I started getting a sore [00:01:00] throat and everybody was very, very concerned. And back then it took 10 days to get a results from your test. So I went there and got a test and I got much better by the time the the negative result came. But by then everybody was on lockdown. And so I just stayed and I actually worked from Pittsburgh for the next three months or so.
Kenneth Brown Jr: So the newly minted director of the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences was essentially learning about his new job, the state, and handling the museum responses to the pandemic, hundreds of miles away.
Eric Dorfman: Then it was trying to do two things. One, apply best practices from my previous job at being the director of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh and other places [00:02:00] and understanding what the best practice across the sector was for this really rapidly changing situation. And then also, really important, understanding who the staff members were, what their personalities were understanding, how the, how the whole place ticked.
Kenneth Brown Jr: But the show still goes on and what started has in-person, one-on-one chats or small group conversations with the staff members to begin as strategic planning process quickly turned to a way for him to understand his team so they can best respond to the challenges.
Eric Dorfman: The unexpected benefit of this was that it helped me understand the personality of the museum and the needs and drivers, if you like, of the staff and that was a very steep learning curve. But absolutely essential in being able to make realistic assessments of what we do in this really unpredictable [00:03:00] time and what was going to make the most part, the impact on the community who was still here in Raleigh.
Kenneth Brown Jr: New job. New place. A novel virus. What a way to start.
This is pivots and podcasts about navigating transitions, negotiating change, and reimagining our world. I'm Kenneth Brown Jr. I chatted with Eric to talk about how he has been settling into his role as a museum has had to pivot to new strategies. We also talk about the lessons he's been learning, what nature may be telling us and the feature of museums like this one, let's jump back into our conversation as Eric describes the ways the museum has pivoted during the pandemic.
Eric Dorfman: And that then brings me to the second part of your question, which is what we did to pivot during this time when we couldn't see people [00:04:00] in-person and of course the other point of it is how do we address morale issues? When all of us museum nerds, we love to have people in. We love to share our stories. We, you know, nothing excites us more than the first time a little kid sees our acrocanthosaurus, which is in that gorgeous dome. You know, that's an amazing site for people. And if you don't get that, how do you replenish yourself as a museum worker? So, there's a lot of, a lot of pieces to this. And so, one of the things that we did pretty quickly is pivot to virtual offer, right? So, we became a virtual museum in a sense and we're very lucky to have an extremely skilled digital team and they were able to help us very quickly start making our offer [00:05:00] digitally. So. Sometimes it was outside the museum. Sometimes in certain circumstances it could be inside the museum. And we, we also took one of our classrooms called the gold classroom. And we, in fact, we repainted it from being a yellow classroom to actually now gold one which was kind of fun. But, um, we put in a really good equipment and in fact, just before I logged on here we are, I was a little silent visitor on, on we're just trialing our new virtual dinosaur birthday with a bunch of kids. So that was really fun. So, all the different ways that we had engaged in learning and entertaining, mostly kids, but all kinds of people really in person are now being done through this new setup with call the Gold Classroom. [00:06:00] We also in our branch facility out in Whiteville, we've done a similar thing so that the folks out in Whiteville can also create content for their constituents, that's really exciting. And then some of the things that we've been able to do in person over the last number of years like Thursday nights, science, science nights, the trivia nights, those things, they have converted quite easily to a virtual space. So, and, and the other thing we've done is have virtual. Well, you know, we have these big events. So, our biggest event of the year is BugFest. It can have up to 35,000 people so we were able to convert that to a virtual...virtual thing. And a lot of it is working and in fact, we've just won an award for our teacher training, which has pivoted. So we've, we've taken that teacher [00:07:00] training, which is always been in-person to a virtual.. Virtual setting. That was a lot. (Eric Chuckles_)
Kenneth Brown Jr: It's all good. And you, when you talk about museum workers getting filled up by seeing the wonder of kids exploring for maybe the first time ever, how does that work now? What ways have you been filled up um, or your staff has been filled up when you can't get a lot of people in the doors, has you all used to be?
Eric Dorfman: And that's a, so it's a really interesting question. And I think different people have different ways of engaging, but, you know, we certainly have tried to have as many staff, virtual staff meetups as possible. I think I'm doing charettes for the, so workshops for our teams to be able to contribute to this [00:08:00] strategic plan as we're getting it. We are having a lot of meetings which of course meetings, that's not as exciting or as you say, a way to fill up. And so, you know, it's, I guess we have different ways of doing that. Um, you know, I, personally, and that's hard because, you know, I think everybody, like I said before, everybody has a different way of doing that. I watch a lot of nature documentaries. I...we do a podcast, so on Dan Dombrowski our head veterinarian and I co-host a podcast called "Love Nature: The Biophilia Podcast." So that gives a lot of pleasure to us and I think the other team members who are working on that, we're, you know, meeting lots of people and learning lots of new things by doing it. I also write a blog, which [00:09:00] I really enjoy, just being creative around that. So, the other thing I want to say, you know, we have a pretty large research team and a lot of people on that team are continuing to write papers and do their field work. And I think many people who are in the sciences take personal pleasure from being able to do those activities. Whether they're in front of people or not. So, you know, I think we're all sort of working out how to do that the best, but I visited the museum today for a couple of hours and that I found also just really replenishing. I didn't even go into my office at all. I just wandered the galleries. I had lunch at the cafe, which is open and of course, really delicious food and saw some folks and thought about things we could do [00:10:00] and just that couple of hours made a really big difference to me. And, and I, and I guess it really reminds me how blessed I am to be in this kind of role that is so stimulating.
Kenneth Brown Jr: How do you define pivots? What does pivoting look like for you? How have you defined that?
Eric Dorfman: Pivoting to me implies being nimble and responsive to changing circumstances so that we can change the thrust of our activities in a short time period. And. You know, we've learned a lot of lessons about how we can do that better. You know, we all want a crystal ball. And at the beginning of the pandemic, nobody really knew how long it lasts, what our restrictions would be, what people's comfort levels would be, what we would be asked to do of course by the governor and the state and the department of, natural, sorry, and the [00:11:00] department of Natural and Cultural Resources, which is the department that we're in and, you know, everybody was working out how to apply. The best practices that they knew from the medical field, from the education field, from the entertainment field, all bringing to bear on the different museums that, that are part of the state system. So we were all helping each other and working out how to do that. Now, of course, hindsight is 2020, as they say, and we can, I think we can respond to changing circumstances if it gets much worse than, you know, of course. Touch wood, knock on wood. We don't have to close again, but if we were ever to have to close we, or we would be able to do that much more quickly and then resume operations smoothly as well. We're getting a lot of practice and you know, the other thing is that [00:12:00] it's teaching us how us has a museum staff, but I think also as a community, how to deal with a lot of unpredictability and change and also allowing us to assess what is best and most valued of our offer as an institution and how we can augment that and changed, possibly changed the priorities across the board of what we offer and what we don't.
Kenneth Brown Jr: In an interview you did with the last museum you worked at in 2016, you talked about the book, you were editing "The Future of Natural Museums" and you said that natural museums are repositories of knowledge and you go on to say that museums have a potential problem solving ability. And I was wondering, does the pandemic change anything that was in that book? What have, and if it [00:13:00] does, what have you been learning?
Eric Dorfman: I don't think so. I don't think it changes it. What it does is demonstrate of course, I'm going to say this demonstrates there's a book was right. Of course. But you know, the, the museums that, that do well and, and maybe this is all kinds of organizations, but I know museums best...that those museums that do well are the ones that can look across sectors outside their own field for best practice solutions. So in the book, I was specifically talking about private sector businesses, where we look at business tools for being accountable for, for being efficient, making the most of the resources to hand all those things are, in many [00:14:00] cases, found best or examples are best found outside the museum sector. And so here, when we were doing well, we were starting to say, what do other kinds of institutions do? For instance, we looked at supermarkets for how, who, which of course had to stay open right through the pandemic. But when we were thinking about it, we were saying, well, okay, how does, how does the supermarket industry to find a best practice of uni directional flow through the museum? Right. So that's the same kind of lateral thinking. So we're not just saying, what are the best museums doing? We're saying, what are the best organizations do for handling this kind of program?
Kenneth Brown Jr: I want to continue to go down the street of lessons and learning various things. And [00:15:00] one of in a piece on your blog, you wrote about how during the plague the air cleared, World War Two had a positive effect on marine life, and in today's situation, you talked about clearing smog in India and weird wildlife sightings. So what lessons do you think that we can learn from nature right now? What do you think that nature is telling us?
Eric Dorfman: Nature is from my perspective, nature is telling us that as...that humanity needs to get its act together, right? We need to take the state of the planet very, very seriously. And the, the weather patterns that make up climate are changing and we cannot be blind to this. We have to be aware that humans have are, are changing things at a global level. But also [00:16:00] celebrate the fact that if humans are changing this than humans have the power to mitigate it right and this is where, you know, the whole climate debate comes out and people, you know, lots of people will still want to deny that humanity has had an impact. And I say, I sure as heck hope we have. Because if we haven't and the climate is changing to this degree, we don't know what to do. And the point of fact is that we do know what to do. And climate is only one issue. Of course, there's plastics and people, people look at big piles of plastic in the ocean or on the, the, you know, in waste dumps or, or whatever and we say, "Oh, you know, that's, that's terrible. You know, that doesn't look nice. There's an aesthetic problem with it." But actually the real problem is the [00:17:00] micro. The microscopic plastics that are getting into our bloodstreams in our bodies. These that are actually toxic. Right. And so we've got to think about...it's not to scare monger. This is the point we have got to say, what is the action that we are able to do, to change this? And that is, so really the environment is giving us a wake up call right now. And it is on a, on a global scale that is totally unprecedented. We need to think about that and there's another point I've got to tell you this other point that (Eric chuckles) that the pandemic itself is pointing out, that we are deeply connected to nature, right? That we are part of [00:18:00] nature that, that a virus that could come from a bat in a, in a market in China, can change the lives of everybody on the planet. And that does that because we are biological organisms. It has that power. We are not immune for all that. We all that we have homes and air conditioning and cars, and we can.... airplanes and we can conquer so much of the biology and the physics of the planet to make our lives better. We are still biological organisms, and we are still vulnerable to what nature throws at us. And so the pandemic, as well as things like climate, as well as things like plastics, all of that points to the fact that we're not unvulnerable and we need to have humility when faced with the kinds of [00:19:00] things that...that are presented by the natural world.
Kenneth Brown Jr: Is, and correct me if I'm wrong with isn't cutting someone say that that is one of the purposes of the "Love Nature" podcast, the Biophilia podcast, is examining our connection to nature?
Eric Dorfman: Totally is and, you know, we started "Love Nature" as, as an opportunity for people working with these ideas to have a platform, to be able to talk about their life's work, to connect people, people out on the airwaves to the kinds of thinking that and the really exciting work that people are doing with connecting humanity to the rest of the natural world.
Kenneth Brown Jr: Yeah. Yeah. That we're all connected to nature.
(music plays: "Curiously and Curiously" by Blue Dot Sessions)
Eric Dorfman: Absolutely. We're we're part of, we are part [00:20:00] of nature. We are nature.
(music break)
Kenneth Brown Jr: Uh, I want to jump back a little bit and I want to talk a little bit more about pivoting and pivoting within your life. I was reading something and you...you wrote a story about how, when you were younger, you had to choose between taking a science test and, or going to a play rehearsal, opera rehearsal, and then also just looking at your path, you know, living you lived on the West coast. You lived in Sydney, South Africa, New Zealand, Pittsburgh, Raleigh, and probably many other places in between. And so, I was wondering, have there been moments from your life that has helped you navigate this time?
Eric Dorfman: Oh gosh.
(pause)
Yeah. It's, it's an interesting thing. Uh, moving so many [00:21:00] times and starting over. The biggest thing that I've learned along the way is the importance of listening, right? You come to a new country, a new culture, uh, in some cases they don't even speak English as a first language. And if you come thinking that your life experiences are relevant to them and that you have the answers, you are more likely to fail than not and so it's taught me, one of the things that it's taught me is humility. You know, that, that it's, it's wonderful to come and have a certain kind of professional experience. But if you don't have the cultural experience, you mustn't assume that you have the cultural experience and. You know, if you don't, [00:22:00] it can be really lonely. So that's, that's probably the biggest part of, and I suppose the other thing is resilience because when you do move around a lot, you're kind of starting over, right? You're starting over with a new job with in my case, you know, had to relocate by house, do all those things that, that you do when you move and, and just you know, opening a lot of boxes, you know, and that's, I mean, there's, there's a lot that, you know, it seems like that, but when you've moved a lot, you start to get into a routine that makes things a little bit more efficient. I think that's definitely really secondary to the first lesson though.
Kenneth Brown Jr: What do you hope sticks around long after the pandemic is over?
Eric Dorfman: You know, it's funny because I was just mentioning humility [00:23:00] and that relationship to nature as well. And I hope that, I mean, I'll start with some of the practical’s first, you know, the ability to work effectively online, not having to travel so much to meet colleagues. I mean, there's certain things that are really enjoyable about being face-to-face with people. Be great to be talking to you in person, but you know, it's also hard on the earth. It's hard on people traveling with amazing travel schedules and in some ways, especially in places that where, you know, seeing a proliferation of wifi, right, people can't get away. And so there's a lot of resource being put into connectedness into underserved communities. And that to me is very, very important. [00:24:00] So getting back to this, the second thing which is related is this idea of humility. You know, I mentioned before the pandemic, in some ways, at least. Well, I was going to say, is bigger than we are, ultimately, it won't be the case, you know, it will, we will conquer this and so there's a resilience part of it, you know? And, and I just, you know, my heart goes out to all the people who have lost loved ones, who've had changed circumstances, who, I mean, you know, it's just been incredibly devastating for people around the world. And of course, It, it we're, we're seeing a resurgence now, which is, you know, very sobering. But if we can start to look at the power of nature in a more humble way, and we can say that we need [00:25:00] the, for want of the better term, goods and services that. The natural world provides, that would be a great deal of progress and also understanding that like I was talking about before that we are vulnerable to the things we do and, you know, I would love to see the wet markets in...across the world be a thing of the past. I would like us to see that we have a better medical infrastructure into communities at every level. I'd like us to, to look as a society at the, uh, the racial breakdown of those who've been victimized by the pandemic and say, "Why is this the case? Can we not do better?" so there's so many lessons to learn if we open our eyes and, and, [00:26:00] and take that journey, and we're not afraid of it.
Kenneth Brown Jr: We are vulnerable to the things we do. Mm. Yeah. Um, that's good. What gives you hope?
Eric Dorfman: One thing that gives me hope is that communities can come together and look after themselves in difficult times. That is an incredible, robust part of the response that we're giving that we genuinely at the end care about each other, that we can, that we can conquer this. Uh, another thing that gives me hope is, you know, I wrote about that in my blog, the, the, the animals that are taking over the cities in places that are not have not been habited, inhabited people start to become more accustomed to seeing [00:27:00] strange animals wander through their backyards and become more comfortable with what is out there versus in a kind of a hermetically sealed environment. And, and maybe we can make more room for natural habitats in amongst where we live and celebrate places that are amenable to those species. E.O. Wilson talks about in his book "Half Earth", setting aside half the planet for natural, for the natural processes, which include not only species, but the cycles of carbon and water and those sorts of things that we desperately need as a species ourselves. And he [00:28:00] talks about that you can't slice up the planet as an orange. You've actually got to integrate those natural places in amongst us. And I hope that people seeing more nature, more vibrantly around them during this pandemic time will wake people up to possibilities.
Kenneth Brown Jr: So someone listening to this might just be curious in how people have pivoted, how organizations have pivoted and I was wondering, what words would you offer to someone who is just looking for some advice and is, and they have had to go through just a massive series of shifts and movements. What words would you offer?
Eric Dorfman: Yeah, it's hard, right? Because everybody's.... Everybody's experiences are so different and so important to them. [00:29:00] And the one thing that I would never want to do is diminished the importance of those by being too general. And so I think of a story and, you know, I'm probably getting a bit of this wrong, right, but a Zen master was asked, what is the one phrase that will cover every situation? And he said "This too shall pass” (music plays: "Home Home At Last" by Blue Dot Sessions)
and it's something that, with the kind of surreal nature of my starting this job and moving across the country, during the pandemic and the lockdown has given me strength and allowed me to find my inner resilience around all these changes. So even though it does sound so [00:30:00] simple as almost to be trite, that's the one thing that I know has worked for me.
Kenneth Brown Jr: Thank you very much. Thank you for this, um, how can people learn more about the museum? How can people learn more about the podcast?
Eric Dorfman: Sure. So, uh, all of that is on our website, natural sciences.org. You can find a link to the podcast. You can find all kinds of online activities that we're doing. You can also sign up for a newsletter to find out when the hours of the museum are open. So, we do have changed hours and, uh, yes. So, there's a lot of things you can also, my blog is eric dorfman.com and that also has a link to the site as well as the, the blogging.
Kenneth Brown Jr: Thank you so much for joining me, I really do appreciate it.
Eric Dorfman: Kenneth. Thank you. It's great to be here.
(music plays)
[00:31:00] Kenneth Brown Jr: You've been listening to Pivots, a podcast about navigating transitions, negotiating change, and reimagining our world. You can also connect with the Museum of Natural Sciences on social media by looking them up on Facebook or on Twitter and Instagram with the handle at natural sciences. Pivots is a project of the A.J. Fletcher Foundation produced and hosted by me Kenneth Brown Jr. Our music is composed by blue dot sessions. Sound effects from freesound.org. You can hear this episode and more wherever you listen to podcasts or go to our show page at www dot pivots-a-j-f dot simplecast dot com.
See you next time.