Ideas matter most when they are tested in the real world.
Every project is an opportunity to ask better questions, challenge assumptions, test ideas, and learn something new.
These explorations span research, organizational strategy, facilitation, futures thinking, learning, and institutional change. Some are individual projects. Others represent questions that have evolved across multiple organizations and contexts. Together, they show what happens when philosophy meets practice.
Strategy and Organizational Development
From Museum to Community Resource • The Children’s Museum of the Upstate • Greenville, South Carolina
Essential Question
How can a museum move beyond serving a community to becoming an active participant in it?
Connection to the Lexicon
Agency (v.) • Belong (v.) • Trust (v.) • Learn (v.) • Play (n.) • Courage (v.) • Museum (n.)
Reimagining the Museum After Disruption • The Bishop Museum of Science and Nature • Bradenton, Florida
Essential Question
How can a museum respond to disruption not by returning to what it was, but by reconsidering who it serves, how it uses its assets, and what it might become?
Connection to the Lexicon
Agency (v.) • Disrupt (v.) • Curiosity (n.) • Courage (v.) • Possibility (n.) • Museum (n.)
Facilitation & Workshops
Disruption & Alternative Futures • Women in the Museum XL • Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
Disruption doesn’t mean abandoning museums. It means reimagining what they can become!
Essential Question
What becomes possible when we challenge the assumptions and inherited stories that shape our institutions?
Connection to the Lexicon
Agency (v.) • Disrupt (v.) • Curiosity (n.) • Courage (v.) • Hope (v.) • Possibility (n.) • Joy (n.)
Thought Leadership & Field-Building
The Case for Children’s Museums • Association of Children’s Museums
Updated and revised the Association of Children’s Museums’ cornerstone advocacy document, articulating the social, educational, and economic impact of children’s museums and making the case for their essential role in the lives of children, families, and communities.
Essential Question
What makes children’s museums essential institutions for children, families, and communities?
Explore the Work
Read The Case for Children’s Museums
Connection to the Lexicon
Agency (v.) • Belong (v.) • Play (n.) • Possibility (n.)
Learning and Children’s Museums • Association of Children’s Museums
Authored an information brief examining the role and positive impact of children’s museums in early childhood learning and development.
The brief explored children’s museums as informal learning environments where play, exploration, relationships, and experience create meaningful opportunities for children to construct knowledge and understand the world around them.
Essential Question
How do children’s museums create meaningful opportunities for children to learn?
Explore the Work
Read Learning and Children’s Museums
Connection to the Lexicon
Learn (v.) • Play (n.) • Curiosity (n.) • Joy (n.)
Research & Strategic Analysis
Educational Placemaking: The Radical Power of Play
Hillary’s doctoral research began with a provocative question: What if play were understood not simply as a childhood pastime, but as a tool for systemic change?
Grounded in spatial justice, the research examined how play-based learning can be intentionally integrated into everyday public spaces to address inequities in access to learning, play, and community resources. The study established educational placemaking as a framework for understanding play-based, community-driven interventions that embed informal learning opportunities into the places where children and families already live their lives.
Educational placemaking brings together placemaking, child-centered design, and play-based learning. It treats learning as a collective, place-based process that extends beyond schools and museums and, importantly, positions children not simply as users of public space, but as co-creators of it.
Using fifteen case studies from five established social-impact frameworks, Hillary examined how different combinations of community co-creation, child-centered design, policy integration, and urban context contributed to increased access to play, improved educational outcomes, and stronger community cohesion.
The research found that play can be a meaningful mechanism for advancing educational equity and spatial justice, but play alone is not enough. Its transformative potential depends on the conditions surrounding it, particularly intentional integration into urban environments through community-centered and child-inclusive processes.
That inquiry continues to shape Agency today. Systems can be redesigned. The people affected by them should have agency in shaping them. And meaningful transformation depends not simply on good ideas, but on intentionally creating the conditions in which those ideas can flourish.
Read Educational Placemaking: The Radical Power of Play
Benchmarking • National Children’s Museum • Washington, DC
Prepared a comparative industry analysis examining staffing levels, earned income, annual visitation, philanthropic giving, and gallery space across peer institutions. Rather than treating benchmarking simply as a measure of performance, the research used comparison as a tool for organizational learning, helping the museum understand its current position, identify patterns across the field, and consider possibilities for future growth.
Essential Question
How might a deeper understanding of an organization as it operates reveal new possibilities for its future?
Connection to the Lexicon
Curiosity (n.) • Trust (v.) • Learn (v.) • Possibility (n.) • Agency (v.)
Leadership Development and Mentoring
Future Perfect Museums
An ongoing exploration of disruption, adaptive leadership, and institutional change.
Future Perfect Museums began with a deceptively simple proposition: disruption, in and of itself, is not the point. Disruption matters when the systems, assumptions, and inherited practices maintaining the status quo no longer serve the people or communities they were intended to support.
Through workshops, conference sessions, collaborative exercises, and organizational tools, Future Perfect Museums asks museum professionals to examine what feels inevitable, distinguish technical problems from adaptive challenges, and experiment with different ways of working.
The work has evolved through multiple applications and collaborations:
Virginia Association of Museums — Everyone is a Leader
A four-hour immersive workshop exploring disruption, resilience, design thinking, institutional change, and the capacity of people throughout an organization to create change.
Association of Midwest Museums — Disrupting Museums for Real Change
Developed with Jennifer Foley and Ed Rodley, extending the exploration into adaptive leadership, Cynefin, BANI, antifragility, and the limitations of universal “best practices.”
Aga Khan Museum / ICOM Canada / ICOM Exhibitions — Across Perspectives: Museums, Contemporary Art and Shared Futures
A participatory workshop examining workplace culture, legacy systems, equity, and the movement from disruption to intentional design.
ICOM Exhibitions / National Galleries Scotland — From Touring to Transforming
An interactive exploration of how exhibition professionals can question inherited practices and disrupt exhibition-making from the inside out.
MuseumNext — Beyond Best Practices: Disrupting Museums for Real Change A provocative exploration of disruption, adaptive leadership, and organizational change that challenged the field’s reliance on inherited systems and universal solutions. Presenting alongside Ed Rodley and Jennifer Foley, this presentation features experienced museum leaders re-examining their legacies as well as the future of museums.
Essential Question
How can museums challenge the systems and assumptions that no longer serve them and intentionally build what comes next?
Explore the Work
Watch Beyond Best Practices: Disrupting Museums for Real Change
Connection to the Lexicon
Agency (v.) • Disrupt (v.) • Courage (v.) • Curiosity (n.) • Trust (v.) • Possibility (n.) • Lead (v.)
What are you exploring?
These projects began with different challenges, but each started in much the same place: with curiosity about what might be possible.
Your question may be about your organization, your people, your community, your future, or something you haven’t quite figured out how to name yet.
You don’t need to have the answer. A good question is enough.