Eric Langham

Eric founded Barker Langham in 2005 and has led the company’s evolution into one of the world’s leading cultural practices.

Internationally recognised as a planner of new museums and cultural projects, Eric directs Barker Langham’s creative and visitor experience work, and his experience encompasses the interpretive direction and curation of ground-breaking cultural projects across the globe.

We spoke to Eric ahead of #NationalFreelancersDay to find out more about his experience of freelancing and consultancy.

Museum consultancy – doesn’t that sound a bit ‘corporate’?

It’s true; I never really liked the word consultancy and, in the past, I always resisted calling myself a consultant. I did feel it sounded too corporate, conjuring up images of power-suited management consultants. I would always call my company a cultural practice or cultural planners and would pitch us as a ‘partner’ to a museum or cultural organisation. This is semantics but was important to me. Lately though, I’ve started using the word consultancy more – maybe this is reclaiming it in some way.

What would you say are the benefits of working for a museum consultancy rather than in a museum?

There are lots of benefits and rewards for the right type of person. Working for a museum consultancy means no two days will ever be the same, for example. The work is eclectic, collaborative and the deadlines can be quite demanding.

By definition, the work museum consultancies do is very varied. One day you might be supporting an in-house museum team, helping them realise a new project. Another day you might be setting up a technical study that requires specialist skills or a dedicated team to carry it out. In any given week my team at Barker Langham might be drawing up plans for a new mega-museum, speaking with an astrobiologist to discuss growing food on Mars, or meeting with a community to explore plans for a local exhibition.

You should probably be the kind of person who actively enjoys working on new things. You’ll be working in different places and with different organisations, each with their own subjects, collections, ambitions and audiences. This makes life constantly interesting and also brings huge benefits to you professionally; it allows you to gauge and assess various perspectives to planning and this, in turn, enriches your own processes. You should be prepared for fast moving projects and sometimes very quick turnarounds. This can sometimes mean long days when you are chasing a deadline but you are also constantly seeing results, which is extremely rewarding.

The work is a satisfying combination of being highly practical but underpinned by academic approaches rooted in robust research. You will always have a sense of purpose because it is often essential work responding to a pragmatic need, such as a collections audit or an economic impact assessment.

It usually also has tangible and real-life results, such as a successful funding application or a new exhibition being realised. Some of the work will be foundational; it is part of a roadmap – often an early part of a new project. As a result, working for a consultancy means you are joining a valuable and integral part of our sector; you are helping to shape the future.

At its best, the work is very cross-disciplinary. Consultancy teams are not usually siloed in any way nor are they hugely hierarchical. This allows different perspectives and voices to fuse ideas and shape results. For me, it is these connections between teams that inspire some of the most rewarding and paradigm-shifting things we do. Creating business plans shaped and influenced by our curatorial team or developing interpretive plans that are underpinned by operational and business thinking achieves incredible results.

What roles exist within museum consultancies?

I’m pleased to say that the structure of most museum consultancies is very bespoke. There is no standard staffing model and many companies tend to grow organically around the skills of the people within them. The most consistent role across most, if not all, museum consultancies is that of the researcher. The work researchers carry out varies according to each consultancy and each project – you might be researching a collection or a subject for a forthcoming exhibit or you could be gathering data on audience demographics.

Other positions within a consultancy depend on the focus of the company, but they usually consist of expert planners and producers. For example, my company, Barker Langham, has two main focuses; strategy and interpretation. Our strategy team includes business planners, financial modellers, master planners, operational planners and cultural recruiters. Our interpretation team includes curators, interpreters, writers, content managers and designers. Supporting these teams, alongside our researchers, we also have audience engagement specialists, project managers and graphic designers – ensuring that everything we do is underpinned by audience need, efficiently structured and looks great.

What skills do you think are most important for consultancy work?

I think there are three vital skills.

The first and most important is listening. People commission you for a reason; you need to understand what this is. The briefs you receive never fully capture the complexity of a project and having the skills to listen to people, empathising with them and their ideas, appreciating where they are coming from and what their reasons and motivations are, is key. Consultants need great all-round communication skills but listening is the most vital of these.

The second skill you are going to need is the ability to synthesise. At Barker Langham we define synthesis as being able to draw on our collective pool of skills, research, capabilities, past experiences, imaginings – anything and everything – and using them to inform our proposed approach to a project. Synthesis is not simply about analysing a situation – it is the pooling of resources and utilising them to inspire and create something totally new. This act is at the heart of creativity and invention but it isn’t a deliberate or formulaic process; it can happen at any time and in any place – you might be brainstorming with your team, or you might be riding on your bike. The key is to be open to it and to find ways to encourage it to happen.

The final skill I think everyone needs is obliquity. Consultants must think differently, and obliquity is just that; the art of thinking differently and looking with fresh eyes at old problems. Consultants are often called in precisely to offer new perspectives and new ideas, so you need to be able to go beyond the standard, easy responses and invent new ways of achieving goals. New solutions can often be found by looking obliquely at the problem, something economist John Kay has written about in his book Obliquity. He talks about how complex problems are often best approached indirectly. If this is your mindset and taking this approach to challenges appeals to you, then definitely think about consultancy; your obliquity will be in huge demand.

How do I find out about vacancies within consultancies?

Consultancies tend to work on projects that start quickly and have a defined shelf life, so teams need to be assembled very rapidly. Therefore I would advise that you make sure any consultancies you are interested in already have your CV and, if possible, that you have already spoken with some of their team. This means sending them your CV and covering letter on spec and then following up with an email or call if you haven’t had a response. It’s also worth looking at consultancies’ social media channels – they will often advertise any vacancies they may have there.

At Barker Langham we use our own social media channels to advertise job opportunities, but we also make use of Guardian Jobs, University of Leicester Museum Studies Job Desk, our professional networks, and our recruitment company, Barker Langham Recruitment, to help fill any positions.

What about professional development?

Working for a consultancy can often be very flexible. Many will be open to you working part time or even freelance. You should also find that they are very open to you pursuing personal and career development opportunities, whether that’s practical courses or a PhD. After all, it will benefit them, too. It is also true that your location – where you live – is not that important, particularly now that we are all experts on Zoom. At Barker Langham, we have always found that having a team spread across the UK and indeed, across the world, has been a real benefit, both for crunching time zones but also for varied perspectives.

What advice would you give to someone seeking a job in a consultancy?

Be bold and be direct. Your experience – whatever it is – is valid. Consultancies are always looking for a diversity of perspectives and experiences. They are more interested in application than qualification and, by the way, any qualification you do have doesn’t necessarily have to be in museum studies.

My own story might serve to illustrate the unexpected routes people take into consultancy. I had always liked the idea of becoming a consultant but wasn’t sure how. My passion was telling stories, something I did as curator at the National Justice Museum and then as head of exhibitions at the Commonwealth Institute. It was only being made redundant from there (along with the entire cultural team) that provided me with the stimulus to make the leap, and from that point I really didn’t want to work for anyone else again. That moment – one of the darkest days in my career – was also one of the best, because it started my career in museum consultancy. Once I became a consultant my entrepreneurial skills developed – they weren’t something I’d had all along. So my advice is don’t be daunted, don’t worry about not being the complete package. You never know, you might enjoy it.

What aspects of museum consultancy give you the most satisfaction personally?

I always love learning new things, whether it’s having teleportation explained to me by a quantum physicist or discovering the hidden stories behind a place or a collection. I really enjoy coming up with creative solutions and then presenting ideas; that could be developing the storyline for a new exhibition or presenting plans to a museum director, community leader or even a head of state.

I also get a lot of satisfaction from collaborating with my team, partners and clients – whether it’s in a brainstorming workshop, on site at a museum or just chatting over a coffee.

And, more idealistically, I feel privileged to be in a position where I can perhaps help to inspire change and action. If we can create experiences that resonate as well as inform, that provoke thought as well as instil empathy and compassion, then maybe we are doing something to help change the world for the better.