How Visitor Studies Can Help Museums Become Learning Organizations

To survive in their increasingly challenging external environment, museums need to become learning organizations. However, there is an organizational learning paradox within most cultural institutions. The goal of museums and, therefore, of visitor studies is usually to enhance the learning that visitors undertake during their visit rather than the learning of the organization. In this paper, I argue that the remit of audience research should be expanded to include the learning of the museum. To do this, museums need to: continually monitor their internal and external environment to identify problems; investigate those problems through conducting research; and then respond to the problems by either changing their actions ( single‐loop learning ) or their overarching assumptions ( double‐loop learning ). This article explores how the Audience Insight team at the V&A in the United Kingdom facilitates organizational learning and provides recommendations for how other museums can utilize their use of audience data to become learning organizations.