Dear fellow colleagues
This triennial mandate sees a renewal both in the components of the board, where many more parts of the world are represented, and in some of the aims of INTERCOM. 

By concentrating on management, leadership, and strategic thinking, we want to re-establish INTERCOM’s fundamentals by recovering our history to update and renew it: Stephen E. Weil and David Fleming, OBE, and their teachings will be put at the basis of our daily work.
By continuing with our workshops and meetings, we want to go deep into contents and become a real reference in the everyday practice of museums’ management. 

By analysing the present, we want to serve as a thermometer for contemporaneity: future is the today of tomorrow. The future is one nanosecond ahead and the choices that we are doing now effect how our future will be “7 seconds away”. Contemporaneity mix past, present and future all together and nothing is more important than being contemporary.

We want to stay always a step ahead of what is happening now, by listening, watching, thinking, and sharing. 

A multidisciplinary approach has always been a must for a museum leader but our future requires that the disciplines we need to consider grow wider: geopolitics, macroeconomics, anthropology, sociology, urban/space planning are some to help understand the contexts museums work in and shape their future. 

Public and private philanthropy has been changing, and environmental and economic sustainability is under discussion. Full autonomy of museums has never been achieved. 

Which are the best strategies to face our present of tomorrow? 

Every museum provides its own reply to this question. 

Some of them work on inclusion, while others work on a specific wellbeing that moves toward welfare and others work on digitisation and technology. 

All of them must work to create new cultures and new policies where respect, trust, duties, and rights are at the basis of a common idea of future cultural and human development.

 

Let’s start working to build it together. 

M. Cristina Vannini