Reconceiving the Institution, 1939

Not all crises impact museums physically or superficially. Some impact museums by disrupting the legitimacy on which they are sustained. These examples tend to be more intangible than those caused by disasters or violence in the lived environment. Such organisational crises have been termed herein as ‘deep-revolutionary crises’. The current chapter uses the case of the Imperial War Museum during the Second World War and its work averting post-war cultural irrelevancy—specifically its initial actions detecting, sensing and acting against the threat—to develop and explore this crisis typology. The chapter theorises and instantiates the deep-revolutionary crisis and shows that the best approach for managing them involves making requisite, legitimate organisational changes.