In our Complexity from the Inside Out program, we do a session on evaluation, looking at some of the implications that complexity has for traditional models of monitoring and evaluation. This is especially an issue in the non-profit world where organizations find themselves managing complexity while being subject to requirements from funders that treat their operations as if they were ordered and predictable.
It is common for participants in these sessions to ask the question “Complexity is all good, but how do we actually deal with the funding bodies that want us to measure everything and create targets?”
Well, this report from a series of conversation convened by the UN Development Program offers a helpful starting point for having these conversations with funders. Here are some of their framing questions:
- How can we measure in ways that enable and incentivize learning and adaptation?
- For whom and why do we measure (recognizing that measurement is often an extractive activity done to satisfy a donor rather than something with the primary objective of learning and empowering local change agents)?
- What should we measure when we are just starting out (e.g. at the intervention design stage) given we may not know what solutions or success will look like? What is the role of baselines and how do we change measures as we learn and adapt?
In my experience, having these conversations early on is critical so that a grantee working on a complex project and their funders can create an evaluation approach that is coherent with the work they are doing. In this article you will find many good conversations starters and framing ideas to help start this co-creation without alienating anyone in the conversation. It pays to meet people where they are at, and that includes funders and folks that are wedded to ordered approaches to evaluating change work despite the reality that those approaches might not work, or even be harmful, to a complex project.
Fall in the north is a time for teaching for me!. I have a few different courses and workshops on offer this fall, including our third cohort of Complexity from the Inside Out, which is a program Caitlin and I have put together from 20+ years of collective experience with dialogue and personal leadership tools in service of working with complexity.
I invite you to join us (and an amazing group of co-learners) for our fall cohort of this highly engaging, practice focussed program. Together we will explore and learn effective and meaningful ways to better understand and work with complexity at many scales and in different contexts. We know that complex challenges need to be engaged in multiple ways including practices and approaches focussed on the complexity of our inner human systems (mind and mindset, emotions, reactions, conditioned patterns, neurobiology and mystery); the space of engagement between us (in dialogue, collaboration and sensemaking in our teams, organizations, communities); and in our work to influence the larger systemic changes that are so needed with the many complex challenges of our times.
The Complexity Inside & Out Program includes:
- 8 engaging online learning and practice sessions.
- Including an Open Space session with your colleagues.
- 2 small group “learning pods” discussion sessions.
- Applied practice exercises
- Online classroom with recordings, resources, discussion space and more.
- Connection and co-learning with amazing colleagues from around the world
In the course we cover a number of tools and practices from various bodies of work including:
- Dave Snowden’s Cynefin framework and his work on anthro-complexity
- Tools from Glenda Eoyang’s Human System Dynamics
- Participatory Narrative Inquiry and sense-making practices from Cynthia Kurtz’s work.
- Personal practice for working with limiting beliefs, the reactivity loop and internal narrative.
- Developmental and complexity focused evaluation
What we offer in this course is a framework that helps to links these areas of practice so that your work with complex challenges can develop coherence with both personal development and work in the world outside of yourself.
We focus on inquires that participants bring to the session too, and in the past two cohorts we have explored activism, equity and justice, various topics in community and organizational development, applications in education systems and the non-profit world. We have had some great cohorts full of folks who are working in all kinds of different contexts. The variety and diversity is a huge bonus, and this cohort is shaping up to be similar.
If you have no experience of complexity work, you will get a deep introduction to this field. For more experienced practitioners, we aim to support you hitting the next level in your practice. You are likely to learn a few new things and develop your own map of a coherence for complexity work that includes the personal as well as the systemic.
There are spaces left and we give a good team discount which allows you to come with your colleagues. Times will work well for folks in North and South America, Central and Western Europe and Africa. We are considering offering a cohort in the new year that will work for Australasia too, so if you are in that region, let us know.
Found this morning on Network Weaver:
Over the past few years, I have been increasingly influenced by the concept of “weaving” — what for me means connecting people, ideas, and projects to foster more collaborative social change.
Weaving is a skill, a mindset, and a way of being. More art than science, it requires deep listening, being responsive to interests and needs, and “sensing” opportunities to bring people or projects together.
Nice post on a set of practical strategies for increasing connections and exchanges at work. One of the more powerful ways to shift patterns in complex systems and catalyze new behaviours is to work with the constraints you can get your hands on. For folks without a lot of power or authority in a system, weaving – a lovely generative image, by the way – offers ways to do this.
A couple of years ago i posted this on our local facebook page. There was something happening that caused me to reflect on how one’s approach to conflict changes the longer you live in a place. As we have turned over our population by more than 50% in the past five or six years, I was trying to give folks a helpful road map. I daresay this is pretty much consistent in every small community anywhere.
For folks experiencing their first Bowen Island conflict, here’s generally what happens next.
- Years 1-3. You move to Bowen and fall in love with the place. You’ve found heaven. You can’t believe how beautiful this is, how amazing the community is, how precious it is.
- Years 3-5. Some controversy happens and you discover that there are people that think very, very differently from you. In fact, it seems like if they get their way, some core thing you love about the place will be damaged forever. You step up to defend it, on social media, in real life. You get involved, get organized and try to stop it.
- Years 5-8 You lick your wounds or revel in the victory depending on how that all went. Regardless, it redoubles your commitment to fight again another day.
- Years 8-12 ANOTHER FIGHT! Man the barricades! Take on the social media hordes! Side-eye folks at the General Store. You’re ready this time. You might even connect up with people in a meeting and form a group of concerned citizens. And when you do you see a bunch of people on YOUR side that you were fighting against last time. Your head explodes, but you dive in anyway.
- Years 12-15. Well, that went well. Or not.
- Years 15-18. ANOTHER fight? What?? Okay, this time, you sit back and watch everyone go through the first five steps. You find yourself in a small group at the pub one night with former friends and enemies, nursing a pint together and shaking your head as you tried to remember why you hated each other so much that one time.
- Years 18-20. You get quiet, you don’t get so involved anymore, or if you do it’s on a committee of some kind doing completely unappreciated work making design guidelines or running a community water system or deciding what flowers to plant in the bed by the ferry terminal.
- Year 20. You realize you are here for the long haul. You fall in love with the place. You’ve found heaven. You can’t believe how beautiful this is, how amazing the community is, how precious it is.
Enjoy the ride folks.