Regular readers will know that I’ve been thinking a lot about evaluation for many years now. I am not an evaluator, but almost every project I am involved in contains some element of evaluation. Sometimes this evaluation is well done, well thought through and effective and other times (the worst of times, more often than you think) the well thought through evaluation plan crumbles in the face of the HIPPO – the Highest Paid Person’s Opinion. So how do we really know what is going on? When I stumbled across Michael Quinn Patton’s work in Developmental Evaluation, a whole bunch …
Two weeks ago in our Leadership 2020 program I experimented with using a signification framework to harvest a World Cafe. We are beginning another cohort this week and so I had a chance to further refine the process and gather much more information. We began the evening the same way, with a World Cafe aimed at exploring the shared context for the work that these folks are in. Our cohort is made up of about 2/3rds staff from community social services agencies and 1/3 staff from the Ministry of Children and Family Development. This time I used prepared post it notes for …
Just off a call with a potential client today and we were scoping out some of the work that we might do together, with a small organization facing unprecedented change. They are in a place of finally realizing that they are not in control of what is happening to them. They are completely typical in this respect. I am constantly struck by the fact that we have so few skills, frameworks and so little language for dealing with complexity. Clients all the time approach me looking for certainty, answers and clear outcomes. It’s as if they are searching for the …
One has to be very careful attributing causes to things, or even attributing causality to things. in complex systems, causality is a trap. We can be, as Dave Snowden says “retrospectively coherent” but you can not know which causes will produce which effects going forward. That is the essence of emergent phenomena in the complex world. But even in complicated problems, where causality should be straightforward, our thinking and view can confuse the situation. Consider this example. Imagine someone, a man, who has never seen a cat. I know, highly implausible, but this is a hypothetical from Alan Watts’ book, …
Our traditional Boxing Day movie this year was The Imitation Game, the new film about Alan Turing and his team’s efforts to break the Enigma code used by the German Navy in the Second World War. While the film itself was good it was full of fictional scenes that were intended to point at some of the interesting things that happened at Bletchley Park during that war. Having done a bit of reading on the subject, it’s clear that the film simplified many things, took liberties with others and glossed over what is a really interesting story, but the movie …