Just about to leave Montreal this morning for Toronto and north to Thornbury, Ontario to visit family. I was here for the conference of the Canadian Evaluation Society, where I participated on a panel on innovative dialogue methods (and yes I noted the irony in my remarks) and later led a World Cafe where I presented some of the sense-making processes I’ve been working on. I was here on the recommendation of Junita Brown who has been in some good conversations with evaluators around the use of the World Cafe for evaluation purposes. Originally Amy Lenzo and I were scheduled to host a cafe here that was much more ambitious: a plenary cafe with the participants to explore the learning field of the conference. Through various machinations that was cut back to a panel presentation and a very small world cafe at the end of the day with 16 people. The conference was one of those highly scripted and tightly controlled affairs that I hardly ever go to.
The session before us was a case competition where student teams were responding to a mock RFP from Canada World Youth to evaluate an Aboriginal Youth leadership Program. Not a single team had an Aboriginal person on it, and every single presentation was basically the same: full of fundamental flaws about what constitutes success (“Did the youth return to their communities”) or what constitutes a cultural lens (“We are using a medicine wheel to understand various parts of the program). One group of fresh faced non-Aboriginal students even had the temerity to suggest that they were applying a decolonizing strategy. Their major exposure to indigenous communities was through a single book on decolonizing methodology and some internet searches about medicine wheels. It was shocking actually, because these were the students that made the finals of this competition. They looked like fresh versions of the kinds of evaluation firms that show up in First Nations certain they know what’s going on.
To make matters worse, the case competition organizer had a time mix up with the conference planner meaning that our panel started 30 minutes late which gave me very little time to present. As I as doing a a cafe directly afterwards I ceded most of my time to my panel colleagues Christine Loignon, Karoline Truchon who did a very interesting presentation on their use of PhotoVoice. It was clear to me at the conference that the practitioners among us had a better grasp of complexity theory, power and non-linear sense-making than any of the professional evaluators I met.
I presented most of the work that I have been documenting here over the last few months, and later led a small group through a cafe where we engaged in the creation of a sensemaking framework and used a pen and paper signification framework.
By far the better experience for me was hanging out with friends and colleagues. On the first night I arrived I had dinner and drinks with my friends from Percolab: Paul Messer, Samatha Slade and Elizabeth Hunt. We ate fish and chips, drank beer and whisky and caught up. On Sunday I met Jon Husband for lunch on the grass at McGill with his delightful godson and then joined the Percolab folks for a visit to the new co-operative ECTO co-working space on Mount Royal in the Plateau, followed by a barbeque with family and friends.
And Last night, after my presentations a great evening with Juan Carlos Londono and Lisa Gravel. We had dinner at Lola Rosa and spent hours going over the new French translation of the GroupWorks Pattern Language Deck. This was a brilliant time. I learned a bunch of new French words and most fun of all we discussed deeper etymology, nuance and the limitations and benefits of our respective languages in trying to convey some of the more esoteric practices of hosting groups. The new deck has some beautiful reframing and some names for patterns that need some work. But it’s exciting to see this translation and I always love diving into the language.
I really do like Montreal a lot and in the past number of years come to love it more as I have lost my inhibition about speaking French. the more French I speak, the more French I learn and the more the heart of the city opens up. Many English Canadians have the idea that Montreal is a cold hearted city to English speakers, but I find that isn’t true at all. Just offer what you can in French and people open up. And if you’re lucky enough to sit down with lovers of words like the friends I have, your learning explodes.
Off for a couple of days to visit family and then home to Bowen Island for a series of small local facilitation gigs, all of which will tell me something deeper about my home place.
I want to invite you to bite down hard and read this article by Rich Lowry, the editor of the National Review: Baltimore, a Great Society Failure:
Recently in BC, we have a had a child die in the care of the state. This does happen from time to time, and when it does a process is triggered whereby the Representative for Children and Youth lanuches an investigation and makes recommendations which usually result in more rules and procedures to govern the child welfare system with the express purpose of never having it happen again.
I work closely with child protection social workers in BC and there is not a single one I know of whose heart does not break when something like this happens. Everyone wears the failure. Social work is difficult not because of the kinds of predictable situations that can be mitigated but because of the ones no one saw coming. The Ministry of Children and Family Development operates under a massive set of procedures and standards about social work practice. But no amount of rules will prevent every case of child death. Just like no amount of rules will eliminate every case of discrimination, every war, every instance of every bad thing that happens to humans.
A couple of good blog posts in my feed this morning that provoked some thinking. These quotes reminded me how much evaluation and planning is directed towards goals, targets and patterns that cause us to look for data that supports what we want to see rather than learning what the data is telling us about what’s really going on. These helped me to reflect on a conversation I had with a client yesterday, where we designed a process for dealing with this.
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 of new doors opened up to me. I was able to see the crude boundaries of traditional evaluation methods very clearly and was able to see that most of the work I do in the world – facilitating strategic conversations – was actually a core practice of developmental evaluation. Crudely put, traditional “merit and worth” evaluation methods work well when you have a knowable and ordered system where the actual execution can be evaluated against a set of ideal causes that lead to an ideal state. Did we build the bridge? Does it work according to the specifications of the project? Was it a good use of money? All of that can be evaluated summatively.
In the unordered systems where complexity and emergence is at play, summative evaluation cannot work at all. The problem with complex systems is that you cannot know what set of actions will lead to the result you need to get to, so evaluating efforts against an ideal state is impossible. Well, it’s POSSIBLE, but what happens is that the evaluator brings her judgements to the situation. Complex problems (or more precisely, emergent problems generated from complex systems) cannot be solved, per se. While it is possible to build a bridge, it is not possible to create a violence free society. Violent societies are emergent.
So that’s the back story. Last December I went to London to do a deep dive into how the Cynefin framework and Cognitive Edge’s work in general can inform a more sophisticated practice of developmental evaluation. After a few months of thinking about it and being in conversation with several Cognitive Edge practitioners including Ray MacNeil in Nova Scotia, I think that my problem is that that term “evaluation” can’t actually make the jump to understanding action in complex systems. Ray and I agreed that Quinn Patton’s work on Developmental Evaluation is a great departure point to inviting people to leave behind what they usually think of as evaluation and to enter into the capacities that are needed in complexity. These capacities include addressing problems obliquely rather than head on, making small safe to fail experiments, undertaking action to better understand the system rather than to effect a change, practicing true adaptive leadership which means practicing anticipatory awareness and not predictive planning, working with patterns and sense-making as you go rather than rules and accountabilities, and so on.
Last night a little twitter exchange between myself, Viv McWaters and Dave Snowden based on Dave’s recent post compelled me to explore this a bit further. What grabbed me was especially this line: “The minute we evaluate, assess, judge, interpret or whatever we start to reduce what we scan. The more we can hold open a description the more we scan, the more possibility of seeing novel solutions or interesting features.”
What is needed in this practice is monitoring. You need to monitor the system in all kinds of different ways and monitor yourself, because in a complex system you are part of it. Monitoring is a fine art, and requires us to pay attention to story, patterns, finely grained events and simple numbers that are used to measure things rather than to be targets. Monitoring temperatures helps us to understand climate change, but we don’t use temperatures as targets. Nor should we equate large scale climate change with fine grained indicators like temperature.
Action in complex systems is a never ending art of responding to the changing context. This requires us to be adopting more sophisticated monitoring tools and using individual and distributed cognition to make enough sense of things to move, all the while watching what happens when you do move. It is possible to understand retrospectively what you have done, and that is fine as long as you don’t confuse what you learn by doing that with the urge to turn it into a strategic plan going forward.
What role can “evaluation” have when your learning about the past cannot be applied to the future?
For technical problems in ordered systems, evaluation is of course important and correct. Expert judgement is required to build safe bridges, to fix broken water mains, to do the books, audit banks and get food to those who need it. But in complex systems – economies, families, communities and democracies, I’m beginning to think that we need to stop using the word evaluation and really start adopting new language like monitoring and sense-making.