Just about to leave Montreal this morning for Toronto and north to Thornbury, Ontario to visit family. \u00a0I 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. \u00a0I 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. \u00a0Originally 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. \u00a0Through 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.<\/p>\n
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. \u00a0Not 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). \u00a0One group of fresh faced non-Aboriginal students even had the temerity to suggest that they were applying a decolonizing strategy. \u00a0Their major exposure to indigenous communities was through a single book on decolonizing methodology and some internet searches about medicine wheels. \u00a0It was shocking actually, because these were the students that made the finals of this competition. \u00a0They looked like fresh versions of the kinds of evaluation firms that show up in First Nations certain they know what’s going on.<\/p>\n
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. \u00a0As I as doing a a cafe directly afterwards I ceded most of my time to my panel colleagues\u00a0Christine Loignon, Karoline Truchon who did a very interesting presentation on their use of PhotoVoice<\/a>. \u00a0It was clear to me at the conference that the practitioners among us had a better grasp of complexity theory, power \u00a0and non-linear sense-making than any of the professional evaluators I met.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n By far the better experience for me was hanging out with friends and colleagues. \u00a0On the first night I arrived I had dinner and drinks with my friends from Percolab<\/a>: Paul Messer, Samatha Slade and Elizabeth Hunt. \u00a0We ate fish and chips, drank beer and whisky and caught up. \u00a0On 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\u00a0a barbeque with family and friends.<\/p>\n