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 …
I was working with a couple of clients recently who were trying to design powerful questions for invitations to their strategic conversations. Both organizations are dealing with complex situations and specifically with complex changes that were overtaking their ability to respond. Here are some of the questions that cam up: How can we be more effective in accomplishing our purpose? How can we create more engagement to address our outcomes? What can we do to innovate regardless of our structure? Help us create new ideas for executive alignment around our plan to address the change we are now seeing? Can …
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 …
Two Tim Merry references in a row. Yesterday Tim posted a video blog on planning vs. preparation. It is a useful and crude distinction about how to get ready for action in the complicated vs. complex domains of the Cynefin framework. I left a comment there about a sports metaphor that occurred to me when Tony Quinlan was teaching us about the differences between predictive anticipation (used in the complicated domain) and anticipatory awareness (used in the complex domain). In fact this has been the theme of several conversations today. Complicated problems require Tim’s planning idea: technical skills and expertise, recipes and procedures and …
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 …