Paying attention to the journey — or evaluation but NOT as you know it!
They say that by focusing on the journey:
- you become more present, you start paying attention to the patterns around you & so you learn more;
- you slow down thus giving due time to the task in hand;
- and you unlock a creativity that is otherwise obscured by the stress of racing to a destination.
I am beginning to feel this adage perfectly reflects our current social lab design phase.
Let me give an example. At the moment we are testing a new way of paying attention to our journey to change through CoLab Dudley. We have begun exploring a new evaluation approach. This approach will help with our decision making, priority setting AND our understanding of the shifting footprint and ripples of our work. This approach is called principles focused evaluation (PFE) and has been pioneered over the last few years by evaluation practitioners who focus upon developmental evaluation (For more about the evolution of this approach and useful detailed examples check out Michael Quinn Patton’s “Principles focused Evaluation. The GUIDE, 2017).
When SMART goals get in the way of doing good stuff
There are many ways to evaluate social change work in communities. Most of the time we are asked by funders to monitor using SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-Bound) fixed goals. The trouble is that this approach doesn’t really tell us enough about the dynamic nature of change, or the emerging and sometimes unanticipated impact of the work. And it certainly doesn’t help us improve work on the go in a situation where the context is changing, timescales are shifting, and any number of new variables are revealed along the way.
So in order to tell a more honest and complete story of change, and to get a handle on using evaluation to better guide the work we do in Dudley, we are exploring evaluating our work using our lab core principles.We have a sneaky feeling PFE might just be useful to many fellow travelers whose work is driven by their social justice & environmental values.
At last an evaluation tool to support working with complexity and uncertainty
Social change — in terms of cultures, connections, & capabilities — is complex stuff because … well … because the systems in which we exist are complex. The many different pieces of the system jigsaw puzzle are forever changing and interconnected often in unexpected ways. This messy and surprising work makes using traditional fixed goals & indicators to check your progress redundant at best, distracting and even damaging at worst. So rather than using a SMART goals approach - which can be overly prescriptive - we are exploring a principles focused approach [PFE] to evaluation.
PFE offers more general guidance for how to take action & understand impact grounded in the values that drive and inspire us.
This approach is just as rigorous in its demands for careful observation and critical analysis of action and impact, but in being more reliant upon interpretation and judgement within the framework of the principles, it allows the work to be more adaptive and responsive to new situations and dynamic contexts.
While PFE is more developmental in nature it holds us firm in our intention by using an ethical core that pays as much attention to doing things the right way as doing the right thing.
We have learnt that in our world of building a platform to nurture emergent cultures of abundance, creativity and connection you need a much more flexible toolbox to help you with your designs, the decisions you make, and in understanding the change that emerges. We have always integrated the learning along our journey by using a form of developmental evaluation that involves the whole team paying attention to the patterns & connections in our work (have a read of our participatory ethnographic research and lab notes). Together we design, test, observe, learn and improve. Exploring Principles Focused Evaluation (PFE) is the next step in our learning and understanding journey. [You can listen here to more about PFE from Michael Quinn Patton].
Principles focused evaluation will help us pay attention to 3 important things in our work in Dudley:
1. Are we ‘walking the walk’ of our principles — do they truly inform our design, decision making and behaviours?
2. What impact is applying the principles to the work having in the spaces and communities we all care about?
3. Is the application of these principles moving us together in the intended direction of travel — i.e. a more welcoming, connected, creative High St where folk feel they belong, they make new friends, and create together?
In our post tomorrow we will be sharing the next steps in our team journey of developing, refining and testing out our lab principles.
