‘walking the walk’ — our next steps with principles focused evaluation
In this lab note we share the next steps in our journey of putting our principles to work in guiding us in the practical day to day stuff of being a social lab on Dudley High Street.
We have 8 principles that help guide our work as a social lab. These are principles that have emerged from our values as a lab team and from what we have learnt from our community of doers to be most effective in this work.
You can read more about the why, how and what of this process in this series of short lab notes.
Principles focused evaluation is one of a number of design tools we use to help take us as a community and platform in the direction of a more welcoming, creative & kinder town based on caring connections between people, places and the planet.
Before we dive into how we are using them a quick reminder of our principles (described in full in the image above):
•Persistence and Being There matters.
•Build creative spaces and experiences together.
•Celebrate gifts and skills, not labels.
•Relationships matter.
•Encourage abundance thinking and practice.
•Nurture the courage to be curious and experiment.
•Default to doing.
•Work at the speed of trust.
How do these help G.U.I.D.E us?
We discussed in this early learning note the importance during the development of the principles to ensure they satisfy the G.U.I.D.E criteria outlined in the image above by Michael Quinn Patton. By G.U.I.D.E Patton means: they help with Guidance (priority setting), they have Utility (i.e. actionable), that they are Inspiring and grounded in our ethics, that they are Developmental (i.e. they are applicable to a range of contexts) and Evaluable (i.e. you can document and judge the results).
While we hypothetically tested the principles against this criteria in development it is only in practice that the value of this criteria comes to life. Below we talk through how in the first 6 months of using them we have found that the principles help with:
•decision-making on a day to day basis;
•they inspire action and matter to both us as a team and also doers in our community;
•they bring clarity in explaining the different ways of working in complex adaptive systems through our counter-principles;
•they are a valuable tool in directing our focus upon scaling deep;
•by testing if we are following the principles in practice we are able to focus on the way things are done not just what is done which has cultural implications.
Guiding the fostering of new types of relationships and connections
For us, the core of this principles approach is a focus upon the nature of relationships and interactions in our ecosystem. As we stick to the principles we, directly and indirectly, affect the interactions with and between the doers, encouragers, spaces, lab team and the platform.
Decisions such as: where and when to prioritise energy and resources; or what pace to travel at in our doing, experimenting & building of connections; or how to co-design welcoming and joyful creative experiences; or how to convene gatherings with purpose; or where to share our learning in useful and open ways that invites curiosity; or what collaborations to nurture or not — are all critically filtered through our principles.
By recognising our core lab principles (and how they appear in our behaviours, norms, decisions, assumptions and mindsets) we are able to make better reasoned judgements, especially when we are uncertain or face challenges. That gives us a clarity of judgement and helps us act out our decisions authentically, transparently and with more confidence.
Aid to intentional design and holding spaces for cultural emergence
We have been struck by how principles focused evaluation helps to underpin our efforts to scale deep, defined as:
“ … activations intended to promote transformation at the sociocultural level of individuals, organizations or communities.” (Gord Tulloch)
Our principles focused evaluation is rooted in our values and the knowledge and mindsets we have been exposed to through our experimentation to date. Like scaling deep this orientates our action towards nurturing new types of relationships and supporting the emergence of alternative cultural values, norms and mindsets. Principles offer direction not prescriptions, and as such they allow us to make judgements relevant to changing contexts and understandings. In sharp contrast to traditionally imposed or predetermined metrics the developmental quality of this approach is useful in creating fertile conditions for cultural emergence and scaling deep.
[Read more about ripples and surprises in our work since we started using principles here]
Opposites are illuminating
As well as helping us design proactively with our principles in mind, this approach also draws our attention to the presence of counter-principles within our system. (You can read our counter-principles in red type in the image above.)
Counter-principles are the opposites of our principles. They express what we work to avoid.
So in our case our counter-principles flag up the presence of mindsets, and behaviours, that have shown themselves to be unhealthy within more collaborative and regenerative cultures. For example, they have flagged the presence of behavioural norms that can often focus on deficits, labels and needs, not gifts and abundance. This has been surprisingly revealing as these behaviours and mindsets can be so normalised within our system that they can go undetected without the clarity afforded through paying attention to the counter-principles.
In her recent post on 3 challenges we face as a lab, Lorna describes a range of counter-principle behaviours we have observed and how we are responding to them. She argues that in order for less familiar mindsets, like systems mindsets and abundance thinking, to be better understood we must keep demonstrating and creating spaces for those that are curious to learn through doing. This takes time. This is part of the function of the platform and the value of investing in this type of social infrastructure.
Weaving principles into day to day interactions and conversations
So how are we following our principles? By bringing them into our day to day design, reflection and implementation processes as a team we are able to check with each other ‘are we walking the walk?’ of our principles. This is also called adherence to principles. For example, we have developed a range of practical discussion canvasses for use in grounding our monthly team design sessions and weekly network guardian sessions in the principles. And we are working with local creatives to co-design visuals to illustrate the principles. This will help with their day to day use and animation across all the lab/ platform interactions with creatives and doers.
We know already from Detectorism Insights#1 that modelling behaviour matters. It helps create spaces or experiences where counter-cultural norms are nurtured and so affects the social norms practised by people in that space and those connected to that community. Principles focused evaluation has allowed us to be more intentional and systematic in how we feed that knowledge into our project designs, and how we animate the principles them through our conversations with doers, collaborators and fellow travellers.
In seeking to walk the walk of our principles we have also been actively sense checking these principles in two ways: against the core values highlighted by doers in the research in Detectorism Insights#1 and in conversation with old and new members of the collective of creatives in Spring 2019. Again, we have been struck by the deeply felt resonance amongst doers and creatives who are now looking to use the eight lab principles as a catalyst for their own creative action and network weaving in the town.
Our principles focused and participatory approach to evaluation in itself informs a meaning making process where the values and cultural norms of our lab and platform are made more explicit, known, repeated and acted out by others in the community with whom they resonate.
Adherence and outcomes evaluation questions — the nitty gritty of evaluating our work against our principles
Understanding our work using principles focused evaluation means we need two ways to approach practical data capture. The first, as already mentioned relates to evidence of how we stick to the principles (adherence). The second is related to what happens as a result of sticking to the principles (i.e. outcomes and pathways to outcomes). As part of the process, we have developed a series of questions aligned to each of the 8 principles for both aspects of the work (adherence and outcomes).
In total we ask and reflect upon 25 adherence questions and 35 outcome questions in relation to the emergence of projects, the co-design of experiences and other forms of platform support.
In answering these questions on an ongoing basis we are able to inform and adapt our practice and the design of experiments. We are collating and synthesizing these findings in order to build and test a picture of contribution (not attribution) to our goals. We know single projects or interventions don’t affect change on their own. Our attention to scaling deep, scree scaling and scaling conditions requires a more holistic observation of the wider system and an acknowledgement of our place in that system. Again this perspective is rooted in a relational framing of the data we capture and learn from.
Take the principle: “Build Creative Spaces together” — one question we ask in relation to adherence in lab work is “What conditions have been developed for co-creating creatives spaces/ experiences?” Here we have noted qualities across the different projects, spaces and happenings that indicate the team and platform are developing those conditions through:
•the intentional framing of invitations to doers to join a collective that is engaging in creative change on the High Street;
•the importance of convening of spaces of conviviality that help overcome barriers to participation and connection;
•the use of visual tools made readily available to aid co-design;
•the space and time protected for purposeful gatherings to forge new relations and the building of trust;
•paying attention to and designing in signals to encourage norms of behaviour that make creative collaboration more likely.
In relation to outcomes we are asking questions including: “What spaces have been created together? How do doers feel about their capacity to shape their spaces following co-creation? How do these spaces / experiences affect their sense of belonging?”.
These outcome questions will become more relevant as more spaces and experiences are animated by doers and creatives on Dudley High Street. So for example, during and after Do Fest (our festival of doing in July 2019) we will be able to observe, listen and reflect with doers to capture different types of data in relation to these questions.
By sense checking across a range of data points we will be able to build a picture of any relationships between the principles informed actions and the results. These findings will be analysed alongside other emerging creative projects and happenings over time in order to identify patterns and determine if we are moving in the direction of a more welcoming, creative and kinder town based on caring connections between people, places and the planet. For example, we have already noted an emerging pattern that when projects and experiences employ several of the principles, there appears to be a cumulative impact that reaches deeper into cultural change (for example read our note on Crafternoon).
In our next steps with principles focused evaluation we will continue to build the layers of data that help us answer our questions around adherence and results as they emerge. Important to us throughout this process will be paying attention to the data context and inter-relationships between different aspects of the picture it paints.
Top tip:
To learn more about principles focused evaluation this book by Michael Quinn Patton is user friendly, thorough, with lots of real life examples.
Our sister lab and fellow traveller Wolverhamption for Everyone have also been using it to guide their principles led work.
If you too are using principles focused evaluation drop us a line and share your lessons we’d love to hear about it and learn together.
