Approach to evaluative thinking

We have drawn on the work of Mark Cabaj along with Michael Quinn Patton, Frances Westley and Brenda Zimmerman in beginning to develop our thinking and practice in this area.

While we are interested in the newly developing models of evaluation, such as participatory evaluation and developmental evaluation (believing they hold much promise for evaluating social innovation) this has not been our major focus to date.

Evaluation has been used in the past to find out if something has been achieved or to improve a model.  Our interest is instead to provide us with information and insights to help us further develop something that is in the process of developing or 'becoming'.

Thus we have focused our efforts on learning to hold a creative tension between evaluative thinking (an analytical way of thinking that brings data to bear on decisions and infuses everything that goes on) and intuitive noticing (a form of observation that  uses all of our knowing to understand what is emerging through action at any point in time).

Building our capacity in both of these ways (and holding the tension that results from their mutual application), rather than applying an evaluative process per se, enables us to work with the emergent, experimental nature of social innovation. It supports us to very quickly notice what isn't working and change course when necessary. It also puts practitioners and other community members on an equal footing, rather than an expert evaluator being brought into the community to apply their expert knowledge anyone and everyone is encouraged to develop their ability to pay attention to what is happening and respond to it.

We have made extensive use of stories (drawing on the work of the Most Significant Change Process) and have been particularly keen to ensure that communities own their own data as it is being created.

We remind ourselves that in the world of business where entrepreneurship is valued and encouraged, 80% of all new developments will fail. This knowledge encourages us to be open with what's not working and continue to adapt and modify until we discover what does. It also makes for far more open learning conversations where people learn to talk about what isn't working just as much as they talk about what is.

The trailblazer communities are each building different tools and processes to support them in developing their evaluative thinking and it is our hope that some of these can be shared on these pages in the future.

All of them involve growing the capacity to reflect, individually and as a group, on happenings and their impact and respond to this awareness in some way.

Ultimately our goal is to learn to notice what is occurring, as it occurs, to understand as best we can at the time why it might be happening, to adapt what we are doing as a result and then notice what happens. A constant process of acting, reacting, adapting and learning

Key to all of this is an intractable curiosity, a preparedness to examine what doesn't work as well as what works and a capacity to apply our analytical thinking alongside quietening our mind to be fully present with what is unfolding.