We prepare for what we know and see. To address the challenges of the future, we need to imagine things differently in order to see them before they exist. Sometimes we need to believe to see things. Sometimes we need to know what we don’t know and can’t know (now) to understand what we’ll need […]
Seeing the Unknown Read More »
Vision is about where you want to go, evaluation tells you if you are getting there. Without one, we leave the other lost. The shift in the calendar from one year or decade to another provides a cultural transition place for renewal and looking forward. Vision — as we’ve covered before — is one the
Vision + Evaluation Read More »
Change-making requires accepting some degree of failure. How we deal with our stumbles determines how or whether we succeed. If you’re reading this in early January (or maybe the weeks after your birthday or some other significant anniversary) you might find yourself head-long into a struggle to implement some change-making plan. This might be a
“It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not a weakness; that is life.” Jean Luc Picard The concept of practice is one that is not given much attention in the design or evaluation literature. Practice is what doctors do, lawyers do, and designers of different stripes do, too. Practice is
Practice and Thermostats Read More »
Just like with drugs, dosage and interactions matter with learning and innovation; it’s about amount, mix, and more. If you know someone over the age of 80 (including you) there is a good chance they (or you) are taking drugs — lots of them. Medical science has done a remarkable job with finding pharmaceutical therapies
Dosing Innovation and Change Read More »
Transformations are easier to understand retrospectively, not in real time. New technologies are about to upend that, forever. It is often difficult to fully appreciate transformation in the middle of it. Most of us might have been ‘wowed’ by the Internet when it came out, but it’s only looking back that we realized how much
Amplification and Impact Read More »
‘Achieving scale’ might be the golden goose of social innovation. It’s a simple phrase, but its meaning and misunderstanding is not. “How do we take this to scale?” This common and often well-meaning question has enormous problems with it for social innovation besides the grammar. Scale might be among the most widely misunderstood concepts in
Developmental Evaluation is all about using data to support innovation. How does this look in practice (and how’s it done?) Developmental Evaluation (DE) is all about supporting and developing innovation. It provides some of the raw feedback materials and a process to help innovators make decisions about what they are creating, adapting to changing conditions,
What Does Developmental Evaluation Look Like? Read More »
Evaluation tells your innovation’s impact story to the wider world. Learn more about what you do by learning about evaluation. Changing something requires evidence, otherwise change doesn’t exist. We only know something has changed — grown, shrunk, transformed, moved — through study (seeing before, after, and what happens in between). Evaluation is what tells that
Knowing Your Impact Read More »
Innovation requires learning to design for the changes around us. This involves not treating moving things as if they’re still. Even if we are standing still, movement is all around us. Whether it’s the seasons, the weather, business cycles or more, we are surrounded by change. Change might be the only true constant. However, our
Design for Movement Read More »
