Persistent, dramatic changes are taking place that influence our work, communities, and personal lives and understanding what it means to learn, respond, and succeed will take changes in how we evaluate it all. A key feature of change in a complex system is that once its shifted, it never goes back; there’s no ‘undoing’ what’s […]
Whole System Learning and Evaluation Read More »
No matter what tools, methods, or approaches you take to create a change, time, care, and attention ultimately affect the outcome as much as anything else. When people ask about what is the one thing that most influence change efforts I offer not one, but three: time, care, and attention. Many things affect intentional change,
The Three Variables Underlying Every Significant Change Project Read More »
It’s easy to say a lesson was learned and far more difficult to show it to be true. What can we do to best to learn from what’s happened to us and not allow often difficult, painful, hard-fought lessons to go unlearned? When the student is ready, the teacher will appear Unknown A lesson is
Lessons Taught, Learned, Forgotten, and Ignored Read More »
Innovation is emotional work and it’s time to connect our feelings and thoughts to fuel our change efforts and actions. I recently read an interview between Yancey Strickler and Clare Farrell, co-founder of The Extinction Rebellion (XR) movement that attracted my attention. The interview was part of Strickler’s Ideaspace podcast and titled ‘from hope to
Emotional Honesty in Designing Change Read More »
Innovation is about seeing things differently. This article looks at how our perceptions of the world can influence what we see and what we miss and how evaluation can help with it all.
Noticing and the Art of Paying Attention Read More »
How do we design for attention in a distracted world? Nir Eyal has some answers to provide the focus we need. Behavioural designer Nir Eyal has spent the last decade looking at how we can draw attention. His first book, Hooked, was all about how to capture attention and keep people engaged. Suffice to say,
Behavioural Design, Attention & Change Read More »
The world is transformed by creators — the artists, the innovators, the leaders — and their creations are what propel change and stand in the way of it. Change can be hard and its made all the more so when we fail to decouple the creator from the created, inviting resistance rather than enticing better creations.
Decoupling creators from their creations Read More »
A read through a typical management or personal improvement feed will reveal near infinite recommendations for steps you can take to improve your organization or self. Three words tend to be absent from this content stream and they are what take seemingly simple recommendations and navigate them through complexity: time, care, and attention. Embedded within the torrent
Time. Care. Attention. Read More »
Is what you do, where you work, or how you organize, beautiful? Among the many words used to describe our work lives the most neglected and maybe necessary might be described that one word: it’s time to take it seriously. For those working in design one of the biggest challenges is getting people to understand that
Developmental evaluation is focused on real-time decision making for programs operating in complex, changing conditions, which can tax the attentional capacity of program staff and evaluators. Organizational mindfulness is a means of paying attention to what matters and building the capacity across the organization to better filter signals from noise. Mindfulness is a means of
Developmental Evaluation and Mindfulness Read More »
