This second in a series on Principles-Focused Evaluation (PFE) draws our attention to the concepts of systems and complexity and how can PFE help us navigate both. Systems (thinking), complexity, and principles all go together. Principles-focused Evaluation (PFE) brings them together in meaningful ways, but to understand that, we first need to understand what we …
Systems and Complexity: Implications for Evaluation Read More »
Attractors might be the most useful concept within complexity science for understanding practical change-making. By looking at how an attractor works we can better facilitate action and design more practical strategies in complex situations. We hear much about the concept of complexity when speaking about social systems. Complexity simply refers to a set of multiple, …
Using The Concept of Attractors To Facilitate Change 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 »
The idea of entanglements is central to understanding complexity in systems and the knots that they generate The idea of entanglements and systems is at the heart of our understanding of complexity as it’s experienced in the world. Much of the literature on complexity speaks of entanglements as complications that arise to challenge our ideas …
‘Unprecedented’ is a term that is changing how we understand complexity and foresight. One thing that often makes complex situations live up to their name is that there is so much going on at once in different directions, velocities, and timing; it’s hard to connect causes with consequences. We hear the term ‘unprecedented‘ being used …
It is poetic irony on many levels that weeks after Leonard Cohen releases his album about the threat of death that he passes on, mere days after we saw the least poetic, most crass election campaign end in the United States with an equally dramatic outcome. This points to art, but also to the science of …
Evaluation is supposed to be driven by a program’s needs and activities, but that isn’t always the case. What happens when the need for numbers, metrics, ‘outcomes’ and data shape the very activities programs do and how that changes everything is something that is worth paying some attention to. Since the Second World War we’ve …
Are we creating path dependencies with our creative technologies that actually limit creativity? Jaron Lanier thinks so and in this post I introduce the concept of dominant design and what it means in terms of technological and social innovation.
What is true in the world of social media and decision making is a matter of interpretation. However that interpretation, often off-loaded to others in crowdsourcing models, might not work well when strong ties are needed to foster quality decisions.
New Year’s resolutions don’t work and can sometimes make things worse. Maybe the problem is less about us and the entire thought process that informs why we plan change in such linear ways to begin with.
