Tag: context

evaluationsocial systems

Baby, It’s Cold Outside (and Other Evaluation Lessons)

on December 6, 2018
Competing desires or imposing demands?

The recent decision by many radio stations to remove the song “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” from their rotation this holiday season provides lessons on culture, time, perspective, and ethics beyond the musical score for those interested in evaluation. The implications of these lessons extend far beyond any wintery musical playlist. 

As the holiday season approaches, the airwaves, content streams, and in-store music playlists get filled with their annual turn toward songs of Christmas, the New Year, Hanukkah, and the romance of cozy nights inside and snowfall. One of those songs has recently been given the ‘bah humbug’ treatment and voluntarily removed from playlists, initiating a fresh round of debates (which have been around for years) about the song and its place within pop culture art. The song, “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” was written in 1944 and has been performed and recorded by dozens of duets ever since. 

It’s not hard for anyone sensitive to gender relations to find some problematic issues with the song and the defense of it on the surface, but it’s once we get beneath that surface that the arguments become more interesting and complicated. 

One Song, Many Meanings

One of these arguments has come from jazz vocalist Sophie Millman, whose take on the song on the CBC morning radio show Metro Morning was that the lyrics are actually about competing desires within the times, not a work about predatory advances.

Others, like feminist author Cammila Collar, have gone so far to describe the opposition to the song as ‘slut shaming‘. 

Despite those points (and acknowledging some of them), others suggest that the manipulative nature of the dialogue attributed to the male singer is a problem no matter what year the song was written. For some, the idea that this was just harmless banter overlooks the enormous power imbalance between genders then and now when men could impose demands on women with fewer implications. 

Lacking a certain Delorean to go back in time to fully understand the intent and context of the song when it was written and released, I came to appreciate that this is a great example of some of the many challenges that evaluators encounter in their work. Is “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” good or bad for us? Like with many situations evaluators encounter: it depends (and depends on what questions we ask). 

Take (and Use) the Fork

Yogi Berra famously suggested (or didn’t) that “when you come across a fork in the road, take it.” For evaluators, we often have to take the fork in our work and the case of this song provides us with a means to consider why.

A close read of the lyrics and a cursory knowledge of the social context of the 1940s suggests that the arguments put forth by Sophie Millman and Cammila Collar have some merit and at least warrant plausible consideration. This might just be a period piece highlighting playful, slightly romantic banter between a man and woman on a cold winter night. 

At the same time, what we can say with much more certainty is that the song agitates many people now. Lydia Liza and Josiah Lemanski revised the lyrics to create a modern, consensual take on the song, which has a feel that is far more in keeping with the times. This doesn’t negate the original intent and interpretation of the lyrics, rather it places the song in the current context (not a historical one) and that is important from an evaluative standpoint.

If the intent of the song is to delight and entertain then what once worked well now might not. In evaluation terms, we might say the original merit of the song may hold based on historical context, its worth has changed considerably within the current context.

We may, as Berra might have said, have to take the fork and accept two very different understandings within the same context. We can do this by asking some specific questions. 

Understanding Contexts

Evaluators typically ask of programs (at least) three questions: What is going on? What’s new? and What does it mean? In the case of Baby, It’s Cold Outside, we can see that the context has shifted over the years, meaning that no matter how benign the original intent, the potential for misinterpretation or re-visioning of the intent in light of current times is worth considering.

What is going on is that we are seeing a lot of discussion about the subject matter of a song and what it means in our modern society. This issue is an attractor for a bigger discussion of historical treatment, inequalities, and the language and lived experience of gender.

The fact that the song is still being re-recorded and re-imagined by artists illustrates the tension between a historical version and a modern interpretation. It hasn’t disappeared and it may be more known now than ever given the press it receives.

What’s new is that society is far more aware of the scope and implications of gender-based discrimination, violence, and misogyny in our world than before. It’s hard to look at many historical works of art or expression without referencing the current situation in the world. 

When we ask about what it means, that’s a different story. The myriad versions of the song are out there on records, CD’s, and through a variety of streaming sources. While it might not be included in a few major outlets, it is still available. It is also possible to be a feminist and challenge gender-based violence and discrimination and love or leave the song. 

The two perspectives may not be aligned explicitly, but they can be with a larger, higher-level purpose of seeking empowerment and respect for women. It is this context of tension that we can best understand where works like this live. 

This is the tension in which many evaluations live when dealing with human services and systems. There are many contexts and we can see competing visions and accept them both, yet still work to create a greater understanding of a program, service, or product. Like technology, evaluations aren’t good or bad, but nor are they neutral. 

Image credit MGM/YouTube via CBC.ca

Note: The writing article happened to coincide with the anniversary of the horrific murder of 14 women at L’Ecole Polytechnique de Montreal. It shows that, no matter how we interpret works of art, we all need to be concerned with misogyny and gender-based violence. It’s not going away.  

behaviour changebusinessinnovationknowledge translation

The hidden cost of learning & innovation

on February 8, 2016

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The costs of books, materials, tuition, or conference fees often distort the perception of how much learning costs, creating larger distortions in how we perceive knowledge to benefit us. By looking at what price we pay for integrating knowledge and experience we might re-valuate what we need, what we have and what we pay attention to in our learning and innovation quest. 

A quote paraphrased and attributed to German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer points to one of the fundamental problems facing books:

Buying books would be a good thing if one could also buy the time to read them in: but as a rule the purchase of books is mistaken for the appropriation of their contents.

Schopenhauer passed away in 1860 when the book was the dominant media form of codified knowledge and the availability of books was limited. This was before radio, television, the Internet and the confluence of it all in today’s modern mediascape from Amazon to the iPhone and beyond.

Schopenhauer exposes the fallacy of thought that links having access to information to knowledge. This fallacy underpins the major challenges facing our learning culture today: quantity of information vs quality of integration.

Learning time

Consider something like a conference or seminar. How often have you attended a talk or workshop and been moved by what you heard and saw, took furious notes, and walked out of the room vowing to make a big change based on what you just experienced? And then what happened? My guess is that the world outside that workshop or conference looked a lot different than it appeared in it. You had emails piled up, phone messages to return, colleagues to convince, resources to marshall, patterns to break and so on.

Among the simple reasons is that we do not protect the time and resources required to actually learn and to integrate that knowledge into what we do. As a result, we mistakenly look at the volume of ‘things’ we expose ourselves to for learning outcomes.

One solution is to embrace what consultant, writer and blogger Sarah Van Bargen calls “intentional ignorance“. This approach involves turning away from the ongoing stream of data and accepting that there are things we won’t know and that we’ll just miss. Van Bargen isn’t calling for a complete shutting of the door, rather something akin to an information sabbatical or what some might call digital sabbath. Sabbath and sabbatical share the Latin root sabbatum, which means “to rest”.

Rebecca Rosen who writes on work and business for The Atlantic argues we don’t need a digital sabbath, we need more time. Rosen’s piece points to a number of trends that are suggesting the way we work is that we’re producing more, more often and doing it more throughout the day. The problem is not about more, it’s about less. It’s also about different.

Time, by design

One of the challenges is our relationship to time in the first place and the forward orientation we have to our work. We humans are designed to look forward so it is not a surprise that we engineer our lives and organizations to do the same. Sensemaking is a process that orients our gaze to the future by looking at both the past and the present, but also by taking time to look at what we have before we consider what else we need. It helps reduce or at least manage complex information to enable actionable understanding of what data is telling us by putting it into proper context. This can’t be done by automation.

It takes time.

It means….

….setting aside time to look at the data and discuss it with those who are affected by it, who helped generate it, and are close to the action;

….taking time to gather the right kind of information, that is context-rich, measures things that have meaning and does so with appropriate scope and precision;

….understanding your enterprises’ purpose(s) and designing programs to meet such purposes, perhaps dynamically through things like developmental evaluation models and developmental design;

….create organizational incentives and protections for people to integrate what they know into their jobs and roles and to create organizations that are adaptive enough to absorb, integrate and transform based on this learning — becoming a true learning organization.

By changing the practices within an organization we can start shifting the way we learn and increase the likelihood of learning taking place.

Buying time

Imagine buying both the book and the time to read the book and think about it. Imagine sending people on courses and then giving them the tools and opportunity to try the lessons (the good ones at least) in practice within the context of the organization. If learning is really a priority, what kind of time is given to people to share what they know, listen to others, and collectively make sense of what it means and how it influences strategy?

What we might find is that we do less. We buy less. We attend less. We subscribe to less. Yet, we absorb more and share more and do more as a result.

The cost of learning then shifts — maybe even to less than we spend now — but what it means is that we factor in time not just product in our learning and knowledge production activities.

This can happen and it happens through design.

CreateYourFuture

Photo credit by Tim Sackton used under Creative Commons License via Flickr.

Abraham Lincoln quote image from TheQuotepedia.