Much of what we believe about behaviour change is based on myth, fallacies, and some poor science and yet these beliefs flourish. It’s time to apply some change-making to itself. It is fair to say that much of the foundation of my profession is bent out of shape. Behavioural psychology is a mess. It’s not …
Repairing Our Broken Assumptions About Change-Making Read More »
Only by understanding our past can we properly design for a future that’s different from it. When we think about the past there’s a tendency toward thinking about things that are often unpleasant, even old-fashioned. Future-thinking is exciting, filled with possibility, and is characterized more by optimism, technology, and ‘shiny things’ at its most cartoonish. …
What regular practice does is reduce the cost of failure and these costs are different in times of disruption. Innovation succeeds because of regular, committed practice. It’s about consistency of effort and persistence. But what happens when we’re constantly being disrupted? The Twenty Twenties will go down as among the greatest periods of disruption of …
Complexity introduces significant challenges for humans. One of the unexpected ones is that it’s been used to hide from difficult problems. Our understanding of complexity has come a long way, but like many things, a little knowledge can be a real problem. A few years back I was facilitating a public health event that was …
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 …
Today is International Women’s Day when the attention of one half of the world’s population is brought to the entire world, suggesting that maybe this day is best honoured the other 364 days as well. Time to consider how this might look. People worldwide will be celebrating and honouring women as part of International Women’s …
Innovation might be doing things different to produce value, but there’s little value if we as a society are not able to embrace change because we’re hiding from mental illness either as individuals, organizations or communities. Without wellbeing and the space to acknowledge when we don’t have it any new product, idea or opportunity will …
Innovation is about channeling new ideas into useful products and services, which is really about design. Thus, if developmental evaluation is about innovation, then it is also fundamental that those engaging in such work — on both evaluator and program ends — understand design. In this final post in this first series of Developmental …
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 is only as good as the sense that can be made from the data that is received. To assume that program staff and evaluators know how to do this might be one of the reasons developmental evaluations end up as something less than they promise. Developmental Evaluation (DE) is becoming a popular subject …
