The personalities and preferences of innovators and change-makers are rarely discussed and when they are it’s not about implementation. So it was with some enthusiasm that we find an attempt to place the roles, preferences, and skills of implementers in a framework and discuss what these might mean. Consultants at NOBL sought to ‘type’ those …
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 …
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 …
In Orwell’s classic Animal Farm the characters often oscillate between their evaluative assessments on the merits of two or four legs. The value was socially constructed, however in practice there are real tangible benefits socially and otherwise to having two legs, which serves as an apt metaphor for understanding the role of scaling in social …
Developmental evaluation is an approach to evaluating programs that takes account of complexity and changing conditions, supports innovation, and serves as a vehicle for adaptation for leaders seeking feedback on how to adapt to these evolving forces. It is not simply about improving programs, but developing them. From a technical point of view, this means …
The Developmental Evaluation and Design Imperative Read More »
Thinking developmentally means attenuating oneself to nuance, punctuated learning, ongoing feedback, and inconsistent behaviour. I don’t blame people for wanting to impose a simple cause-and-effect narrative on the world, but doing so doesn’t mean its useful. As I’ve argued elsewhere, unless we consider changing our thinking we may continue to spend time devising ways to do what systems thinker and management leader Russell Ackoff called “the wrong things, righter”.
Higher education strives to prepare learners to meet the scientific and technical demands of a changing world, yet does so in a manner that seems antithetical to change. What gives? I explore this in a little further with insights from complexity science.
