My friend Chris Corrigan recently wrote a great blog post on weather and complexity, riffing off a statement from a retiring weather forecaster to talk about how to navigate complexity. One of my favourite COVID-era hobbies was tracking weather patterns with Chris and our friend Amanda. As systems swept in and out over the coast, we would announce in our group text the moment when rain reached our respective locations, from Nex̱wlélex̱wm/Bowen Island to East Van to New Westminister. Chris always has a fascinating app or person he follows on Twitter with cool maps and data about what is actually happening and the three of us got quite nerdy about it. (I'll never forget on the first night of the heat dome, when he showed me a heat map visualizing that column of hot, red air going straight up to the highest levels of the atmosphere, sitting on top of us with nowhere to go. Terrifying.)
Read moreWhat a time to be alive. Back when we could still gather in groups to sing together, that was a lyric from a song I loved in the drop-in choir group I sang with every week. It is time now, and what a time to be alive.
Yesterday was Juneteenth. Tomorrow is National Indigenous Peoples Day. It’s the height of Pride season. It’s the summer solstice. It’s the first day of Cancer season. There’s a full moon in Capricorn on Thursday, which is also the Strawberry Moon, which is also the last supermoon of the year. Somewhere in there it’s also going to be my 35th birthday. And we are still living within crisis within crisis within crisis within crisis within crisis. What a time to be alive.
I mark the passing of time with reflection. I love to skip back through my calendar apps and my photo albums and remind myself where I was, what I was doing, what I was thinking about and trying to get done a month ago, a year ago, a decade ago. I realized yesterday that I have just passed the ten-year mark of being an evaluator.
Read moreReading this Twitter thread and thinking about the conversations we’re having in evaluation about being human and bringing our whole selves to our work made me really want to talk about being disabled and an evaluator.
But I have no idea if I’m disabled.
Am I?
Read moreA friend asked me today how I was figuring out the current crisis, and we had a lovely clarifying conversation about our respective struggles and journeys. A few ideas surfaced for me that I want to preserve and share.
Read moreI promised Jara I wouldn’t overthink this one and just get this off Twitter and into a blog post, and I’m really trying hard to live up to that. (I might have overthought “not overthinking it” though.) I also know that with how fast things are moving now, there’s a balance to be struck between deliberateness and irrelevance. The post I’m writing now isn’t the one I would have written last week, nor is it the one I’d write a month from now. It’s the one I’m writing in this moment, sitting on my couch in my apartment where I’ve been mostly alone for the two and a half weeks, since the global pandemic came crashing down on these shores.
Read moreDo yourself a favour and check out this post from Mariah Brothe Gantz, “The Realm of Possibility in Evaluation”. (And once you’ve clicked through and read it in its entirety, also click through and read all the posts that Mariah links to! They’re all brilliant.) I love how Mariah embraces her “youth” as an evaluator as a way to call on all of us to re-examine and renew our spirits and our practices. There’s a surge of energy in the field around questions like these, spurred by the young and young-at-heart among us. It’s a beautiful and critical time to be an evaluator as we hash out what that can and should mean.
Read moreYesterday afternoon I spent a few delightful hours in a spoon carving workshop learning how to carve a cedar spoon with a bush knife and some hot coals. (Thank you to Delmar Williams of Squamish and Lil’wat Nations for being our teacher, and to Sharon Kallis of EartHand Gleaners Society for organizing and getting that all-important burn permit!)
Read moreI imagine evaluators are reflective people by default, whether by nature or practice. I definitely find myself obsessed with milestones and checking back to think about what changes and progress I’ve made in whatever timespan I’m reflecting on. The end of the Gregorian calendar year is a very exciting time for me! This one in particular because I’m coming up on my five-year anniversary of moving to Vancouver, which means catching up on my five-year plan that I had when I came out here. (People are sometimes very impressed when I say that I moved to Vancouver with a five-year plan and then I tell them the plan was, “check in at five years and see how things are going and if I should keep sticking it out or not”. Very developmental!) I’m happy to report that my hope to have some form of sustaining work with a promising future and not an over-bearing cost of living on top of it was well-exceeded by year four, so year five has been nothing but bonus learning and discoveries!
Read moreHere’s something I’ve been thinking about.
Imagine a big knotted clump of yarn, the kind of thing that happens when you leave a crafting project at the bottom of your bag for too long. (Alternatively, what happens to your headphones if you leave them in your pocket for five seconds.) It’s a solid mass of strands going every which way at the centre and a bunch of loops and looser tangles hanging off it. If you’re lucky you might know where the two ends are (assuming there’s only two!), but you probably have no idea what else is going on in there and how it’s gotten this tangled and useless. The fastest way to get rid of it would be to cut it (ah, Occam’s Razor), but that wouldn’t help you finish the crafting project, the scarf or hat or sweater that this thing is supposed to be.
Read moreI know what you’re thinking. Do we really need yet another “The Art of”? Can’t we let this naming convention go and find something more creative for our workshop titles? I sympathize, I do, yet here we are. Because this time it’s my turn and, darn it, it’s just such a good description of what we’re up to!
Some of you may have seen me tweet a teaser about this recently, but here’s the full promotional package. From October 16th to November 6th, Rita Fierro and I will be leading an engaging online workshop on practical approaches to developmental evaluation, hosted by our lovely friends at Beehive Productions. There’s more info, including pricing and timing details, on the registration page: Developmental Evaluation: The Art of Learning
Read more“Can we even get that data?”
That question, or some version of it, is usually one of the first, if not the first, question I hear when planning or discussing a new evaluation project. People want to know if it’s possible to collect data on a particular outcome or from a particular group. There’s often an undertone of, “I bet we can’t,” in the question too.
Read moreOne of the first posts I put up here was one about advice for emerging evaluators, based on my own experiences of getting into the field. I wrote it about a year after moving to Vancouver and six months after I committed to building a consulting practice. Three years later, I’m pleased with how well that post holds up. I might word a few things differently now, but the gist would be the same. And I’m pleased to report that I took my own advice (for once) and it’s stood me well as a developing evaluator and consultant. So much so that the last year in particular has been one of transformation and levelling up!
Read moreIf you listened to our recent episode of Eval Cafe with Michael Quinn Patton on principles-focused evaluation, you’ll remember him sharing his new favourite example of principles in action. It’s from the introductory article of a recent special issue of The American Statistician, which is all about moving beyond the use of p < 0.05 as the threshold for determining statistical significance. The article offers an impassioned explanation of why abandoning the entire concept of statistical significance is necessary and also outlines the beginnings of an alternative practice for valuing and interpreting statistical findings. The reason it showed up in the podcast is because the authors ground this new framework in principles, or flexible advice that can guide decisions and give direction, but must be adapted and interpreted in context. In comparison, p < 0.05 is a rule—it is applied the same way regardless of any contextual factors. (Check out the podcast and also Michael’s book, Principles-Focused Evaluation, to learn more about the implications of principles for evaluative work.) Specifically, the principles that the authors offer are, “Accept uncertainty. Be thoughtful, open, and modest” (or “ATOM”, as a mnemonic), and the remainder of the issue (43 articles worth!) goes on to offer more depth around the issues of p < 0.05 and the discussion of alternatives.
For an academic publication about statistics, it is, frankly, stirring.
Read moreTransformation is awkward.
I mean, we all know that change is hard, but it’s also awkward.
Read moreI can’t recall for certain, but I think the first person I “had coffee” with in a professional capacity was my friend Brian Hoessler, a fellow evaluation consultant and now my co-host on our evaluation-themed podcast, Eval Cafe. And of course the podcast is all about, as we say in our intro, “informal chats on evaluation-related topics. The kind you might overhear a your favourite coffee shop, if your favourite coffee shop was frequented by evaluators.” I guess we really set the tone with that first conversation!
Read moreToday I was asked to design a meeting outline for a hypothetical scenario in which a group of people needed to winnow down an ambitious list of topics for inclusion in a strategic plan. This was part of a training course I’ve been taking in facilitation (hence being hypothetical), but of course I’ve been in this scenario plenty of times in real life. Only so much time in the day, much money in the budget, staff in the organization, energy in the body, etc. Somewhere we have to decide how we’re going to focus resources that are not infinite.
I don’t object to prioritizing in principle, but there was something about this particular assignment that made me recoil and, ultimately, rebel.
Read moreHave you ever had that experience of being really seen? Paid attention to in that deep way where the other person notices things about you that no one else ever seems to, maybe even sees things in you that you didn’t know were there, but now you see them too? Maybe with a therapist, or a romantic partner, or a really sensitive, observant friend or family member? There’s something tingly and terrifying about being seen that way, but also deeply satisfying and rewarding. The pay-off of that vulnerability is intimacy.
Read moreBlogging is hard. I’m not sure why I find it such a struggle, though I know I’m not the only one who does. I marvel at the folks who seem to be able to write quickly, eloquently, and insightfully (I can usually manage 1-2 at a time but rarely all three). But I’m choosing to assume that blogging ability is a learnable skill so I keep practicing and looking for ways to make it easier on myself.
One thing I’m trying is to look for synergies between blogging and other creative work that I find easier, to see if I can borrow some of that momentum and inspiration. In this case, that’s the podcast I’ve been producing with my good friend and co-conspirator Brian Hoessler (of Strong Roots Consulting) for the last couple of years.
Read moreThere’s a really great device that Michael Quinn Patton suggests using in developmental evaluation called ‘sensitizing concepts’. He’s borrowed it from qualitative research methods as a way of providing guidance to inquiry in complexity. Here’s a definition he gives in his qualitative methods book that came out a few years ago:
“Sensitizing concepts are terms, phrases, labels, and constructs that invite inquiry into what they mean to people in the setting(s) being studied. ... Qualitative inquiry using sensitizing concepts leaves terms purposefully undefined to find out what they mean to people in a setting. Sensitizing concepts are windows into a group’s worldview.”
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