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 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 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 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 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.
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