Five Good Ideas: Evaluation in disruptive times

These are disruptive times. Events on the other side of the world affect public policies at home. New technology changes the way we communicate, work and live. Our values and cultural rules evolve at a relentless rate. Leading and managing non-profit organizations is less like stewarding a well-oiled machine and a lot more like white water rafting. As Mark Cabaj points out, this type of continual disruption requires non-profit organizations to excel at adaptive leadership. They must drop practices that no longer “fit” the evolving context, experiment with new – sometimes multiple – opportunities that appear out of the blue, and continually adapt – rather than freeze – even the most effective models and practices. Unfortunately, many traditional ideas and practices of evaluation weaken, rather than strengthen, non-profit organizations’ ability to navigate and thrive in disruption. This needs to change.

Five Good Ideas

1. Use evaluation to support adaptive approaches to tackle tough issues rather than encourage fidelity to the original plan and hoped for results.
2. Acknowledge that “best practice” is anti-innovation.
3. Admit that innovation is ahead of the evidence curve.
4. Embrace a practical standard for “robust” evaluation: i.e., triangulation of methods, real time data, good sense-making and a realistic burden of proof.
5. Dramatically raise the bar on “intelligent” failure.

Resources

1. The SIG Knowledge Hub provides a good introduction to Developmental Evaluation and links to extra resources for those who want more.
2. Lisbeth Schorr is a well-known advocate for a more practical approach to evaluating initiatives to tackle complex issues and one of the first to make the case for a new “gold standard” in evaluation.
3. The Better Evaluation website is the most comprehensive and accessible online resource on evaluation methods.
4. The Center for Evaluation Innovation focuses on developing evaluation methods that are better suited to advocacy, systems change and social innovation that traditional evaluation practices struggle to assess.
5. The Fail Forward organization in Toronto has a number of practical techniques to support groups identify, make sense of, document and use failure to move their work forward.