Measuring change: who decides what’s measured?

I have spent the summer and early autumn helping two organisations improve their ability to reflect on and learn from their experience. Both pieces of work have involved how to measure change in the real world.

The first was designing an impact assessment framework for International Service. They do capacity-building with local organisations in five countries around the world, and they are interested to know more about the difference that this capacity building is making in the lives of their partners’ beneficiaries. That’s quite a long impact chain, from sending a development worker to discerning how (hopefully) improved services are improving individual lives.

International Service is fifty-six years old this year. A much younger organisation, the Newcastle Conflict Resolution Network, is planning its activities over the next twelve to eighteen months, and I have been invited to help design their logframe. Ultimately we’re hoping this will help evaluate their impact, because of the attention they are giving now to:

• What are our realistic objectives?
• What are the changes that we want to see and measure in the future? (indicators)
• Where will we look to find any evidence of those changes? (the means of verification)

My input into these organisations has been informed by the latest CDRA Nugget – if you’re not signed up, these occasional nuggets of insight and information are well worth reading.

This latest nugget I paraphrase here as: those involved in designing impact assessment frameworks (oops! – that includes me…) must remember the most important lesson of all: initiatives work best if they are designed and implemented with those who will be the recipients. Note the word ‘recipients’ rather than ‘beneficiaries’ – let’s not assume that everything our organisations do turns out for the good.

And so I am helpfully reminded that thinking how to assess the effect of one’s work requires you – me – to ask the recipients: what would you value as a positive impact? And how might that impact be measured? That I am not asked these questions as a recipient of local or government services here in the UK does not diminish the obligation to ensure they are asked through the organisations I work with.

From parenting to management (4): Doing what my parents did

From parenting…

It must be one of the commonest experiences amongst parents, to catch yourself saying or behaving as your parents did; and then comes the refrain: “I sound just like my mother/father…”.

Sometimes my parents did pretty neat things. Other times they didn’t, though of course how much I contributed to the situation is open to debate!

My practice of parenting has a lot to do with how I was parented. I may do the same as my parents, or the exact opposite; either may be appropriate, so long as I act awarely and with choice.

So when I’m angry, or stressed, or tired, that’s when the autopilot is ready to kick in, to make me act without awareness – and that usually means acting without a thought for how I might do it better.

… to management:

Do you remember your first manager? Or the first time you noticed a manager in action, so that you could see beyond the consequences of their actions to actually observing their techniques, their values, their opinion of those they managed?

The experience of being managed is very different from the years-long process of being brought up and the complex emotional relationship that builds up between parents and children.

Nevertheless, I believe that what we learn from managers – especially when we’re new to the experience of being managed – does have the potential to become ‘hardwired’ into us; that if we are lucky to be managed early on in our career by a good manager, we are more likely to carry forward good qualities into our own managerial practice. What’s your experience?

How hungry are you?

I have been challenged recently to face the question “How much do I want what I say I want?” There are things I want to happen to me: I would like to publish a book, be famous, develop a new strand of work… but unless I make them happen, the evidence is that I’m not hungry for them.

So perhaps my ‘wants’ are more dreams and visions. Dreams and visions are essential to initiating practical changes. Without them we never start anything; but they need to be followed by other things.  Such as imagining potentials, considering possibilities, generating options – and only then making commitments. Action is way down the line; to use the NLP phrase, before I act, do I create and hold “well-formed outcomes” in my mind”?

I hope I am not alone in thinking there are things I want which in fact I don’t – or only partially – do anything to bring about. I’m left wondering if my wants are as urgent as I believe them to be.

Perhaps, and this is a scarier thought, I don’t actually want them; that what I make happen in fact shows what I’ve really wanted for myself. And that if I’m not satisfied with who I am, I have to want harder.

Now there’s a new year’s resolution: to ask, and to live, the question: What is it that I really want to do? And if that’s what I truly want to do this year, then that’s what I’ll do. And if not…

£100 to change the world

The most intriguing present this Christmas that Bronwen and I received this year was £100 “to do something we wouldn’t normally do”. Given by an activist couple in their seventies who had just moved out of a spiritual community into a smaller house, they gave £100 to friends and family who they felt were still in the generation of “maximum contribution” – now there’s an ominous expectation.

According to the accompanying letter, the gift is to be used “to do something which you wouldn’t normally do. Buy an expensive book? Give someone a special meal? Go on a visit? Give it on to someone else? Whatever you choose”.

There are many things of course that we don’t normally do – and some of these we would like to do if time and resources permitted! We’re hoping to see the money as a means to heal hurts, raise awareness of issues not yet on public agendas, or as seed money that hopefully will have some kind of domino effect. Maybe too optimistic, and the amount itself is a challenge – a lot to some people, but very little to most organisations.

We’re pondering our responses, and have found value in bringing the idea into conversations with friends to see what possibilities emerge. Do you have any ideas to share?

Experiential learning

I was yesterday part of a group looking at how to promote whole person learning.

I’ll say more about whole person learning in future posts, but for the moment I want to report on the process we used. My sense is that it could be used by any group of reflective practitioners who are looking for ways forward to develop a work area or interest.

I use whole person learning in the methodology below, so substitute WPL for whatever issue you’re interested in.

The process took about two and a half hours, with a break as well.

We started with the decision that until we know what we’ve got within us on WPL (“whole person learning”) we can’t know what we can offer.

So on an individual basis, take up to 30 minutes to answer these questions:
1. What is my first/an early experience or inkling of WPL. When, where, what – build a sense of that experience. What were its implications or consequences – lasting value or only seemed mundane at the time.
2. How is that experience similar to, and different from, WPL if we were to be developing it now.
3. What was involved in the experience that makes it WPL?
4. What are my questions about WPL?
5. How would I use WPL in our work together?
6. What areas of theory and practice do I need to attend to?
7. If I’m more able to promote WPL in my work, what would it help me accomplish?

Share in pairs, 10 minutes each.
Back in the whole group: Share what came out of the pot.
Then whole-group discussion: What’s our resulting agenda, and priorities, and agreeing action.

The primary agenda item was for us to work on a two-day course for facilitators of whole person learning; again, I’ll keep you informed about this.

As with some experiential learning experiences, it was easy to feel at times that it was all going too slowly! But the depth of our sharing in the whole group would not have happened without that individual and pairs sharing which underpinned our later discussions.

If you try out this process in your own work or groups, do let me know how you got on.

Truth-saying

In Richard Adams’ Watership Down, a group of travelling rabbits reach what seems to be a perfect rabbit warren. The warren rabbits are well-fed, there is plenty of space, and the nearby farmer controls the rabbits’ natural predators. The farmer even carelessly leaves out carrots and other delicacies that the warren collects.

What seems ideal is in fact slavery: the farmer ‘farms’ the warren, and traps and shoots enough rabbits for his own use. Under the farmer’s protection, the warren has developed unusual rabbit behaviours, and they have lost some of their essential survival skills.

When one of the travelling rabbits lays this truth bare, the travellers are criticised, attacked and driven away. Each of the warren rabbits ‘knows’ at some level the truth of their existence, but all but one of them (who escapes to join the travellers) find it easier to live the illusion than acknowledge the truth.

Truth-sayers in human society sometimes face similar responses. Note that I’m using the early Quakers’ definition of truth: not as doctrine or objective fact, but an individual awareness or understanding drawn from inner attention and group reflection. The founder of the Quakers, George Fox, said that everyone “must come to the truth in their own particulars” – meaning, find the truth for you based on your own experience. Your own ‘truth’, provided it has been worked out, can only be tested by others, but ultimately not denied.

Those who challenge an organisation’s culture or behaviours can encounter difficulties too. ‘Wise as serpents, gentle as doves’ comes to mind, along with the courage of course to say something like “it looks to me as though reality may be this way rather than the way we’ve been thinking it is.” Such people need to be open to challenge, and be willing to adapt their own understanding in the light of the responses they get.

Most importantly, they need to think “What would be useful for my colleagues to hear, and how might they most usefully hear it?” Acting on the answers to these questions is a truth-sayer’s responsibility; how others respond is theirs.