5.22: Learning + Evaluation Spotlight Series - Reflections from Tuesday Ryan-Hart + Dr. Gabrielle Donnelly - L&E Outside Style

Show Notes

For the final episode in our Learning and Evaluation spotlight series, Tuesday and Gabrielle reflect on what they learned from our spotlight guests, how The Outside works with evaluation, and how evaluation can support the celebration of successes along the way while also holding up a mirror for what needs attention in the centering of equity.

Tues: Welcome to the pod! It’s just Dr. Gabrielle Donnelly and I today and we’re going to talk about learning and evaluation, Outside style!!

Gabrielle: It feels great to be in this conversation after chatting with our 3 guests around their work in evaluation and to really just land this around the work that we have been doing at The Outside around evaluation and how these conversations, with our guests, inform and influence how we move forward as well.
Tues: We had three REALLY different evaluators on the show - Dr. Dominica McBride, Jamie Gamble and Dr. Gladys Rowe.

Gabe: To start [the spotlight series] with Dr. Dominica McBride and the work of Become, was for me, such an opening of a purpose to evaluation that I had not seen, for a number of reasons, but she really spoke to evaluation in a culturally responsive way - as a pathway for healing and transformation - and really bringing this ethics of care into the work. I certainly think that at The Outside we bring an ethics of care in the work… but I think, for me, the contrast or the difference was that I came to the field of evaluation already as a facilitator of change work and change efforts and so in the way that I conceive of evaluation is often another method to help us do good work. It was so helpful for me to hear this kind of visionary sense of what evaluation could be - as a liberatory practice and tool.
Tues: I was quite moved by that interview with Dominica for that precise reason. She used the word healing and it was like, evaluation - healing. Wow. I've thought about it [evaluation] as really, really needed, integral to our work, and certainly a way to make sure that we're attending to equity but the idea of evaluation as healing was pretty brand new to me. This is actually a person who is shifting the thinking around the racial justice paradigm. I feel also part of her work is shifting the tone of it as well.
Tues: I feel like all 3 of the interviewees did not stumble into evaluation. All three said, “I want to have impact… so that’s where I stayed.”
Gabe: In our conversation with Jamie Gamble, what came through was his pragmatism and clarity and simplicity of talking about how evaluation can help us think better and can help us overcome barriers to thinking well and to strategy. I have worked alongside Jamie in one particular project and what struck me is that he always comes back to: “How do we make the data we're gathering help us make better decisions moving forward in real time? What's just enough structure, just enough order, to that process to do it well?” I think what’s incredible is how Jamie talks about evaluation and also his practice. He is really great at distilling exactly what would be helpful, at a particular time, to help inform the next step and that, to me, is a really seasoned practitioner.
Tues: When you describe your work with Jamie right now, I think what I experienced from him was his radicalness. His belief that people can think better; that it is inherent in us. We can think better. We can use data to impact. There was like just this kind of belief in the smarts and intellect of the people he was working with which I think - and maybe I'm projecting - but it feels like that might not be present in a lot of evaluation.
Tues: I really appreciated Dr. Rowe’s interview, her bringing in her personal self to this work and how much personal work it took to stay in to do this work that she felt was so important for her community.
Gabe: Absolutely! Her journey has led to this beautiful gift into the world which is a medicine bundle of evaluation which is grappling with how do indigenous practices and values… can they imbue evaluation practice which is from a white Euro North American centric worldview? I think not everybody's going to stick along for that ride and she has the tenacity to do that and to transform it into something really incredible and beautiful and working with indigenous communities…but also bringing indigenous worldview and practices into evaluation work more broadly and that just feels really incredible, and in the work of how are we in practices of decolonization.
Tues: If all evaluators are like the 3 of them - and you - I'm in! I just want to hang out at evaluation conferences or something.
Gabe: At The Outside, our work is so often about how do we support people, organizations and networks to confront work that we don't have answers to and we might have a sense of our vision of the future that we want to arrive at but how we get there is unfolding and uncertain. I think that we've learned particularly in our work as facilitators and hosts of change processes is sometimes people's ideas of how they want to make change can be an obstacle to what actually needs to happen. So there's something about the kind of stripping away or the kind of peeling away of our beliefs and our assumptions about how change happens and bring more of a mindset of inquiry, of testing and trying something out and holding it lightly enough to really be in an experimental, innovative creative space where we have just enough order from an evaluative practice that helps us be in cycles of reflection and of sense making around data and data informed decision making. That we can stay really nimble - and you might notice I am trying to avoid the word pivot - because it's so overused in our pandemic times.
Gabe: I think one of the reasons why The Outsider has become real advocates of integrating developmental practice early on in change efforts is because there are some real big risks when we don't and some of those are: we pick a strategy and it’s actually going to be a dead end but because it was baked into a 5 year strategic plan we don't know until we get there and then potentially we spent a lot of time and money and resources on a strategy that's not actually moving us forward. [Developmental Evaluation] can help us spend our time, our money, and resources in ways that are more effective to be in this kind of lighter, nimble, “let’s learn as we go.” We also bring in summative evaluation to be able to tell the story of when something's worked. We’re about learning what works and amplifying that and growing it. So when we have landed on a strategy or a story or a narrative that's making waves of change, it is important to bring in that more kind of traditional, summative approach.
Gabe: In our work, we start with what we would like the outcome to be. Then we’ll develop the progress indicators and outcome indicators. These indicators, or signals, are like flags or markers along the way that could help us anchor into, “are we moving in the right direction or not?” and part of that is building in these evaluative cycles - ninety days, three to four months, participially when we're in high innovation stage work. Sometimes in action learning cycles where we're prototyping with teams, we’re actually in an evaluative cycle every month or every month and a half to help move things forward. Part of that process when we come up with these indicators or these signals is when we do that in a participatory way - or a way that includes those who are in the work - we’ll bring out what are the equity principles that are important here? Oftentimes my job, or the job of the evaluation team, is to hold up a mirror of the sticky patterns - we say this principle is important around equity but then we're actually moving too fast to include all of the voices that are needed.
Gabe: I think one of the real benefits too of evaluation is that not only is it course correcting but it also can give us opportunities and create space for us to celebrate the “wins” because we can see them more quickly.
Gabe: Listeners, if you want to bring in an evaluation tool lightly into your work, into ongoing work already, there is a process called, “the most significant change” and it's just asking that question to a group of stakeholders in the work: “What is the most significant change you have witnessed or seen as part of this effort?” It can be just quite a powerful, helpful, and very revealing way of just beginning that work. That process is available on www.betterevaluation.org.