Tag Archives: evaluation

Evaluation and complexity – lessons from 5 large evaluations in the UK

Last week, I spent the day with the Big Lottery Fund and a bunch of evaluators who are running five large evaluations of major BLF programmes. The evaluators come together regularly to exchange and learn from each other’s experiences. This meeting was focusing on the topic of evaluation and complexity. I was asked by BLF to set the scene by talking about what complexity is and why it is relevant for evaluation. Afterwards, I enjoyed listening to the evaluators on how they made sense of complexity and the consequences for their evaluations. Here a summary of my inputs and some insights from the subsequent discussion.
Continue reading

Systemic monitoring

Wordle

I have been very lucky to work for an initiative termed ‘Systemic M&E’ (although we talk more about the ‘M’ than the ‘E’), focusing on ways to move away from a linear and static understanding of the systems we work in and develop tools and approaches that let us monitor changes in the complexity of the real world. Continue reading