Thanks to my engagement in the ‘Systemic M&E’ initiative of the SEEP Network (where M&E stands for monitoring and evaluation but we really have been mainly looking into monitoring), I have been  discussing quite a bit with practitioners on monitoring and results measurement and how to make monitoring systems more systemic. For me this bottom up perspective is extremely revealing in how conscious these practitioners are about the complexities of the systems they work in and how they intuitively come up with solutions that are in line with what we could propose based on complexity theory and systems thinking. Nevertheless, practitioners are often still strongly entangled in the overly formalistic and data-driven mindset of the results agenda. This mindset is based on a mechanistic view of systems with clear cause-and-effect relationships and a bias for objectively obtained data that is stripped from its context and by that rendered largely meaningless for improving implementation. Continue reading →