Cense Ltd.

Inspiration, Innovation and Impact

Using Timelines To Track Activities

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Just as parents will use pencil notches in a wall to track the height of their children as a developmental marker, so too can innovators and evaluators use timelines to help gather and track the development of programs and projects over time.

A timeline is a simple linear visual that gathers activities together that uses time as the variable of distinction.

What makes a timeline useful is that it provides a visual display of temporal relationships between events, activities and outcomes. It makes explicit what we might have in our heads, but are also prone to confusing and forgetting over time.

When to Use Timelines

Timelines are useful in a variety of situations:

  1. Projects with activities that can be organized into a sequence (whether planned or not). They are less useful for projects where there are many activities happening simultaneously.
  2. Projects with a long time horizon.
  3. Projects operating in an environment with many different levels of activities and influences. For example, when there are external factors like policy decisions that have discrete times attached to them and can influence a project’s course, this is a good use of a timeline.
  4. Projects that have a story to tell that involves a beginning, middle, and end.

A timeline can help provide anchors between project activities and events — whether those are policy-related, tied to human (or other) resource use, environmental disruptions, seasons, or cycles. They can help provide hypotheses between causes and consequences or explain mediators.

For example, one non-profit project we worked on had a planned roll-out that was moving along well until their funder abruptly cancelled the program that they relied on. This meant that the six-months after that announcement involved finding new sources of revenue, reductions in staffing, and changes in some activities, yet also persistence in trying to adapt to the situation and still execute the original plan. By showing the data on a timeline it helped explain what happened to project activities, outputs, and outcomes within a certain time period and how that related to the overall project plan.

Examples

Below is an example of a timeline that illustrates distinctive markers along the route. These are clearly defined events that took place on specific dates. The selection of events includes those deemed to be meaningful and significant to the project.

What makes a timeline a powerful tool is that there are many different ways to illustrate events. The example above is a relatively straightforward set of data.

Below is another example that involves much more data and in different forms. This example creates a hybrid of timeline and categorization exercise.

Creating Timelines

There are many templates and tools that can be used to help develop visual graphics. The examples above are from Lucidchart, however, tools like Miro, Mural, SmartDraw, PowerPoint, Google Draw, and many others have templates that can be modified to create useful timelines. These are all simple tools that can be manipulated easily so you’re able to build them as you go.

If you are looking to develop more sophisticated models, we suggest employing a visual communicator or graphic designer to take advantage of the many ways you can represent temporal data.

The result is something that is engaging and can easily be discussed or presented to diverse stakeholders involved in a project who might be able to validate, contribute to, or constructively challenge the arrangements. We find this to be a powerful way to organize our findings, refresh our memories, and recognize all of the activities that go into a project.

Documenting Innovation Development

Lastly, if you are developing an innovation where there is no clear ‘end’ known at the beginning, timelines are useful in telling the story of the project and documenting the different pivots, changes, adaptations, and their consequences. A timeline can be a powerful asset to Developmental Evaluation and a complement to the Living History Method that we often employ in those kinds of evaluations.

A timeline can honour all the work you put into coming up with your final product and can be an engaging way to get people involved in celebrating, documenting, and tracking what you do and create.

We use these all the time and can help you track and evaluate your project. Contact us and let’s talk about timelines, innovation and impact.

Camera Work and Cultural Probes

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Gathering insights about how people live, work, socialize and experience their world is one of the principal challenges facing innovators, design researchers or those looking to do design-driven evaluation. It’s easy to forget that most of us have access to a powerful tool for data gathering on our phone or in the body of a camera.

Camera work can be a great means for capturing social life and patterns. Whether it is through using a process like Photovoice or using it as part of an array of data gathering tools, cameras are often forgotten when we think about how to learn from our users. Let’s look at one way we can use cameras to support understanding our users’ context better: The cultural probe.

The Probe

A camera (or phone camera), notebook, and instructions are all that’s needed for your prospective users to turn their lives into an anthropological adventure. This method is user-focused and meant to involve your prospective users taking pictures and notes and thoughts about what they are recording. The instructions are tied mostly to the basics of photography (e.g., consideration of light, framing, and ethics of taking pictures of others, in certain settings, etc.).

Instructions can also focus participants’ attention on specific things. For example, you may wish to have your participants focus on a topic, setting, context, interaction, or situation — anything you want to learn more about. Keeping it too general is often not a good idea and can be anxiety- or confusion-provoking in your participants. If they are too specific, you might lose some of the creative possibilities.

The probe part of this method is the ‘thing’ you want your participants to focus on. The cultural part comes from what context, framing, explanation, or interpretation participants (and others) bring to the photos.

Interpretation & Expression

What makes the cultural probe method useful is that it allows for a guided activity that has a standard format while producing artifacts — pictures — that delve into the uniqueness of your users’ lives.

What participants choose to take pictures of can be instructive. It provides an opportunity to discuss why something was included and why other things might not be.

What context the photos were taken is also helpful as it indicates priorities, habits, situations, or choices that the participant makes.

Photographs provide a means to ask questions about what is in the pictures, how things are framed, and what kind of reflections are made by participants from the photos.

This method can also be used in group settings where people agree ahead of time (with the right to withdraw agreement, of course) to share some of the photos they take. It can be useful in times of conflict or ambiguity when participants themselves aren’t sure what is going on and collective sensemaking is needed.

The camera is a powerful tool. Its insights can help us design services and products better, create and learn more from people, and provide a means of qualitative evaluation data, too.

We love this method. If you want help using cameras as a storytelling, design, or evaluation tool contact us and we can help you along.

After-Action Review: Learning Together Through Complexity

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Complexity science is the study of how systems behave when under conditions of high dynamism (change) and instability due to the number, sequencing, and organization of actors, relationships, and outcomes. Complex systems pose difficulty drawing clear lessons because the relationship between causes and consequences are rarely straightforward. To illustrate, consider how having one child provides only loose guidance on how to parent a second, third or fourth child: there’s no template.

An After-Action Review is one such way to learn from actions you take in a complex system to help shape what you do in the future and provide guidance on what steps should be taken next.

The After-Action Review (AAR) is a method of sensemaking and supporting organizational learning through shared narratives and group reflection once an action has been taken on a specific project aimed at producing a particular outcome — regardless of what happened. The method has been widely used in the US Military and has since been applied to many sectors. Too often our retrospective reviews happen only when things fail, but through examining any outcome we can better learn what works, when, how, and when our efforts produce certain outcomes.

Here’s what it is and how to use it.

Learning Together

An AAR is a social process aimed at illuminating causal connections between actions and outcomes. It is not about developing best practice, rather it is to create a shared narrative of a process from many different perspectives. It recognizes that we may engage in a shared event, but our experience and perceptions of that event might be different and within these differences lie the foundation for learning.

To do this well, you will need to have a facilitator and a note-taker. This also must be done in an environment that allows individuals to speak freely, frankly, and without any fear of negative reprisals — which is a culture that must be cultivated early and ahead of time. The aim isn’t to point blame, but to learn. The facilitator can be within the team or outside the team. The US Military has a process where the teams undertake their own self-facilitated AAR’s.

To begin, gather those individuals directly involved in a project together in close proximity to the ‘end’ (e.g., launch, delivery of the product, etc..). As a group, reflect on the following three question sets:

  1. The Objectives & Outcomes:
    • What was supposed to happen?
    • What actually happened?
    • Practice Notes: Notice whether there were discrepancies between perceptions of the objective in the first place and where there are differences in what people pay attention to, what value they ascribe to that activity (see below), and how events were sequenced.
  2. Positive, Negative, and Neutral Events:
    • What created benefit / what ‘worked’ ?
    • What created problems / what ‘didn’t ‘work’?
    • Practice notes: The reason for putting ‘work’ in quotes is that there may not be a clear line between the activities and outcomes or a pre-determined sense of what is expected and to what degree, particularly with innovations where there isn’t a best practice or benchmark. Note how people may differ on their view of what a success or failure might be.
  3. Future Steps:
    • What might we do next time?
    • Practice notes: This is where a good note-taker is helpful as it allows you to record what happens in the discussion and recommendations. The process should end with a commitment to bringing these lessons together to inform strategic actions going forward next time something similar is undertaken.

Implementing the Method

Building AAR’s into your organization will help foster a culture of learning if done with care, respect and a commitment to non-judgemental hearing and accepting of what is discussed in these gatherings.

The length of an AAR can be anywhere from a half-hour to a full-day (or more) depending on the topic, context, and scale of the project.

An AAR is something that is to be done without a preconceived assessment of what the outcome of the event is. This means suspending the judgement about whether the outcome was a ‘success’ or ‘failure’ until after the AAR is completed. What often happens is successes and ‘wins’ are found in even the most difficult situations while areas of improvement or threats can be uncovered even when everything appeared to work (see the NASA case studies with the Challenger and Columbia space shuttle disasters).

Implementing an AAR every time your team does something significant as part of its operations can help you create a culture of learning and trust in your organization and draw out far more value from your innovation if you implement this regularly.

If your team is looking to improve its learning and create more value from your innovation investments, contact us and we can support you in building AAR’s into your organization and learn more from complexity.

The Amazing Spidergram

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Illustrating action points within a complex system challenges evaluation users. Time to call on your friendly neighbourhood spidergram for help.

Visualizing complex systems is a challenge within strategy, foresight, and evaluation because each component of the system is interconnected with others. Influence on one of these is likely to influence others.

From an action standpoint, it’s easier to focus on one or two small parts of the system than tackle the entire system all at once. How do we reconcile this and provide a means to see the parts of the system without being reductionistic and neglecting the relationship with the whole?

One answer is: look to the spiderweb.

A spiderweb is a good entry-level metaphor for helping people see places they can take action within a system by creating distinctions between the parts (nodes, intersections) and the whole (branches, webs). There are two related, but different spiderweb models worth noting.

Spider Diagrams / Mindmaps

Spider diagrams (or spidergrams or mindmaps) are ways to connect ideas together through the branch-and-thread model akin to a spider’s web (hence the name). These are often called mindmaps and have been shown to facilitate learning about complex topics.

They enable the development of relationships between ideas and possible causal or associative pathways between ideas, concepts, or other data- or evidence-informed concepts. They also enable us to cluster related concepts together to identify sub-systems that may be more amenable to our intervention within the larger whole.

Spidergrams / Radar Diagrams

The other spider-related metaphor that is available to innovators and evaluators is the spidergram, sometimes called a Radar Chart or Spider Chart. These allow for the display of data collected along a scale presented alongside others that use a similar proportioned scale.

This hub-and-spoke model of data allows users to see a variety of performance indicators presented along a similar set of axes related to a common goal.

What this allows for is a view of performance across a variety of metrics simultaneously and can recognize how we make progress on one area often at the expense of another. Strategically, it can enable an organization to balance its actions and foci across a variety of key indicators at the same time.

This can be used with quantitative data such as the financial data above or social data, too.

Spidergrams/charts can also overlay data within the same domain (see example) providing even more depth into recurring or separated data points within the same topic or subsystem.

The web of engagement

What makes these tools powerful is that they display a lot of data at the same time in a manner that can facilitate engagement with a group of people tasked with making decisions. Visualizing data or systems brings the benefit of literally getting people’s focus on the same page.

People around a table can then literally point to the areas they are interested in, concerned with, do not understand, or wish to explore assumptions about.

Complex systems introduce a lot of data and a lot of confusion. Sensemaking through the use of visuals and the discussion that they encourage is one of the ways to reduce confusion and get more from your data to make better decisions.

If you’re stuck in the web of data and complexity, call on your friendly neighbourhood spidergram.

Want to learn more about how this can assist your innovation efforts? Contact us and we’ll gladly swing over and help (without the costume).

Photo by Jean-Philippe Delberghe on Unsplash. Spidergram by

Seeing Innovation Differently: The Role of Evaluation

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See what you do through new eyes

We begin a series called the Innovators Secret Advantage by starting with a simple, but powerful premise: perspective is everything. 

This is based on a phrase that we use as our guide at Cense: 

“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”

Marcel Proust

Evaluation is most commonly seen as a means to assess the merit, worth, and significance of a program, service, or product. Evaluation can focus on implementations and learning, how a program works, outcomes and outputs, or some combination of these things. This is how most see evaluation. 

However, for innovators — those looking to develop and apply something new into a situation — evaluation offers so much more when approached as a tool for innovation. This is less about the method and much more about how we treat the methods. This is where we need our new eyes. 

Evaluation = Feedback

What evaluation offers to innovators is feedback, which plays a central role in complex systems. These are the kind of systems that most human services exist to various degrees. Complexity creates conditions for innovators where it’s difficult to know what is happening with a high degree of certainty. Feedback allows innovators to ‘take the temperature’ of what they are ‘cooking up’ to see if they need to make changes. These changes might look like doing more of something, adding things, or perhaps removing something. It’s very much like making a soup. 

Evaluation is the means of obtaining feedback and doing it systematically. It allows innovators to avoid bias, mis-perceptions in the data, and overcome blind spots that get created. Innovators are focusing on their product, service, or program itself, but with a slight shift in perception toward feedback systems, and they can gain much more in the way they approach their work.  

Evaluation is the means of providing fuel for innovation, particularly as an idea moves from concept to prototype. Data, systematically collected and focused, along with the analysis and sensemaking that comes with it, plays a vital role in determining how ready an innovation is for deployment or how appropriate it is for scaling upward or outward. 

Seeing With New Eyes

Seeing with new eyes begins by asking some questions. The first three questions foster evaluative thinking, not just new ways of seeing: 

  • What is going? 
  • What is new?
  • What does it mean?

The next question is: What are you hiring innovation to do for you? The answers to these questions are what can inspire that new way to see the work being done. 

The final set of questions to give you those new eyes come from mindful reflection. Organizational mindfulness is not some new age meditation technique, but a scientifically-supported approach to paying attention across the organization to learn what is being done and how it connects with purpose and values. 

Engaging these questions will set the stage for using evaluation as a means to help innovations fulfill their true promise. In the weeks ahead, we’ll look at how this is done and what your new eyes can be trained to look at.