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 …
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 …
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 …
After-Action Review: Learning Together Through Complexity Read More »
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, …
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 …
Seeing Innovation Differently: The Role of Evaluation Read More »
