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Aug 25 2019

Evaluator Competencies Series: Contributing to the Evaluation Profession

And the final reflective practice competency is:

1.8 Engages in professional networks and activities and contributes to the evaluation profession and its community of practice.

There are several ways that I engage in this competency:

involvement with the Canadian Evaluation Society (CES)
teaching evaluation
mentoring my evaluation team
social media involvement

Involvement with CES

I first got involved with CES back in 2010, when I was looking to find my way in this profession. The national conference was being held in Victoria, so I volunteered for the conference as I figured it would be a good way to meet other evaluators and learn about the field. And was I ever right – the evaluation community was so welcoming and I met people there that I’m happy to call friends and colleagues to this day.

For the next several years, I went to the CES national conference when I was able to attend, but then in 2015 the BC & Yukon chapter decided to host a one-day conference of its own, and that’s when my involvement really took off. I volunteered to be the conference program chair for that conference – and also volunteered to be a program co-chair for the national conference which was scheduled to be held in Vancouver in 2017. That role was a tonne of work, but it was also a lot of fun, as I got to work with two delightful fellow evaluators, Sandra Sellick and Wendy Rowe. I really enjoy and get a lot from conferences (both in the content I learn and in the networking opportunities they provide) and I know from experience that they take a lot of effort, so I think that volunteering for conferences is an important way that I can contribute to the profession and its community of practice.

Also in 2015, I joined the CESBCY council as a member at large, later transitioning into the VP role when the VP stepped down. In 2017, I became the chapter president. I’m really proud of the work the chapter is doing – we are hosting a lot of professional development events (e.g., one day conference, various workshops and webinars) and meetups that serve the evaluation community.

This year I also coached a student case competition team at the CES national conference – and that was a really rewarding way to support new evaluators in our community!

Teaching

Another way that I feel that I contribute to the evaluation profession is by teaching evaluation. I’ve taught evaluation courses at both SFU and UBC, and I’ve supervised practicum students from SFU, UBC, and UVic. And several of my students have gone on to work in evaluation (right now, I have three of my former practicum students and two of my previous evaluation course students working as evaluators on my team!)

Mentoring

And speaking of my team, I currently have 10 evaluation specialists working on my team and a big part of the work that I do as the leader of the team is to mentor and support them. This is another way that I am working to contribute to the future of our profession.

Social Media

Another way that I’m involved in evaluation professional networks is online. There’s the #EvalTwitter hashtag that a lot of us connect through. There’s even a monthly #EvalTwitter tweetup on the last Thursday of every month (at 5:30-6:30 pm Pacific time). And through#EvalTwitter I learned about Eval Central, an online forum that “aim[s] to encourage positive and fruitful discussion among culturally diverse evaluators from around the globe.” So I recently joined that and am eager to see what kind of conversations happen there.

Image credits:

CES logo is from https://evaluationcanada.ca/
Social media icons image posted on Flickr by Sean MacEntee with a Creative Commons license.

Aug 19 2019

more advice for emerging professionals

I don’t have a specifically appropriate image for this post, so here’s a nice picture I took at the Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Garden over the weekend.

One of the first posts I put up here was one about advice for emerging evaluators, based on my own experiences of getting into the field. I wrote it about a year after moving to Vancouver and six months after I committed to building a consulting practice. Three years later, I’m pleased with how well that post holds up. I might word a few things differently now, but the gist would be the same. And I’m pleased to report that I took my own advice (for once) and it’s stood me well as a developing evaluator and consultant. So much so that the last year in particular has been one of transformation and levelling up!

Over those three years I’ve kept learning, though my own experiences and through talking with all sorts of wonderful folks, both inside and outside the field of evaluation, about their own career trajectories. I want to make sure all of that wisdom get a wider circulation than just my own brain and decided it was time to revisit and add to this topic. I originally planned to do just a one big follow-up post, but one thing I’ve learned through upping my blogging game this year (have y’all noticed how much better I’ve been doing? One a month at least now! Thank you, thank you, oh, the applause is too much, thank you, you’re too kind!) is that shorter and more frequent is better. So I’m going to try to make this an on-going topic that I can add to as I go and focus on just one or two things at a time.

And just to summarize, the headline versions of the original advice were:

Have a vision
Be visible and accessible
Get involved and meet people
Keep learning (about anything!)
Do your research (specifically on the field itself)

So here it is, one more thing you can try as an emerging professional (since a lot of this is not evaluation-specific). Once again, I offer no guarantees to this advice besides my sincere promise that it’s what I’m trying to do myself. (Also I’m starting with one of the things I find absolutely hardest to do as a way to motivate myself to do it more. Mmm, public accountability.)

6. Know your value

I picked the exact wording for this one up from a tweet about tips for successful collaborations. I endorse the entire tweet, but that part stuck with me particularly because as soon as I saw those three little words I went, “Ah ha, yes! That’s the thing I’m bad at!”

What do I mean by “know your value”? How I interpret that is try to have a reasonably accurate understanding of what you offer and how that’s received and experienced by the people you work with (whether that’s clients, colleagues, employers, etc.) and what it’s worth to them. That includes the value of your skills and experience (which will continue to grow), the ineffable value of you as a whole and unique individual, and your fundamental worth as a human being (which is, y’know, baseline and non-negotiable), and is about money-stuff as well as general perception of you and why people are interested in working with you.

There’s a couple pitfalls here. One is false confidence, or overestimating the value of your professional skills and experience in particular and assuming you bring more to the table than you do. That’s the one I’ve always been most worried about, but it turned out I was causing myself problems with the other pitfall, false humility (a.k.a., underestimating the value of your skills and experience and also who you are and your personhood too sometimes).

It feels safer to underestimate rather than overestimate, but the issue is that when you discount your own value (sometimes literally, by under-pricing your services), you’re actually cheating yourself and the people you work with. You undercut your own confidence and capacity, and, if you’re literally under-selling yourself, you’re also helping set a normative standard of what work in your field is worth and what other people who do work like yours can expect to be paid. It’s complicated because in evaluation and other similar professions, we’re often working with organizations and communities that are under-valued and under-resourced as well and we understandably don’t want to impinge too much on those resources, especially if we’re not feeling confident in the value of what we offer. But we need to be thoughtful about how we’re participating in these systems because we can easily be part of the feedback loop that keeps us all stuck in the same patterns that reinforce our collective under-valuing.

(Here’s some bonus advice that comes to me via a therapist friend who was struggling with setting his fees because money can be such a barrier to accessing mental healthcare, especially for the people he wanted to support most. The guidance he got from his mentors was that if you set your prices too low for you to sustain yourself on or only take clients at the very bottom end of your sliding scale, you will end up under-resourcing yourself and risk exhaustion and resentfulness toward your clients, which will then show up negatively in the therapeutic relationship. It’s not that we need to be content with the terrible systems we’re operating in, but our resistance must also be strategic and we can’t treat ourselves as expendable in the process.)

So how do you figure out a reasonably accurate understanding of what you have to offer and what it’s worth to other people?

On the money front, what I did for a long time (and I don’t recommend this part) was grossly undercharge (because after being a grad student, everything feels like a lot of money!) and fortunately had a lot of kind, patient people (fellow consultants and occasionally clients) who pointed out to me what I was doing and made sure that I got paid more until I eventually figured out that I needed to raise my rates myself. I panicked a whole lot about alienating people by “asking for too much”, but I also paid close attention to my budget, my overhead, and my income and figured out what kind I needed to be making to make a sustainable go at this and what seemed plausible based on what I knew about the local evaluation market (from working on projects, from learning about other consultants’ rates, and from scanning RFPs and job postings that had budgets and salary details included). And then I didn’t go with the lowest number I thought I could get away with—I went for something that I knew I would meet my needs and let me bring my best to my work rather than put me in a position of chasing contracts, stressing about hours, and feeling obliged to work on projects that feel wrong but pay well, or appear to (I’ve been advised those are usually the ones people regret most and I believe it). I went for something that gives me flexibility to keep doing volunteer work. That keeps me mindful of offering maximum value for the time I spend on my projects and not just grinding through. That communicates to prospective clients that I believe in the value of what I offer and that our work together is a commitment for both of us. The first time someone was noticeably disappointed with my stated rate was pretty nerve-wracking, but I survived.

(I realize I’m not giving specific numbers, which I know people always want, and that’s because I’ve learned that appropriate rates are very, very contextual and I can’t do the nuance justice in a blog post. So I can’t tell you what you, personally, as an emerging professional should charge or expect to see as a salary, because it depends so much on where you live, what specific work you’re doing, what kind of experience you have, and a lot of other factors. But, reiterating the advice above, look at RFPs and job postings and talk to other people doing similar work as yours. If you’re moving into consulting specifically, remember that you aren’t just charging for “the amount of work I can do in an hour” or whatever time increment—you need to factor in all of the overhead expenses that you can’t bill directly for, like your office supplies and equipment, professional development, healthcare expenses, accounting fees, etc. Consulting fees are typically 2-3 times higher than the equivalent “hourly” rate of a salaried employee because you have to cover what would otherwise be covered by your employer’s operating budget. There’s a lot of good guidance out there on this topic, like this article that also links to other resources, such as this hourly rate calculator. Gail Barrington’s Consulting Start-Up and Management is also a classic consulting reference text in the evaluation field for a reason and covers some financial basics.)

And then on the other value front, the “why in the hell do people actually want to work with me?” front (since that’s actually what I’ve had on my mind more lately despite all the money talk in this post), for that I had to do a lot of thoughtful listening and getting humbled on the false humility. Once again, other people to the rescue! Sometimes it’s hard to know the impact we have on other people (that’s literally one of the reasons evaluation jobs exists!). We’re so inside our own context that we lack context for our context. What I learned is that I don’t get much insight from focusing on what I think people get from working with me, I have to listen and pay attention to what they say and do. Am I getting repeat clients? Are people asking to work with me again? Recommending me to others? Saying nice stuff behind my back (a.k.a., reverse gossiping)? Cool, then I can assume that I’m doing something people appreciate and respect. And when I don’t see these things, I can look deeper. Was I not bringing my best? Was it a poor fit? Is this an outlier or a trend? Not everyone will love me and that’s fine, but it’s always interesting to notice patterns.

The thing about value is that it’s qualitative as well as quantitative. It’s not a great strategy to just maximize the total number of people who want to work with you (you’ll get tapped out quickly and pulled in a lot of different directions because the work is so varied), you want to be attracting the people that you want to work with and that make sense for you to work with. So look to those folks and find out what they like about you. Ask them. If they’re a client, do a post-project check-in, do some meta-evaluation on yourself and your process. If they’re a colleague, ask them what they’ve noticed about working with you. And don’t count on just one person’s perspective either. Different people will have different takes and see you from different angles (this is the logic of the “360-degree review” process, although you don’t need to go to such elaborate lengths).

The point is not just to buff up your ego (and you can and should take in the “needs work” feedback too—critique that comes from a place of mutual respect is a gift), but to get a clearer reckoning of what your contributions are so that you can work to a place of honest, realistic, and grounded confidence and humbleness. It’s got some less obvious practical implications too. A lot of what I write in bios and website copy and other forms of marketing (everyone’s favourite thing to write about!) is informed by real feedback I’ve gotten from people I’ve worked with. Start gathering up that kind of insight now, it’s a very useful indicator of the kind of professional you’re developing into.

Aug 19 2019

Evaluator Competencies Series: Self-Awareness and Reflective Thinking

I didn’t write a blog posting in my series last Sunday – the weekend was busy and time got away from me! But it’s now this Sunday night and I’ve got cup of tea and I’m ready to reflect on reflective thinking!

1.7 Uses self-awareness and reflective thinking to continually improve practice.

Often I do my my reflective thinking over a a cup of tea – whether sitting on my own to do some reflective writing, or chatting with colleagues (As an aside, if you want to read some brilliant thoughts on reflective practice, check out Carolyn Camman’s fabulously titled blog posting “The coffee is largely metaphorical“). I’m an external processor and I find that I tend to come up with a lot of my great “a ha!” moments when I write my thoughts down or talk to a friend or colleague. I also don’t have a great memory, so when I have an insight, I need to write it down to cement it in my brain (or the very least, so I can look it up again later.)

Journalling

I write a lot of reflections as I go about my work. Whether I’m collecting data, analyzing data, in a meeting, or whatever activity I might be doing, if I have an “a ha!” moment, I write it in my reflective journal (which for the project I’m currently working on is typed up and saved on a shared drive with the rest of my team’s reflections, as these “a ha!” moments are about the content of the evaluation that we are working on together). A reflection might be about a pattern I’m noticing in the data, or a connection I’m making between different parts of the evaluation, or a surprise that I wasn’t expecting, or thoughts on some of our longer-term evaluation questions. My general rule is “if it’s interesting enough for me to want to tell my team about this cool thing I saw or thought of, it should write it down as a reflection). This improves my practice because it helps me to identify things that are important to the interpretation of the data, which allows me to develop accurate and comprehensive evaluation findings.

I also keep some separate reflections that are more for myself than as part of the evaluation data. For example, since I’m the team manager, if I have reflections that are about my work as a manager, and I might not want to share those with the team right away – especially if I’m trying to work through a challenge or figure out a way to be a better team manager. Some of those reflections might become things that I do want to talk about with my team later, but sometimes I need some time and space to work through stuff first. This helps improve my practice because being an effective leader will help my team be effective in its work.

Team reflections

Speaking of my team, we’ve taken to having group reflection sessions after we complete any big chunk of work where we debrief on:

what worked well
what didn’t work well
how might we have done things better
what can we glean from what worked well/didn’t work well to improve our practice for our next task

These are some pretty standard evaluation type questions, but we’ve definitely been able to continually improve our practice by doing this reflection together.

For example, in our first big round of data collection, we didn’t do nearly enough documentation of our data analysis. And with having a big team of people all working on different pieces of the data analysis, it meant that we had a lot of files that we’d all named in different ways, with our spreadsheets set up in different ways and often not very well labelled. So when it came time to write up our findings, it was quite difficult to find the data we needed, and we sometimes had to reproduce some of the analyses to ensure we had the correct data. So my big lessons learned for future rounds of data collection were:

we needed standardized naming convention that we all used
we needed all steps of analysis clearly documented so that another person could pick up the file and understand exactly what was done (without having to sift through formulas and pivot tables to figure out what it all meant)

These seem like pretty basic things – and they are – but this was the first time for all of us working on a big team. We each had our own individual naming conventions and ways of setting up our analyses in our spreadsheets that had served us well working as individual and what we hadn’t realized was how many different ways people could do the same task! Since the project is being implemented in a phased approached, we are now entering a period of time where our work will be a bit cyclical (collect baseline data for a site, monitoring data at the time of implementation, collect post-implementation data 3-6 months later, and repeat for the next site). And I can see that we are getting better and better each time because we’ve been reflecting on how we do our work and finding ways to be more efficient and more effective.

Another reflection that I shared in a team reflection session recently was something that I think links to the “self-awareness” part of the competency. Working in healthcare, even as a non-clinician, you get exposed to situations and information that can be quite emotional. For example, even when doing a chart audit, you get exposed to stories of serious illnesses/injuries and deaths. Or when interviewing healthcare workers who are exposed to traumatic situations, you also get exposed to those traumatic situations. As human beings, this can bring stuff up for us (like similar illness, injuries, patient journeys, and deaths of loved ones, for example) and it’s important to be kind to ourselves when stuff like this gets to us. I am extremely lucky that I work in a large team made up of kind and caring colleagues, so we know that we can go to each other if we need to debrief, or if today is just not a good day for us to do that particular observation or interview. Being aware of situations that might bring up things for me and being aware of my emotions as I’m experiencing them can help me to manage those, ask for help when I need it, and thus help to ensure that they don’t negatively effect the work. It can also help me to be empathetic to my colleagues and the people I interact with as I do my work.

In addition to reflection with my team of evaluators at work, I am also part of a co-op inquiry group that meets monthly to reflect on a particular topic (for us, it’s “boundaries in evaluation”) and that has been an amazing experience to hear the reflections of a group of evaluators from different sectors and locations – I have left every meeting having expanded on ideas I’ve been having and having learned new ideas or perspectives from my colleagues that have resonated with me.

Teaching

Teaching is a fantastic opportunity to reflect. Whenever I prepare to teach an evaluation course, I’m dedicating time to stepping back and thinking about the big picture of evaluation – what it is and how to do it well. I find it also brings me back to the basics and it gives me the opportunity to think about whether there are ways that can improve what I’m doing. I use a lot of storytelling and examples when I teach – I’ve had many students tell me that they really appreciate that I do that because I tell them “what really happens, as opposed to what the textbooks tell you it’s going to be like”. But it also helps me because, again, it gives me an opportunity to think about how I’ve done my work, how it links to concepts, theories, standards, etc. and how I might do my work in the future.

In addition to getting back to basics, I also like to tell students about whatever the “hot topics” are in the field at the time, which means that I have to keep abreast of what the hot topics are, and typically do a bit of research to be well versed enough in the topic to discuss it with the class. This is an opportunity for me to identify gaps in my knowledge and do some learning.

Another aspect of teaching that I think is reflective is that students tend to ask really great questions. And since they are coming from a different perspective, sometimes those questions are things that I haven’t thought about before, which forces to me to reflect situations from a different angle. Sometimes they ask questions that I do not know the answer to – when that happens, I tell them that I’ll go do some research and get back to them. This links to that notion of self-awareness – knowing the limits of my knowledge, having the confidence to say “I don’t know that right now, but I will find out”.

Blogging

And finally, this blog is something that I’m using as part of my reflective practice now. I’m glad that I decided to write this blog series on the evaluator competencies as a way to provide some structure and timeline to get me in the habit of reflecting here on a regular basis ¹Last Sunday notwithstanding.. I’m finding it quite useful to spend a bit reflecting on the extend to which I have each of the competencies and areas for each where I can continue to learn and grow.

Image Source:

Pot of tea photo posted on Flickr by Jack with a Creative Commons license.

Footnotes [ + ]

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Last Sunday notwithstanding.

Aug 12 2019

Six things we’ve learned about power

And their implications for evaluation

Power is an integral aspect of social change initiatives. It can shape relationships and enable or constrain the agency and impact of social change actors. Change actors constantly contend with power as they work to advance systems and structural change. But despite its significance, power is often missing from conversations about funding and evaluating social change.

In the past year at Innovation Network, we’ve noticed an increase in the number of nonprofits and funders asking us to help them assess and learn about the power-building efforts of organizations, networks, and movements.

To that end, we’re reviewing academic and practice-based works to better understand power, how it shows up in change ecosystems, and how we can appropriately evaluate it. Here’s what we’ve learned so far.

Lesson 1: Concepts of power are contested.

A constant across the literature is the lack of a common definition of power. Various pieces we’ve read describe power in turn as “sociologically amorphous,” “perpetually contested,” “polymorphous,” with a virtual “confetti of definitions and theories.”

So this wouldn’t be a real piece about power without first giving the usual disclaimer that definitions of power are contested, overwrought, and evolving.

If you’ve ever had a conversation with anyone about power, you’ve likely experienced this. I’ve personally found myself in discussions with people about power where it becomes immediately apparent that we’re talking past each other. While some people want to talk about structural types of power, others will talk about power building, and others still about power dynamics.

Implications for evaluation: If we want to assess power and power building, its critical to understand that definitions of power are numerous, and people will likely show up to the evaluation process with different understandings of power.

So how do we prioritize the varying definitions and concepts? We believe centering community and social change actors’ definitions and understandings of power will be critical. Community organizers, advocates, and movement builders have grappled with power and power building long before it became buzzy in the philanthropic and evaluation sectors. There is a lot we can learn from social change actors about power.

Lesson 2: Power is dynamic and multidimensional.

The lack of shared definition of power underscores that power is dynamic and multidimensional.

Academics and practitioners have identified countless ways that power manifests in the world. John Gaventa, an influential theorist of power, created the powercube in an effort to identify the different levels, spaces, and forms of power:

Levels: Refers to the different levels where power is exercised, from the individual, family, organization levels up to the local, state, national, and global levels.
Spaces: Refers to the spaces where power is exercised for decision-making and action. Gaventa describes spaces as being closed, invited, or claimed.
Forms: Refers to the different ways power shows up, including its visible, hidden, or invisible forms (more on that in Lesson 3).

Others have built on these levels, spaces, and forms to identify different expressions of power (Lesson 5) and different types of power (Lesson 6).

The levels, spaces, forms, and expressions of power are not static. These dimensions of power are interrelated and dynamic, shifting and evolving over time. Gaventa described it this way: “Each dimension of the powercube is constantly interrelating with the other, constantly changing the synergies of power. For instance, what happens at global decision-making levels can affect the spaces available for participation and engagement; which spaces are available affect the forms of power within them.”

Implications for evaluation: All systems change efforts exist in complex ecosystems of power. These ecosystems include a diverse range of social change actors, their opposition, and the decisionmakers, institutions, and systems they seek to influence. Power shapes the relationships between these actors and their ability to advance their interests. Power can take many forms and show up in countless different ways.

To address this complexity, we believe evaluating power and power building will require a developmental approach. Evaluators of power will need to be ready for shifting power dynamics and to identify and assess new forms and sources of power as they emerge.

Lesson 3: Examining power can help us understand the structural forces that enable or constrain change efforts.

Power over is the longest-standing, most recognized expression of power. This concept sees power as being fundamentally repressive and negative, all about domination and control. Some of the earliest theorists described power this way. In recent years, some theorists have started taking a more nuanced view of power over. They recognize that while power can be negative and repressive, dominant social structures and historical, social, and cultural forces can exert power in a way that is beneficial to social change efforts.

Either way, power over underscores that dominant historical and structural forces can have a powerful influence on the relationships, capacity, and impact of change efforts.

In 1974, Stephen Lukes provided one of the most oft-cited theories of power over in his book, Power: A Radical View. In this book, Lukes introduced the “three faces” of power over — visible, hidden, and invisible.

Visible: Visible power refers to power that is publicly visible or that takes place in formal decisionmaking spaces. Arenas for visible power include laws, legislatures, and courts.
Hidden: Hidden power is exercised by powerholders to maintain their power and privilege by systematically excluding people and their interests from decisionmaking tables and processes. Hidden power can manifest in how issues are framed and how institutions are structured.
Invisible: Invisible power shapes people’s worldviews, ideologies, and sense of agency. Powerholders may exercise invisible power by developing dominant narratives and tailoring the information available to the public to hide the existence and sources of injustice.

Lukes’s three faces of power have gotten a lot of play in social change spaces and have shown up in the work of other organizations, including Just Associates and the Grassroots Policy Project. These organizations have used the three faces of power to encourage social change organizations to take a more holistic view of the forces that facilitate or inhibit social change.

Implications for evaluation: By examining and mapping the structural forces that exercise power over a change ecosystem, we can better understand the contextual factors, systems, and structures that enable or constrain social change. This understanding makes evaluation findings more valid and useful, by deepening our understanding of which power-building approaches work under what conditions.

Lesson 4: Power building is at the heart of grassroots-led change efforts and can help us understand the progress and success of change initiatives.

Power doesn’t just lie in social structures and institutions, social change actors also have the ability to build and exercise their own power.

Gene Sharp, one of the world’s leading thinkers on nonviolent action, was a big believer in the social view of power. This idea emphasizes that the power of decisionmakers and institutions depends on the consent and cooperation of ordinary people. People can wield power by collectively giving or withdrawing their support for systems, institutions, and decisionmakers.

The idea that power lies in the hands of the public is one that is essential to grassroots-led change efforts like community organizing and social movements. Grassroots efforts flip the script on who is the powerholder, stressing that power lies not just in formal institutions and visible decisionmakers, but also in the general public.

For that reason, power building is often fundamental to the theory of change of grassroots-led change efforts. Building long-term power is often not just a means to an end but a critical end in itself.

Implications for evaluation: Power building is an important lens through which we can view the progress and success of change efforts. Assessing power building will require us to think differently about how success is defined. Contrary to what some might think, policy and systems change is not the end goal of all social change. “Winning” is also about building and maintaining long-term power in communities. How would it change our understanding and assessment of social change efforts if we saw them through a lens of power building?

Lesson 5: Power to, power with, and power within are three expressions of power building that provide us with a starter framework for assessing power.

In A New Weave of Power, People, and Politics, Lisa VeneKlasen and Valerie Miller made the case that power can be used as a positive force to advance affirmative change in society. They outlined three core expressions of power building: power to, power with, and power within.

Power to (power as capacity): Most of the time when people talk about power building, power to is what they’re talking about. Power to refers to your ability to exercise agency or, as Martin Luther King Jr. said, “Power, properly understood, is nothing but the ability to achieve purpose. It is the strength required to bring about social, political, and economic change.” Having power to means you have the capacity, resources, and opportunities to advance your interests.
Power with (power as relationships): Power with emphasizes that relationships are a significant source of power. Power with is about building collective strength across varying interests and stakeholders. Because long-term change often requires collective action, power with is a critical form of power building for social change initiatives.
Power within (power as individual agency): Power within is about developing a person’s individual agency, self-empowerment, and self-worth. Some social change efforts, such as community organizing, seek to build power within the individual community members and leaders they serve and organize. In transformative organizing practice, for instance, social transformation is seen as being intertwined with personal transformation; social transformation is only possible when individuals have a sense of self-worth and individual agency.

Implications for evaluation: The three expressions of power building have helped us better understand the forms of power social change actors can build. We believe they provide us with a starter framework for identifying and assessing power building in social change efforts that can be adapted to the specific interventions we are called to evaluate.

Lesson 6: Governing, people, and narrative power are three common types of power building that advance structural change.

Some social change organizations and practitioners have started to identify, define, and operationalize the types of power building that are needed to advance change. Three power-building concepts have emerged that seem to be common across different organizations and change efforts: governing/governance power, people power, and narrative power.

Governing Power/Independent Political Power: Although they have different names, governing power and independent political power (IPP) have similar definitions and elements. Both are about building power to govern based on the values and priorities of grassroots communities. Governing power is about building political infrastructure and capacity that is independent from the dominant political parties. It goes beyond policy and electoral change to advance structural change and influence narratives, norms, and values. Some select resources about governing power/IPP:

People Power: Similar to the social view of power discussed above, people power emphasizes that power comes from the engagement of ordinary people. People power is often about building power with an active, grassroots base. However, in the context of social movements especially, people power is also about building power to build, mobilize, and sustain large-scale public support. Select resources:

Narrative Power: Narrative power is fundamentally about the power to transform and hold dominant public narratives and ideologies and to limit the influence of opposing narratives. Rashad Robinson from Color of Change sums it up nicely: “Narrative power is not merely the presence of our issues or issue frames on the front page. Rather, it is our ability to make that presence powerful — to be able to achieve presence in a way that forces change in decision-making and in the status quo.” Select resources:

Implications for evaluation: While change initiatives do build other types of power, governing, people, and narrative power are often present in community organizing, electoral organizing, advocacy, and social movements. Given the contested nature of power concepts, we are finding that having some definition about these types of power building (and having a set of resources to draw on) provide a helpful starting place for discussions about power with funders, evaluators, and social change actors.

As more funders, organizers, and advocates start paying attention to power, it will become an increasingly important competency for evaluators who assess structural change efforts to know how power shows up in change ecosystems, how it is built, and how to appropriately measure. Over the next year, we’re building on these learnings to develop a set of resources for evaluating power building. Stay tuned!

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Aug 05 2019

Evaluator Competencies Series: Transparency

1.6 Is committed to transparency in all aspects of the evaluation.

transparent adjective
trans·par·ent

a: free from pretense or deceit : FRANK

b: easily detected or seen through : OBVIOUS

c: readily understood

d: characterized by visibility or accessibility of information especially concerning business practices

Merriam-Webster Dictionary

To reflect on this competency, I decided to see what the definition of “transparency” is. I usually think of transparency in the sense of “sharing all the information”, which is a bit more extreme than one can actually be in an evaluation. For example, we have an ethical responsibility to maintain confidentiality for participants in our evaluations when they want their identity to be kept confidential. Sometimes we are working with proprietary information that the organization requires to be kept confidential. So as with so many things, being “transparent” requires a bit of nuanced thinking.

I used to work with someone who talked about her role in a communication chain in a hierarchical organization, where information came from the top and was cascaded down through the org chart. Sometimes, information was only allowed to be shared to a certain level – say, it could go from the VPs to the EDs to the Directors, but the Directors were not allowed to share it with the Managers – at least not yet. And this person’s (who was in a Director role) approach to it was to tell their managers “I do know this information but I am not allowed to share it with you at this time.” And then they would give the reason (e.g., “Leadership is planning to do X, but until it is signed off by the board of directors, it’s not official and so they do not want put this information out broadly in case the board does not sign off it on, as it could cause confusion.”). And then they would make a commitment to tell their managers as soon as they were allowed to. This approach stuck with me, because it was honest (they weren’t saying “I don’t know this information” when they really did know, which is an approach I’d seen others take in these types of situations) and it was as informative as it was possible to be given the situation – giving a reason why they weren’t allowed to share the information at that time, rather than just saying “I’m not allowed to say”. I find that not giving a reason usually results in people coming up with their own theories about what information is being kept hidden – and that ends up causing rumours and confusion. So I think that this (sharing what you can and being honest about what you can’t share and why) can be a useful approach to being transparent. Of course, there can be good reasons or bad reasons for not wanting to share information, so I think we also have a responsibility to think critically about the reasons why an organization might not want to share and to push back in situations where appropriate (e.g., if an organization wants to suppress evaluation findings because they think it makes them look bad, as I talked about last week, I’d push back on that).

I was interested to see that the definition of “transparent” isn’t just about making information accessible, but also making information “readily understood” and “free from pretence or deceit”. These are things I can get behind. Obviously, a credible evaluation should not include anything deceitful, but I think making information “readily understood” is something that is sometimes overlooked. There are so many ways that we can exclude people from evaluation by not being “readily understood” – whether that be by the way we design our evaluations, the ways we recruit participants, the methods we use, or the way the report the findings. There seems to be a lot of interest in the evaluation world around data visualization – i.e., presenting data in ways that actually convey the meaning of them. This is something that my team and I are actively working to get better at. And there’s interest in alternative reporting formats – i.e., not just handing over a 200 page report, but actually thinking about ways to report evaluation findings that work for those who are interested in those findings.

Something I see spoken about less often, but that I think about a lot, is the use of language. I’m a bit fan of clear, simple language when writing ¹Though I will admit that I have a tendency to be wordy, I write complicated sentences, and I overuse footnotes to an excessive degree. because I think that if I’m writing something, I want people to understand it. I mean, isn’t that why I’m writing it? I try to avoid jargon (or at the very least explain any jargon that I use) and prefer to pick a simple word over an obscure one. But I often see writing that is full of jargon, and unnecessarily large and obscure words. Part of me thinks that people write this way in an attempt to look intelligent. And I have seen situations where people use jargon as a way to try to cover up that they don’t know what they are talking about (which becomes evident as soon as you start asking questions like “What do you mean when you use the word X?”) An even more cynical part of me thinks that people write like this in order to exclude other people, by making the knowledge they are ostensibly trying to “share” non-understandable by “others” who don’t have the same training/background as them. After all, knowledge is power and keeping knowledge away from others by making it not understandable to others is a way of holding onto power. Which to me, is another reason to make the effort to make my writing as clear and easy to understand as possible.

At any rate, I hadn’t really thought about making information “readily accessible” as being part of “transparency” before, but it makes sense when I think about it.

Image Sources:

Orange glass winged butterfly posted on Flickr by Alias 0591 with a Creative Commons license.
Black glass winged butterfly posted on Flickr by Mary Shattock with a Creative Commons license.

Footnotes [ + ]

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Though I will admit that I have a tendency to be wordy, I write complicated sentences, and I overuse footnotes to an excessive degree.

cplysy

1.8 Engages in professional networks and activities and contributes to the evaluation profession and its community of practice.

Involvement with CES

Teaching

Mentoring

Social Media

6. Know your value

1.7 Uses self-awareness and reflective thinking to continually improve practice.

Journalling

Team reflections

Teaching

Blogging

And their implications for evaluation

Lesson 1: Concepts of power are contested.

Lesson 2: Power is dynamic and multidimensional.

Lesson 3: Examining power can help us understand the structural forces that enable or constrain change efforts.

Lesson 4: Power building is at the heart of grassroots-led change efforts and can help us understand the progress and success of change initiatives.

Lesson 5: Power to, power with, and power within are three expressions of power building that provide us with a starter framework for assessing power.

Lesson 6: Governing, people, and narrative power are three common types of power building that advance structural change.

1.6 Is committed to transparency in all aspects of the evaluation.

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