carolyncamman

I can’t recall for certain, but I think the first person I “had coffee” with in a professional capacity was my friend Brian Hoessler, a fellow evaluation consultant and now my co-host on our evaluation-themed podcast, Eval Cafe. And of course the podcast is all about, as we say in our intro, “informal chats on evaluation-related topics. The kind you might overhear a your favourite coffee shop, if your favourite coffee shop was frequented by evaluators.” I guess we really set the tone with that first conversation!

When I moved to Vancouver, I didn’t know anyone here. I hadn’t done much networking outside of Saskatchewan and was mostly a quiet observer at the CES and AEA conferences I’d attended. Fortunately Brian had been more social and pointed me at Sarah Farina, so I sent her an email, stiffly titled, “looking for professional evaluation contacts in Vancouver”. We were sitting down for coffee the next week. I remember being struck by how easy it was, reaching out to a total stranger and within a week having a conversation about the local evaluation landscape and where a newcomer might look to get involved.

After that coffee, Sarah put me in touch with Diana Tindall who was looking for volunteers to help out with planning the 2015 CESBC one-day conference. Michelle Naimi was also on the planning committee and she and I went on to co-found the Student & Emerging Evaluator Network (SEEN), organizing events and opportunities for new evaluators in Vancouver, including a monthly meet-up at, you guessed it, a coffee shop. I’ve now worked with Diana and Michelle many times in various capacities and spent a lot of time in coffee shops with both of them.

Sensing a trend?

Somewhere along the line, the coffee shop connections have become a cornerstone of my professional practice. This year in particular, it’s gone from meeting up with someone once or twice a month to once or twice a week (or more!), according to the rich historical data source that is my Google calendar. Even my vacations become an opportunity to grab coffee with someone new (when I was down in San Francisco this April I got to spend a couple of hours talking about evaluation and coaching with Betsy Baum Block at a coffee shop in Berkeley—perfect vacation activity! Also pleasingly alliterative). Last week, I had four separate coffee engagements, including spending my whole Saturday in eight consecutive hours of conversation, starting in a coffee shop on Commercial Drive and ending up in another one in Hastings-Sunrise (with a three hour yarn-store-adventure-and-chat with my sister in between).

I meet with people I know well and see regularly, I meet with people I’ve just met or only talked to online. I have a few “standing” coffee dates and a lot that come up spontaneously. Sometimes I ask and sometimes I’m the person getting the email with a subject line like, “looking for professional evaluation contacts in Vancouver” (except less awkward than that). Sometimes the “coffee shop” is a zoom room, occasionally it’s a pub or a bar or someone’s front porch. Sometimes I’m close to home, other times I’m venturing out to New West or North Van or hopping on a ferry, island-bound. Rarely is coffee actually consumed, at least by me (too much caffeine), but the coffee is largely metaphorical anyway. It’s about the connections, and, increasingly, the conversations.

Conversation is at the heart of it for me. There’s definitely a conventional networking component to it as well and I’m always aware of how work opportunities can emerge unexpectedly through these connections (almost all of the work I do right now has come from a “somebody introduced me to somebody who introduced me to somebody” type of situation). But the conversations themselves are key.

One of the things I’ve learned about myself this year is that I think in conversation, in dialogue. I was surprised, because “reflective practice” always signified to me something quiet and peaceful—walking alone in nature, sitting quietly in meditation, or writing bent over a journal. But when someone asked me to describe my reflective practice I realized that it looks like pacing around my office or my apartment and talking to myself. Occasionally I will write things on post-it notes, stick them to the wall, and then carry on a conversation with the post-it notes. (This is a lifelong habit. Once I was talking to myself while out walking and gesticulated so much I accidentally hailed a cab.)

I wasn’t sure if this counted as “reflective practice” until someone shared a quote with me from the feminist economic geographers who co-published under the name, “J.K. Gibson-Graham”. The quote was:

“… our seldom-inspected common sense posits a separation—or even an opposition—between thought, understood as cerebral reflection, and action, understood as embodied engagement with the world. This makes it hard to see thinking itself as a kind of action—that we are doing thinking, in other words, touching the world and being touched by it and in the process things (and we) are changing.” (A Postcapitalist Politics)

It was a wonderful observation and broke open my assumptions about what did and did not count as reflection (or as action), and gave me a new way to appreciate why my particular reflective practice works for me—because it helps me break down the artificial distinction between my mental processes and my embodied experiences. For me things live differently when I speak them out loud. Who hasn’t had the experience of, “Wow, that sounded better in my head”? Putting it out there lets me engage with it, interact with it, disagree and argue with it, be inspired by it. To paraphrase the above, “to touch the world and be touched by it and, in the process, change”.

I think this is the core of any reflective practice, really. Whether it’s journalling or nature walks or quiet contemplation. All of these practices are meant to create opportunities for another kind of interaction, through a change of scenery, seeing words on a page, or finding the space inside to hear things in a different way.

Where do coffee shop conversations come into it again?

Complex adaptive systems thrive on a diversity of inputs, a source of the variations that allow for adaptive resilience and flexibility. Talking to myself (or my post-its, or my whiteboard, or the book I’m reading) is part of how I inject a little variety into my own system. I don’t know exactly what I’m going to say until I say it, or quite how it’s going to land with me until I hear it. Letting my harvest of post-its accumulate on the wall for months becomes a source of unexpected inspiration when I am reminded of something or see it in a new light on a different day.

But it only goes so far. I may contain multitudes but those multitudes have a lot in common with each other. And while I’m pretty good at taking myself by surprise (I used to play whole games of cribbage against myself when I was a kid and learned to “forget” what I knew and operate as if I didn’t hold all the cards), there’s nothing like the true mystery of interacting with another person. Even if we have a topic picked out in advance, I rarely go into these conversations with any particular goal beyond discovery and relationship-building, and I’m always surprised and delighted and stimulated by what happens and what comes up. And it’s usually, as far as I know, reciprocal. Good conversations are collaborative and co-creative. It matters who I’m talking with—different people mean different conversations.

It’s also resource of integration and embodiment for me. I’ve learned that it’s not just enough to write my thoughts down. The written word is a temporary holding space, an extension of my working memory. The true archive is me, my person and my personality. I don’t truly know something until I don’t have to hold it deliberately in my head and my hands anymore, but have it available to me in the moment that I need it. Conversations become a rehearsal space for my being—what do I say? What do I think about? What do I hear? What do I notice? What do I discover? What do I remember? Anyone who’s had a conversation with me lately probably heard me utter something like, “Oh, I was just talking with someone the other day about this, and…” at least ten times. Every conversation reinforces the associative network of embodied knowledge that I am weaving into myself. (And that’s not even counting the more traditional, “Oh, I just read this the other day…”, which has always been a constant.)

And on that metaphor, on the relationship-building side of it, it’s more than just fixing myself as a well-connected node in a network, it also feels like I’m weaving together and reinforcing the fabric of my community. I always want all the cool people I know to know each other and to share their brilliance with the world and a lot of these conversations result in contact referrals and introductions (both ways). If I had one frustration with the coffee shop conversations it’s that I’m always thinking at some point or another, “Oh, so-and-so should be here for this!”, and truly there isn’t a coffee shop big enough for what is effectively a friend-convention that I want to throw. I am trying to level up to dinner parties at least. (Also even as I’m writing this, I’m realizing, “Oh, this is so obviously the trajectory of the four-fold practice that is the basis of the Art of Hosting. Of course.” Also, this is why folks should check out The Art of Hosting. Tell them Carolyn sent you!!)

It wasn’t always this way for me. I’m not joking when I describe myself as “a shy, socially anxious introvert who drastically overcompensated”. Once when I was a teenager I managed to eek out five minutes of small talk with someone waiting at the same bus stop and it was such a remarkable and unprecedented accomplishment for me that I positively glowed all the way home. I truly believe that talking about the weather is humanity’s greatest invention (even greater than post-it notes). I don’t know what changed exactly. I think I just finally became more curious than I was shy. And it was easier than I thought it was going to be when I stopped trying to be so very smart about it and got humble.

The coffee is a metaphor and the coffee shop is too. The conversations have percolated* into nearly every facet of my work. The podcast has been both an invitation for conversation and a platform to share that conversation with a wider audience and have new conversations because of it. (And, let me tell you, there’s no better ice-breaker at a conference than, “Do you want to be on my podcast?”) Twitter has become an important space of conversation for me. Though conversing in tweets can be a little fragmented and chaotic, one of these 280-character flurries led to the forming of a co-operative inquiry group of evaluators (we’ve been meeting monthly to have generative conversations around the topic of “boundaries in evaluation”). This blog is also an attempt to be in conversation in another way, though I find it trickier and am trying to bring in more conversational elements to make it easier. The ability to be in good conversation is a core evaluative practice for me as well, from the big boardroom meetings to the casual hallway chats. In fact, especially the casual chats—that’s where the magic is.

It will be interesting to see how my coffee shop conversational practices shift (or don’t) as time goes on. Right now they feel absolutely integral, as much as any other professional development practice I’m engaged in. It was an absolutely giddying realization that “hanging out with cool people in coffee shops” is a totally valid and awesome part of my job description. Now, to remember to save the receipts.

(Also, if you think I use a lot of parenthetical asides while I’m writing, you should experience firsthand some of the exciting “thought journey” detours I go on in person, which a good 70-80% of the time will reconnect back with the original point, or at least end up in verdant pastures of inspiration in their own right, hopefully. Conversational off-roading.)

(It is possible that mostly talking to myself and therefore needing to hold up two sides of a conversation at once has instilled some terrible habits, I mean, interesting quirks!)

(I’m done now.)

*Yes, I forced the pun a little and, no, I don’t regret it.

This blog post has been jointly written by Carolyn Camman and Art Assoiants. We connected through the Canadian Evaluation Society’s Mentoring Initiative in 2018 and this post is our way of sharing some of the learnings from our journey together as mentor (Carolyn) and mentee (Art) over the last year.

To write this post, we did a sort of self/mutual interview. We chose some questions for ourselves, wrote up our responses separately, and then shared them back with each other. You can read the questions and our respective reflections below.

Why did you get involved in mentorship and what were your best hopes for it?

ART: I got involved in mentorship for numerous reasons. First, I believe that some of the most effective learning happens through relationship. Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development comes to mind. In other words, to be with and around people who do something you want to do, but who are more skilled at it and are willing to help your developmental process, is what I sought in the context of evaluation. Second, I wished to be supported in my journey, recognizing that there was a lot I didn’t know and a whole lot more in which I was unconsciously incompetent. I wished to connect with Carolyn to bear witness to my process, help me think through and pull insights from what I was doing, and aid me in becoming aware of and improving my skills and tools. Altogether, I wished to learn quicker and be supported in this learning.

CAROLYN: I got involved in mentoring by accident. I created an account on the CES MI platform because I wanted to be able to describe to folks who asked me about it what the platform was like and how it worked. When I created my account, I checked out some possible mentors, but I didn’t feel a burning need for mentorship at the time, so mostly I forgot about it. I didn’t expect anyone to contact me as a potential mentor. Art wasn’t the first person who got in touch, but he was the first where there seemed to be a genuine alignment of what he was looking for and what I could offer, our expectations of the process, and our schedules. I was candid from the start that I’d never mentored anyone before and didn’t have a lot of experience being mentored myself. I also saw myself as closer to a peer mentor rather than someone who was going to be drawing on decades of practice experience. I remember that Art seemed up for that, that he liked what he’d read in my bio and felt there was an affinity in our interests and approaches to evaluation that stood out from the other potential mentors he’d looked at. I was reassured by the commitment to figure this process out together and looked forward to learning more about how to be a mentor. My best hope for the process was that we would both take something valuable from it, though I wasn’t sure exactly what that was going to be.

What did you find helpful or hindering in the mentorship process?

ART: I found several things helpful in the mentorship process. First, I liked that Carolyn and I discussed our best wishes and preferred approaches during our first conversation together. We also made it explicit that things could change and that we would honour potential shifts in each other’s professional journeys. I liked that Carolyn and I booked our next conversation at the end of the talk we were already having. This ensured we ongoingly kept in touch. I enjoyed being asked reflective and process questions, such as: “What made you want to make that decision? What was the result of that decision?” I appreciated being offered evaluation tools that were appropriate for the situation I was facing. To add, I sought Carolyn out not only for professional fit, but also for proximity. Carolyn lived far away enough from my professional world that few relationships would overlap. In order to be honest about my process, and recognizing that many of the communities to which I was connected professionally were quite intermingled, I wished for someone both close professionally and far enough in distance. I appreciated that they fit perfectly with this wish! On a different note, I found it helpful that Carolyn connected me with other leading practitioners in the fields we were discussing: social innovation, social entrepreneurship, evaluation, design thinking, and the like. I also took notes during our conversations, which, if nothing else, made writing this reflection a much simpler ride. But most of all, I appreciated having space held for my own thoughts. Carolyn allowed me to make sense of my professional journey in terms of skill sets, relationships, and further development.

CAROLYN: One of the most helpful things was the clear setting of expectations early on. Because we’d had that frank conversation, I didn’t feel pressured to deliver some great inspiring wisdom every time. I think that helped me be more genuinely helpful, because I just spoke from my own experience and trusted Art to figure out what was useful to him and what wasn’t. In retrospect, I realize this is a good approach to mentorship regardless of one’s level of experience, and humility and mutual respect are things I look for more intentionally now in the relationships I develop with the people who teach and mentor me.

The most challenging part was probably coordinating long distance and dealing with time zones and schedules and technical difficulties. We tried using a video chat platform to start with, but wifi quality was variable and made focusing on and hearing the conversation difficult. After a while we switched to just an audio connection for the technical stability. I ended up preferring it because I could focus on just listening. I also made things easier for myself by not trying to prepare or do anything fancy, just get on the call and be fully present and trust that I would have something valuable to offer, even if it was just a listening ear and a question or two.

What are your takeaways from the mentorship process?

ART: I have a few thoughts come to mind regarding takeaways. First, mentorship can be a process powerful enough to make or break a person’s professional experience. With Carolyn’s help, I was able to thrive and quickly glean actionable insights from situations that at the moment may have felt ambiguous, beyond control, and overwhelming. Second, I felt it was important to have a conversation about mentorship preferences and style at the get-go. That way, both parties have a sense of what to expect from one another moving forward. It helps to take a moment as a mentee or mentor to think through or write out what these expectations may be for you. Third, it may prove helpful to take notes about the insights you glean from your mentor (and mentee!). This helps consolidate memory to quicker internalize and act on learnings.

CAROLYN: I started to get mentorship-envy! Stepping into a mentoring role for someone else and getting to see the positive benefits of it up close had me thinking about the amount of mentorship in my own life. My training and other experiences I’ve had did not really emphasize the value of supportive and engaged mentorship on this level. Though in reflection I can recognize how several lovely colleagues have, of their own initiative, leaned into mentoring roles for me over the years (for which I’m deeply grateful, even more now), I didn’t entirely grasp the significance of these experiences at the time. So I’ve been inspired to take a closer look at the opportunities for deep mentorship in my life and let those experiences into my life more fully. I also developed a greater respect and appreciation for my own capacity and experience as both an evaluator and mentor. When we started out, I was pretty self-effacing about my experience and what I had to offer as a mentor. While that served me well in some ways, I learned I can balance it with a healthy respect for and confidence in what I do offer.

I also learned how to really let go and listen. Although I’ve worked for a long time to develop my interviewing skills, this took me to another level by letting me commit to just listening to someone and being absolutely present with zero agenda, like writing notes or thinking about analysis or planning the next question. It was relaxing to be in a place where all I needed to do was be in that moment and put all my attention on the person I was listening to, and it highlighted how much self-consciousness I’d been bringing into my listening in other situations and how much of a hindrance that really is. It was also a delight to be present to someone else’s journey of discovery and learning, to notice how Art would respond to the questions I offered, take them in, and go places with them that I’d never imagined, sometimes still thinking of them weeks later on our next call. It was not unlike those moments where a client or stakeholder connects with the data in a deep and totally unexpected way and takes off with it, and you get to sit back and think, “This is so cool. I’m glad I get to be part of this.”

Finally, I took from all of this a deepened commitment to the value of mentoring as a mutual learning and growing experience. It’s not a commitment to be taken lightly and even with a relatively low-intensity approach that we took there’s still a considerable investment of time and energy, but overall it was a joyous experience and something that I intend to carry on with in my practice.

Want to know more about Art?

Art Assoiants is at the tail-end of an MSc in Counselling Psychology. He’s the founder and host of the Let’s Develop Podcast, where he and others explore stories and tools for social change.

Today I was asked to design a meeting outline for a hypothetical scenario in which a group of people needed to winnow down an ambitious list of topics for inclusion in a strategic plan. This was part of a training course I’ve been taking in facilitation (hence being hypothetical), but of course I’ve been in this scenario plenty of times in real life. Only so much time in the day, money in the budget, staff in the organization, energy in the body, etc. Somewhere we have to decide how we’re going to focus resources that are not infinite.

I don’t object to prioritizing in principle, but there was something about this particular assignment that made me recoil and, ultimately, rebel. I refused to accept the premise of the meeting as outlined. In particular, the scenario was designed to suggest some appropriate prioritization criteria within the description of the case, which we were meant to pick up on and include in the meeting outline. But one of the meeting objectives was to come to an “agreed-upon set of criteria” among the participants, which speaks to me to a need to authentically develop the criteria together in the room, collectively, and not come in with a pre-formed list seeking a relatively quick consensus on it.

The scenario also referenced some “strong personalities” who were passionately advocating for the inclusion of topics that the majority did not think were as important, and a need to manage these people so that they did not derail the process. I think this was meant to heighten the emphasis on designing a controlled process that would make sure everyone was on-side about the prioritization scheme before using it to narrow down the topics (which, again, tells me that authentic buy-in to the criteria is critical and should come out of a meaningful development process, not an expedited one). But I’ve been the “strong personality” in the room, trying to point out and advocate for something that others just aren’t interested in or don’t see as important because the implications of it don’t affect their lives the same way. And you can say, “Well, but there’s a difference between someone speaking up about a matter of discrimination or social dysfunction and someone who just won’t let their pet passion or fringe issue go,” but in practice our ability to see that difference is affected by our understanding of the context at hand. If an issue isn’t part of the scope of your experience, either direct or vicarious, how do you make the assessment of whether it’s meaningful or not? How do you avoid catering to the centre of “acceptable experiences”, knowing that the location of the “centre” is skewed by deep-seated social inequities that may be invisible to you? This is how we design structural violence into our meetings and decision-making processes, by making “efficiency” and “effectiveness” our primary goals (i.e., meetings that finish on time and accomplish all the stated objectives) instead of things like “compassion” and “equity”, by letting ourselves be determined first by what is scarce and limited (time, money, attention) instead of what is abundant and limitless (imagination, love, excitement).

I’m not arguing for meetings that run on hugs and fuzzy feelings and never finish on time or accomplish anything. That’s a false dichotomy. We can account for the realistic constraints of our contexts, but do it from a place of having first considered the whole scope of opportunities available to us and what we have to work with. We can shift from starting with questions like, “How do we make sure we do X, Y, and Z tasks within A, B, and C resources?”, to, “What is the most human, powerful, important outcome we can imagine from this process? Okay, how do we work with what we have to support that?”

Here is an example, albeit on a smaller scale. I sat down with a client recently who had a list of agenda items for an upcoming meeting. It was immediately obvious that there were too many items to be covered in the available meeting time without rushing through them and hoping nothing contentious and derailing came up—not a strategy for success. My first impulse was to say, “You need to narrow this down. You can’t do all of it, so pick the most important ones”, but as we talked them through it was clear that all of them were important in their own way. Who were we to be the sole arbiters of which really needed discussion? I’m sure we could have come up with a rationale for including one item but not another, but instead we changed focus. What was the larger purpose for the meeting? How did each of these items connect to that? What was the thing that made them hold together, made each of them an important part of a single, continuous discussion? We saw that one of the items was less of a discussion topic and more of a framing device that could help give coherence to the conversation, and that the rest hung together in a chronological narrative (reflecting on a past event, considering a current issue, planning for future steps). We prioritized the available resources based on the unifying purpose of the meeting, which would keep the conversation around each item in scope and directly related to the items around it, rather than imposing comparative importance on the individual agenda items to sort them in or out.

Someone else I spoke with today gave the example of working with a large and diverse group of people with a wide range of interests to prioritize just a couple of these to be the focus for a larger action campaign, and how painful and difficult the process was of making the group say, “These are all important, but this is MORE important”, especially when all the issues were all clearly interrelated and of deep personal importance. The metaphorical re-frame I offered was that we don’t approach situations like this with the understanding that we’re ranking and deciding amongst topics, but rather that we’re choosing where to enter the river. The river is the river, it’s a continuous entity, but we can choose where we go into it, based on what we’re trying to do and what access opportunities are afforded to us, and know that entering the river at one point doesn’t preclude us from ending up somewhere else along it (in fact, it’s very likely). That doesn’t mean we won’t still have some potentially sticky discussions about where we want to “enter the river” in order to move most effectively toward our common goal, but the conversation then at least truly respects the reality that all of these things are important and that the difference in approach is about strategy, not merit.

Working in the idea that things are interconnected can also open us up to conversations not just about where we enter the river, but how, by looking at the common threads that make all the topics or potential sites of intervention hang together. Instead of saying, “We have limited resources so we need to focus on either working locally in community, or at a municipal level, or a provincial or federal level” or “We have to pick one sector to transform and just do that because it’s too much to look at more than that”, we can ask, “What are the points of connection and commonality across all of these? What is a unifying need that we could speak to? How can we leverage changes across levels or sectors?” It’s not always a trade-off between the edges and the centre if we refuse to accept the premise of that paradigm.

And since I have rivers on the mind, here’s a song to put them on your mind too (and contextualize the post title):

Have you ever had that experience of being really seen? Paid attention to in that deep way where the other person notices things about you that no one else ever seems to, maybe even sees things in you that you didn’t know were there, but now you see them too? Maybe with a therapist, or a romantic partner, or a really sensitive, observant friend or family member? There’s something tingly and terrifying about being seen that way, but also deeply satisfying and rewarding. The pay-off of that vulnerability is intimacy.

When we talk about evaluation being an intimate experience (something I’ve heard several people mention over the last few months and experienced myself), that’s what I think about. Really, evaluation is saying, “I want to see all of you. The parts you love, the parts that make you tremble, the parts you don’t even know are there. I want us to look at them together, and I want to know you inside and out.” When we evaluate, we’re asking the people we work with to be completely open and vulnerable with us about things that matter a lot to them, to lay it all out there for close observation and follow-up commentary and judgement, often for a paying audience. Evaluators are there to see you, to help you see yourself, and help others see you too. Terrifying. And thrilling, in the right context.

I’ve had the chance to talk about intimacy a lot lately with a friend of mine, Erin Clark. Erin is a writer, performer, athlete, and all-around sparkly, amazing person. She has the gift of being an elegant and soulful thinker and you can find out more about how she’s been navigating intimacy in her own life by reading her digital memoir, Love All The Way (not entirely safe for work, I’ll warn you now), and checking out her recent guest appearance on the Free Her Spirit podcast.

When it comes to intimacy, one of the things Erin talks about in the podcast is how people are constantly forcing intimacies on her when they see that she uses a wheelchair. She gives an example of an exchange where a woman in an airport abruptly transitions from asking about outlets to charge her phone to probing Erin about why she’s in the wheelchair and whether she’s experienced some kind of trauma. Here’s what Erin said about this kind of interaction:

“It’s a very loaded and violating exchange that happens so frequently it becomes mundane, which is very weird. … A lot of the heartbreak I experience, or the struggle for me in having a disability, comes down to intimacies being forced on me so frequently that it shuts down my ability to feel intimacies, so that strangers are having conversations with me that only lovers should, and people are carrying me or touching me or taking me over in ways that only people I’ve developed that trust with, who’ve earned that, should. But because it feels so casual to people, so right to them, so, you know, allowed and permissed, that there aren’t a lot of ways for me to maintain those boundaries and protect my chosen intimacies that don’t involve being shut down completely.”

(You should definitely listen to the whole episode, or read the transcript, because Erin has magical things to say about being a sex icon, a world-champion pole-dancer and a paragliding pilot in Spain, and her insights into experiencing life through risk, desire, and intuition. Erin is my #LivingInComplexity icon. You can find out more about her by following her on Instagram, checking out her website, and also by reading her soon-to-be-published memoir about love, sex, risk, family, intimacy, travel, adventure, self-discovery, and so much more. I’m halfway through reading a draft of it and it’s already made me cry a lot, write poetry, and dream up a list of fabulous risks I can take.)

The context that Erin is talking about isn’t the same as program evaluation, but it still got me thinking. Evaluation is an intimate experience, so there are implications for how little autonomy organizations and communities have to enter into it authentically. Even for evaluations that aren’t explicitly mandated or when participation in evaluation processes is meant to be consent-based, there can be a sense of, “Well, we need to do it because it’s what’s expected. We don’t really have a choice. It’s not up to us. This is how the system works.” And the system works that way because of assumptions made about how to manage social services and distribute funding and resources—that accountability and efficacy of services and policies comes from externally-imposed ‘objective’ scrutiny and surveillance (whether from funders to programs, or service providers to service users), and not the fostering of authentic, mutual relationships founded on trust and respect. (Even though a lot of us working in this area know that the people closest to and most invested in the thing being evaluated are the best-positioned for informed and insightful critique of it and the most motivated to hold it to the highest standard of meaningful impact.)

Real intimacy isn’t possible when you aren’t allowed to have control over your boundaries and your privacy. Real trust doesn’t grow in a culture of mistrust. The most accountability is demanded from those with the least structural power, dragged upward instead of flowing downward, and evaluation is under constant pressure to be co-opted into maintaining this arrangement of who is scrutinized and who does the scrutinizing, for which the quality and meaning of our work suffers. Vulnerability is a gift, and gifts have to be given, not taken. Like Erin says, we are supposed to earn our intimacies, not assume we are entitled them, and we do all kinds of harm when we do.

It’s a bad system, but there’s promise here too. When we do find ways to foster the conditions for meaningful, enthusiastic, consensual participation in evaluation, when we collectively resist, disrupt, and subvert the power dynamics that rear up in so many places throughout the process, when we make spaces for each other and ourselves to “heal from the trauma of being judged” (thank you forever for that phrase, Chris—it’s definitely going on a t-shirt), then we can participate in the magic of intimacy in evaluation. We can let down our guards and set our masks aside for a little while (that means us too, fellow evaluators), and share our scars and fears, hopes and delights, questions and insights, and dive into discovery together.

Blogging is hard. I’m not sure why I find it such a struggle, though I know I’m not the only one who does. I marvel at the folks who seem to be able to write quickly, eloquently, and insightfully (I can usually manage 1-2 at a time but rarely all three). But I’m choosing to assume that blogging ability is a learnable skill so I keep practicing and looking for ways to make it easier on myself.

One thing I’m trying is to look for synergies between blogging and other creative work that I find easier, to see if I can borrow some of that momentum and inspiration. In this case, that’s the podcast I’ve been producing with my good friend and co-conspirator Brian Hoessler (of Strong Roots Consulting) for the last couple of years. (If you haven’t checked it out yet, the podcast is called Eval Cafe and it’s semi-regular series of casual conversations about things we find interesting in evaluation, frequently with guests! To quasi-quote our introduction, “it’s the kind of thing you might overhear in your local coffee shop if your local coffee shop were frequented by evaluators”.)

(Here is some fun tangential trivia about me and Brian: we have no idea how we met each other. It was definitely in Saskatoon and probably circa 2012-2013, but other than that, neither of us can remember a specific point in time of meeting. We just appeared in each other’s lives as buddies, and the rest is history! There was a coffee shop hang-out early on though.)

Working on a podcast is all kinds of fun and delightful and it gives me a really good excuse to randomly reach out to interesting people who are doing and saying cool things and invite them onto the show. A perfect example of that is back in January I read an AMAZING article on Better Evaluation LINK, called, “What does it mean to ‘un-box’ evaluation?”, by Jade Maloney, an Australia-based consultant doing evaluation and design work in the disability sector. The article is part of the lead-up for the 2019 Australian Evaluation Society conference and it explores their conference theme of ‘Evaluation Un-boxed’, which is officially my favourite conference theme ever (and there have been some good ones lately!). I loved the article so much that Brian and I reached out to Jade right away and recorded a fabulous episode where we all dug into that theme even more.

Definitely go and check out the article as well as the write-up of the theme on conference website and our podcast episode, ‘What’s in the mystery box?’, while you’re at it (don’t forget to scroll down to see what we link in the show notes as well). And also the follow-up article that Jade wrote after we recorded the episode!

We covered a lot of ground in that conversation, but there was one part that I’ve really wanted to go back to because it spoke to something that’s been on my mind quite a lot lately, which is the idea that evaluation is (or can be) a gift.

Here’s what Jade wrote in her first article:

As evaluators, we see evaluation as a gift. We see evaluation’s potential to support effective policy and program design, guide ongoing program development, provide insight into on-the-ground practice, and identify whether intended (and any unintended) outcomes are being realised. We see how evaluation can support better public policy and, thereby, better individual, social and environmental outcomes.

I was so excited to see Jade writing about this, because a few weeks earlier I’d scribbled some notes in my reflection journal along the same lines and was glad to see I wasn’t alone in thinking about it. This is what I wrote and shared again on the podcast:

If I believe evaluation expertise is a gift that can be given, that has three implications for my practice: 1) I have something of value to give. Thinking of something as a gift means assuming it is not worthless. 2) Good gifts are thoughtful and personalized. They are selected and given based on a judgement call that they will be meaningful, useful, and valuable to the recipient. They are also presented in a way that emphasizes the assumption of their value. Bad gifts are generic, impersonal, and presented without thought or attention to how they will be received. 3) While you can prepare a gift to be received well, you cannot assume control over what happens with it once given. It is up to the recipient to decide what it means to them and what they will do with it.

It was that last thought there that really caught me—this recognition that while we might try to influence it, we can’t control how people receive what we do and that’s the way it’s supposed to be. I may work really hard for an evaluation (design or process or deliverable) to be good and take a lot of pride and satisfaction in doing what I do well, and I might do everything I can for it to be useful and used well, but gifts are meant to be given, and giving something means letting go of it. I don’t know that I felt especially possessive of my evaluation work or projects before now, but I definitely didn’t think of them with that degree of… I’m grasping for a word here and the closest one to me at the moment is “liberation”.

There’s an ephemerality in doing evaluation work as an external consultant, which I’d noticed but hadn’t thought through all the implications of. Paying attention to it now is shifting my thinking in subtle ways. It makes me feel even more strongly about the centrality of relationships and collaboration in the work. It nudges my thinking about responsibility, what I am responsible and not responsible for, and reminds me that the people I’m working with are partners who share the responsibility for how evaluation is used, rather than it being my burden to carry alone. It moves me further away from that expert-driven model. It also reinforces the importance of asking, “Who will be using these findings? And how?”, to make sure the gift is given widely and to those who will use it well and be generous themselves. Acknowledging that I don’t control what is done with a gift doesn’t erase my responsibilities in giving it. If anything it heightens them.

I can’t control how evaluation is used, but I can make damn sure that if I give a gift, I’m giving it well, giving it in a way that reflects the value it’s meant to have. If bad gifts are generic, impersonal and presented thoughtlessly, then good gifts are meaningful, personalized, and presented with care and attention. That doesn’t always mean fanfare and fireworks and big glitzy reports that are designed up the wazoo. Some of the best gifts I’ve received have been ones that were just handed to me, a book with a special inscription inside that made it clear it was chosen for me with love and intention or a something small given with warmth and a smile. The key is that it’s a gift that you know is meant for you with thought to what will make it meaningful and useful for you, in what it is and how it’s given. In evaluation we already know that this is important. It’s the reason we care about utilization-focused evaluation and have embraced data visualization and effective reporting strategies. This is just a further reminder for me to keep it personal and personalized. Heck, somebody out there might even want and need the 400-page wordy tome of a report (after all, some of us like socks for Christmas!), though I’m probably not the person to give that particular gift.

So if evaluation can be a gift, if it can be given in a way that is meaningful and useful to someone, then that means it has value and it’s okay to think of it that way. I worry about that sometimes. I ask myself, “Do I really have something to offer here? Is this helpful? Is it doing anything good?” Sometimes evaluation feels like a burden, a challenge, a distraction, a threat, a shadow, or just a very tall mountain to climb. And it can be all of those things too, but it’s still a gift. It’s the gift of permission, time, space, and a way to ask just those kinds of questions—“Is this helping? Is this good?”—and learn something about that.

Just writing this and thinking about evaluation as a valuable gift that deserves to be treated that way in how we do it brings me right back around again to that question of, “Who gets given this gift? Who is it for? Personalized and thoughtfully chosen and presented for whom?” Any time there is distribution of a valuable resource, it becomes important to ask about and examine the equity of that distribution, and these are questions I’m pushing myself to always ask.

I’m happy to report that this is one of the faster blog posts I’ve written. Yay for building on podcast inspiration! And with 19-going-on-20 episodes posted, maybe I’ll even make a regular blogger out of myself yet. (Do not hold me to this.)

Speaking of podcasts (and gifts), here are some of the ones I’m finding the most enlivening and enlightening right now, and maybe you’ll enjoy them too!

• MEDIA INDIGENA – Rick Harp leads a vibrant weekly roundtable on current affairs from Indigenous perspectives

• Secret Feminist Agenda – Hannah McGregor furthers a nefarious feminist agenda with a host of fabulous guests

• The Good Ancestor Podcast – Layla Saad connects with culture-shapers and change-makers to find out what makes a good ancestor

• Living Myth – Michael Meade draws links between current affairs in troubling times with timeless, mythic stories