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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.