Complexity -- it's everywhere we look. If you're working to engage communities and create meaningful, sustainable change, then you're going to come up against complexity. This becomes even more complicated when you're not only trying to make change, but evaluate your efforts in making change.
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Developmental evaluation, a form of real-time evaluation focused on innovation and complexity, is gaining interest and attention with funders, program developers, and social innovators. Yet, it's popularity is revealing fundamental misunderstandings and misuse of the term that, if left unquestioned, may threaten the advancement of this important approach as a tool to support innovation and resilience.
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Not long ago my friend Mark Holmgren posted a blog titled Becoming a Learning Organization that got me thinking about what it takes to provide leadership to a learning organization. As Mark points out in his post, learning organizations are more likely to address complex issues and challenges effectively. To be clear, the term "learning organization" does not refer to a specific size, configuration, purpose, or structure of a group. It can refer to a multinational corporation, public agency, small social sector or nonprofit organization, and even a project team. All of these can be learning organizations. The core idea is that it is an entity that has developed the capacity to learn, change, learn some more, and then change some more to respond effectively to its environment. Mark does a great job of explaining how this happens.
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This is different work, this work of Collective Impact. It requires us to deepen relationships with each other and to build new relationshipswith individuals we may not have worked with previously. It calls upon us to take a new leadership journey, not one that is focused on our own work but one that is focused on a collective, often aspirational, approach to understanding and changing our communities.
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In social innovation we are at risk of confusing our stories of success for real, genuine impact. Without theories, implementation science or evaluation we risk aspiring to travel to the moon, yet leaving our rockets stuck on the launchpad.
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There are so many cool technologies out there that enable us to do more…way more…in terms of how we engage the community. There are social media integrations, dynamic polling, geo-mapping, data visualization, crowdsourcing, online decision-making, and all of these technologies enable us to go both broader and deeper than we could before.
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