In their 2016 paper Collective Impact 3.0: An Evolving Framework for Community Change, my colleagues Liz Weaver and Mark Cabaj shared a quote from Eric Bonabeau, CEO, Icosystems, who observed that:
“Managers would rather live with a problem they can’t solve than with a solution they can’t fully understand or control.”
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We made it!
2020 has felt simultaneously like the longest and shortest year. So many of us anticipated and planned for a year of significant accomplishments, opportunities and growth. We felt that 2020 would be a year of renewal. And then something called the Corona virus (COVID-19) emerged.
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As an unapologetic optimist, hope is normally not hard to find. The COVID-19 second wave has descended on us this fall like a deep west coast fog. All summer we knew it was coming. Many of us relaxed bathing in the familiar relationships and interactions we so missed. How could this be happening again?
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Have you ever thought about whose role is it to build community? Whose role is it to fix the problems? Is it government, maybe social service programs? Is it groups and associations? Sometimes, I think that communities are looking for a superhero to swoop in and fix all their problems. But this superhero does not exist. What we need is a group of superheroes such as Marvel's Avengers, with each hero bringing their own gift and knowledge, and when its used as a group big changes can happen.
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I’d like to offer another suggestion for improving the way we plan community engagement processes; stakeholder mapping. The classic process used is the 2 x 2 matrix of plotting stakeholders according to their level of interest and their level of influence.
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Developmental Evaluation (DE) can provide vital information to inform the evolution of a program or service by connecting what is done to what is happening with what our program is designed to do and our resources using data, design, and sensemaking. That’s a tall order, but then DE is a particularly powerful approach to supporting innovation and program development. But how do we capture and document all the things that actually go into the life of a program? That’s where the Living History method comes in.
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