Where is the change?
Where is the change?
Where is the change? I have stumbled over this question when I was thinking about monitoring and evaluation recently. How to evaluate the effect of an organisation or an action? Where to look? It is actually not so trivial. Traditionally one would just decide what change one wants to see and then build a causal chain from your actions to that change, applying an ‘if … then’ logic. Unfortunately, complex living systems do not follow this type of logic.
I cannot find the exact quote but Nora Bateson sometimes quotes her grandfather William Bateson who apparently said something like: in a living system, when one thing changes, everything else changes too. This makes intuitive sense if you believe that in these systems everything is connected with everything.
Of course there are degrees - when some things change, the adaptation to that change by everything else is much more pronounced than when other things change. For example when Putin suddenly invades Ukraine, a lot of adaptation is going on both locally and globally. Yet when I finally get myself together and go for a run three times a week, the effect might be more immediate on my health as well as on my family and my work as I need to adapt my schedule - not much change globally (although even a small change can ripple through all the interconnections and have second, third and n-th order effects that are often unexpected).
In my work I often think about places and people who live in these places - and how they can come together to make the place a better place and their lives better lives. If we look at the actors in a place, we can think of it as a system of interconnected individuals and organisations who constantly adapt to each other based on their perception of reality. So if now a number of these individuals and organisations change the way they work together, where exactly has the change happened? In the individuals (all of them? to what degree?)? In the organisations? In the relationship between the individuals? Maybe in the context, allowing for the new types of relationships? And how do all these changes lead to further changes, 2nd, 3rd, … n-th order changes?
If we want to say what effect a project had on a situation, we need to somehow pragmatically draw a line or define a threshold beyond which the change will not be detected anymore. Yet the lower this threshold, the better we can understand further reaching influence. Yet the further away from the action, the more other factors play a role. It is an interesting exercise to think through all these questions for specific projects and actions and come up with a pragmatic and doable way of monitoring.
As a simple thought experiment, you can just take a recent change you yourself have gone through. How have you changed? Where in you (or outside of you) has this change happened - or have changes happened? What effects do these changes have?
The Paper Museum
For a change, an illustration instead of a quote, from a recent post on What’s the PONT by Chris Bolton titled Obsessive Measurement Infinity Loops (OMI Loops)
Why have I added this to my paper museum? This one particularly fits with the weekly email I wrote this week about measurement, not to forget that measurement always needs to be useful and relevant to the question we are asking.
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My Warm Data Buddy Angelina wrote a touching piece on how we speak to each other about war.