Is there space for creativity in evaluations?

In the past year most of my work has been focused on evaluations. To be candid, I usually find them very challenging (mostly because of all the unspoken emotions they generate in the commissioners, evaluators and evaluands which I will address in my next blog post), as well as an interesting processes of discovery, and an opportunity to help funders and those funded by them to step back for a while and take another look into the past and the present of an initiative, a network, a project.

Photo by RhondaK Native Florida Folk Artist on Unsplash

Nearing their end, evaluations extend also an invitation to connect to the future by developing the usually required “recommendations” (which should become yet another blog to write on my list). I have traveled from providing insights and thoughts from a rational mind of an external consultant in my past to increasingly opening a potential door for the collective intelligence of evaluation participants (from donor to implementing organizations to communities) to identify paths to brighter and wider futures.

In fact, final learning and co-creation workshops are becoming a trend in evaluations’ terms of reference as collective and participatory sensemaking sessions are too…but do we really share an understanding of what they are and what their purpose is?

This type of workshops can allow space for new thinking, feeling and behavior to emerge, for the authenticity of diverse knowledges and wisdoms come together. However, can this happen when at the backstage we as evaluators are sticking to evaluation frameworks with straightforward questions to which we are accountable guided by strictly defined and well-established criteria?

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There is a creative tension, as Martin Luther King would have defined it, in this question. I am all for integration: we do not need to leave out softer, less structured and innovative methods in an evaluation nor do we need to throw out of the board quantitative and very rigorous and structured approaches. The tension is visible among animated defenders of ones and others…those going for less proven and softer approaches usually being more questioned and challenged in our field.

However, how can the energy of producing triangulated and rigorous evidence on what has worked or not be combined with the energy of visualizing the best possible future enabling imagination, values and emotions emerge because they are part of that creative process? Moreover, can we also be creative in the way we design and implement data collection tools to reflect the past and the present when some qualitative and more open approaches going in that direction are still disregarded in several spaces?

I believe we can. If we are willing to go through some discomfort, to be criticized, pushed, questioned…which is not easy as you feel your reputation and professional image are harmed and you begin to doubt too…

I will share two examples of recent evaluations. In one we had used gardening as a metaphor of the initiative which is a local implementation in one city of a model devised by the donor organization. We started full of enthusiasm, committed to facilitate a very participatory process guided by metaphors and images with creative workshops to enable collective expression, thinking, imagining. However, our draft inception report received a very low quantitative grade due to a very linear focus on details (i.e. asking a step by step detailed description of how we intended to adapting a certain method (which due to very tight extension limits we had not detailed but had thoroughly thought about) or being described as “ambitious” due to our intention to interact in a very ecosystemic way with evaluation participants, trying to reach as many as possible, giving voice to all possible interested parties. We slowly began a process that reduced and constrained our original excitement and our creative angles to end up developing a very traditional report. We feel we missed the opportunity to shed light into many interesting and rich angles.

Photo by Hannah Busing on Unsplash

In another current evaluation, I invited participants to go through an adaptation of Appreciative inquiry using a mural that took them from an analysis of current strengths and weaknesses of their partnership to dreaming a possible future together. One of the participants, as soon as I presented the idea, questioned: what does this have to do with the evaluation framework? You are not tasked to talk about the future with us…I explained how I had embedded evaluation questions in the approach and argued about the value of also using no traditional approaches to ignite group discussions and inspiration (we were conducting a survey, key informant interviews, focus group discussions as well). It was uncomfortable, no one was contributing much at the beginning…there was resistance in the air…but slowly as I began to ask some of them to elaborate on the scarce post it notes that were written by a kind mind and heart, ideas started populating the mural and an active discussion took place.

I choose the less traveled path, again and again. I feel evaluation would grow and evolve if we invite new guests to the table: emotions, values, lived experience from communities, indigenous wisdom, art, creativity…anyone willing to add some more?