What Do We Really Value? Rethinking Evaluation from the Roots

This blog post is part of the Series: Tending the Roots of Change: Re‑imagining Strategy and MEL

Framing this series of blog posts

I have felt the need and the desire to write about planning, learning, and evaluation for some months now, never quite finding the right words, time, or format to do so. I studied Literature for three years at university and then changed to Social Communications, and for a long time I have expressed that I left a ghost of myself on the staircase of the Facultad de Letras at the Universidad del Salvador.

I feel the time has now come. The blessing of participating in different projects and processes during 2025 and the beginning of this special 2026 is bringing a kind of cosmic convergence and insight: everything interlinking and co‑creating together at an amazing and wonder‑full pace. I have facilitated three complex, challenging, and rich evaluations (one of them still underway), as well as three future‑foresight planning and transformational processes. These projects talk to and listen to each other in my mind, heart, and body, and I feel the desire to share a bit of that inner conversation.

I also deeply cherish Seedlings and its members as part of this journey. Together with some profound, conscious, and like‑minded peers, we meet every month to explore the questions that keep us awake and alive. A true luxury in this demanding world.

First of all, I want to thank my colleagues along this journey: partners who trusted me to lead or co‑lead these projects; peers who worked hard and with commitment — sometimes suffering due to unhealthy practices that still prevail; and the participants in evaluation and future‑foresight processes.

What I will share in this new blog series emerges from collective intelligence: it does not belong to me. I am simply a point of convergence, with the capacity to listen, braid together, and share. Because some of what I will communicate touches on uncomfortable truths, I will not name individuals here, though I will share my gratitude privately through heartfelt thank‑you notes.

These months and projects have enabled me to compost wounds from more traditional ways of practicing my work, while also watering the seeds of change and of the future that I feel wants to emerge from my practice.

Photo by Maryna Bohucharska on Unsplash

The risks of impact and the promises of value

“The value of science is not the same as the impact of science.”

This truth was expressed by a young person from Peru during a workshop on imagining the future of science and research systems. It stayed with me for several months, acting as an interpellation to how I approach future planning and evaluation.

By focusing so much on assessing impact, have we perhaps lost sight of value? Evaluation, after all, is fundamentally about identifying value — the word itself contains it. Google AI tells me that “the word evaluation originated in the mid‑18th century (circa 1755) from the French évaluation, meaning ‘to find the value of’. It stems from the Old French evaluer, combining the prefix e‑ (from Latin ex‑, meaning ‘out’) and value (from Latin valere, meaning ‘to be strong or worthy’).”

Wow.

I practice evaluation guided by frameworks that are usually developed by funders and/or implementers. Through these, we explore value using very specific lenses: evaluation questions become simplified devices through which we attempt to detect value in complex and dynamic processes and settings. Of course, as evaluators — and as curious, committed human beings — we discover much more than what those reduced lenses explicitly ask of us. Commissioners of evaluations also see more and want to know more. And yet, so far, we have collectively agreed to use highly structured approaches to ensure that evaluations produce the evidence needed to inform decisions within our current operating system. What counts as “acceptable” evidence or knowledge within evaluation has, in very recognizable ways, constrained all of us.

Is it time to re‑evaluate what is valuable for us — building on collective conversations and enabling diverse voices to co‑create multiple ways of defining what is valued and how it is valued? For me, that time has arrived. I see this threshold inviting many of us to step into the new. As Otto Scharmer expresses it: “The future is possibility looking at you.”

I will start by sharing an image from Scharmer and Kaufer’s recent book — which I was honoured to review — as a starting point to expand what we measure, assess, observe, learn from, and decide upon (and yes, we should also revisit how we do this, but that will be another blog post).

Source: Scharmer and Kaufer, Presencing: 7 Practices for Transforming Self,

Society, and Business (2025).

As shown in Figure 1, observable and tangible signs of change are usually related to invisible roots of change, such as the quality and inclusiveness of relationships. We could also add other dimensions, such as openness, flexibility, and resilience.

We have paid significant attention to assessing what takes place at the level of social systems, while still struggling to observe and assess changes at the level of the social soil. Yet the quality of the soil is critical for understanding which plants and trees grow — or fail to grow. In this metaphor, the soil is composed of awareness and relationships, whose development is, of course, much more challenging to assess.

We can also identify other invisible and intangible factors that shape the birth, growth, maturity, and decay of elements within social systems (for example, changes in education). At present, there is a clear mismatch between what matters most for transformation — trust, alignment, shared language, readiness, and the capacity to collaborate — and what is formally measured within traditional MEL approaches. Output‑focused metrics fail to capture these personal, relational, and institutional shifts, even though they are critical for grounding sustainable and locally owned change.

So how can we begin to pilot new ways of going deeper into the social soil? This is a collective invitation, not a question for me alone to answer. I am not interested in becoming the creator — and even less the owner — of an attractive device or mechanism to “sell” to others or persuade them to adopt. I believe there are multiple context‑informed, systemic, iterative, and provisional responses to this powerful question.

Moreover, there are already individuals, organizations, and systems working differently and asking these questions. However, they often operate at the margins, as such efforts are rarely supported by traditional funding schemes. There are, of course, important exceptions — such as the Joseph Rowntree Foundation in the UK, whose Emergent Futures programme is “working to support, shield and nourish the efforts at the edges that are already assembling the building blocks of a different world.”

In the next post, I will explore the value of what was once called strategic planning and is now referred to in some contexts as scenario planning or strategic learning.