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Why do we still see policies in workplaces like, “You Tube banned on Government Servers to stop staff wasting time!”, when staff could be learning stuff as rich as these videos from Dave Snowden? Dave is the Founder & Chief Scientific Officer at Cognitive Edge. His blog is very heavy, often amusing and well worth following.

Dave is working with an Australian video producer to help communicate his models and frameworks with the world. The videos bring a subtle and effective use of visuals and graphics to illuminate the key points that Dave is making. Dave’s confidence and sense of humor shines through as well.

I have embedded a series of videos from Dave (and others) to help you understand the world of complexity. Another place to visit is Dave’s series of posts on the Origins of Cynefin.

The Set Up

Understanding the Cynefin framework is probably the first place to start. One from Shawn Callahan (Anecdote), the 2nd from Dave the third a Pecha Kucha presentation from Mark Schenk (also at Anecdote).

The most humorous story

If you have listened to Dave’s podcasts, you will have heard his ‘how to organise a children’s birthday party’. I often show clients this video when facilitating strategy and planning workshops. Apart from some laughs, the key message can challenge last century ways of working that still persist today.

The Close

This final run of videos, again from Dave explores some of the other concepts and ideas that relate to working in a complex world. They tell great stories and the final one shines a light on the Cognitive Edge Sensemaker Suite.

Cheers

Geoff Brown – www.yesandspace.com.au

Click here to view a full list of Open Space sessions hosted in the Open Space on Days 1 and 2

Click here to view a full list of Open Space sessions

Here for all the Video Interviews

Here for all of Simon Kneebone’s Cartoons

Click here to visit the National Institute of Circus Arts website

“Unimagined possibilities came to the surface. Imagine if there was a celebration of the natural world as a part of this conference. Wasn’t this why we were really here anyway? Wasn’t this the real reason for our work? Or was this a totally incorrect assumption? Was this just a part of my imagination? This conference had created a doubt.”

“My learning at this stage had not been great, day one had been difficult and today more enjoyable, but as to the value of attending this conference I was very unsure. Nothing life changing, no great learning in this process, not that I was expecting anything anyway…until.”

www.melbourneplayback.com.au

Stepping Stone Events in 2010 …

29-30 May 2010 – “Camp Obama”: public narrative & organising community change in Anglesea, Victoria

Contact – Kathryn@ourorb.com

Early June 2010 – Behaviour Change Workshop “Building a Toolkit for Change”, Melbourne, Metropol Hotel

Contact – Atlas www.atlascomm.co.uk

3 August – Strategy Change & Organisation Development, mid-late May

Contact – www.alchemyroad.com

6-9 September – ALARA (Action Learning Action Research) World Congress, Melbourne

Contact – www.alara.net.au

Sept 2010 – Australian Association for Enviro Ed (AAEE) Conference, Canberra

Contact – www.aaee.org.au

7-8 October – Celebrating Story conference: bringing people and work to life

Contact – Andrew Rixon @ www.babelfishgroup.com

1-2 November – Thematic Communication with Prof Sam Ham, Townsville

Contact – sustainable@townsville.qld.gov.au

22-26 Nov – Australian Facilitators Network Conference, Hobart

Contact – www.afn.net.au

For Ellen, this moment came during the conference. For others it may come at another time and place – or it may never come. The sum of our experiences is what makes us who we are, and some experiences resonate more than others.

As a group responsible for designing this conference we are grateful to Ellen for capturing the essence of our approach – opening up to complexity by immersion in complexity; conversations, relationship building then transactions; providing space to share our stories and questions; and a narrative thread held together by our individual and collective experiences.

You can read Ellen’s story here.

To view and download individual cartoons, please visit the conference Flickr site here.

Leader: Keren Winterford

Key Points:

We talked about some limits or challenges for learning:
•    No support time for evaluation
•    Evaluation at the end (“tacked on the end”)
•    Busyness
•    Managers not being involved
•    Often strategy/planning (higher level) org processes, different to true frames of projects: learning can’t fit into higher level org objectives – learning can’t influence this level
•    Reporting (formal) eg; Quarterly reports – people don’t like writing them (“creative writing”) and people reading don’t get what they need/want
•    Question: evaluation needs to be able to change projects, (how to do this?)
•    Often evaluators have different language and hard to connect with
•    Cycles of funding
•    Educate managers of the importance of learning

We talked about some great ways to support learning:
•    Action learning
•    Structured time for reflection in project management
•    Lessons learned methodology
•    Using case studies (tight, structured formats) and peer reviews
•    Structured process for doing something of ‘evaluation learning’ (ie. Process of a response and changed practice as a result of evaluation)
•    Engagement of managers in reflection and learning process
•    Having workshop/reflection meetings (everyone in the room)
•    Practice continuous change
•    Feedback loop to senior management
•    Focus learning processes not just on participants (beneficiaries) but on practitioners
•    Trust important to share the full story (including failures)
•    Right balance of measurement and learning (we need both) – make measurement stuff easy and quicker so we can focus on learning
•    There is intuition in learning- ‘trust ourselves’
•    Monitoring is a part of the process
•    Establish process and structure of evaluation from the start
•    Need flexibility for learning
•    Partnerships are becoming increasingly important and important for learning (design as part of)
•    Need to structure/enable staff to have self reflective learning process
•    There is a need to recognise interactive nature of projects and evaluation
•    Be more creative and innovative in “reporting”, ie; not a report, but also videos, pictures, workshops, opportunity for conversation (through workshops)
•    Use of extended evaluators, yes, not necessarily objective, but they offer a neutral, safe place for participants/stakeholders to really share
•    Recognise not an evaluation should be to change a project (next phase) and then to set up an evaluation (at the start of next phase) and then to know as part of the implementation the evaluation will then need to be revised as new knowing it gained, therefore, interactive process of doing and evaluating
•    Its complex and iteractive

Participants: Scott McKenry (NCS Swinburne), Elle Morrell (MEFL), Beth Hyland, Candyce Presland, Maxine Schache, Diane Nichols, Cathy Wills (Swinburne)

Key Points:     (INSERT PICTURE)

How do we evaluate impact of training programs over time?

Funders and “deliverers” of programs need to have more conversations about long-term evaluations:
-    what do each need?
-    how can they connect?

What partnerships need to be formed? What relationships need to be credited?

Recognise that we need to move beyond evaluation sheets at end of training

If you want to involve participants in evaluations, you need to train them, get them excited by it as a practice. Makes them more amenable to being ‘evaluated’.

Some of us already doing this:
-    DPI (Farmer CD)
-    ACF (GreenHome)
-    NCS (Carbon Accounting ??)

Leader: Jess Dart

Participants: Julia Davies, Sue Arendt, Scott McKenny, Maxine Schache, Carolyn Kabore, Lisa Goeman

Key Points:

•    Dangers:
1.    Idea is that some programs that are in the early stages of development, working out and trying different options – then predetermined indicators may ‘squash’ innovation. Evaluating a program a whole range of new ideas could stifle creativity, eg; picking winners and losers too early on
2.    Danger of mandating evaluation of everything – mindset that evaluation is critical and essential. But funnily enough, this is often done at the expense of ‘diluting’ evaluation money and getting very poor quality evaluation – not everything needs evaluating
3.    Focus evaluation on where learning can inform decisions – occur – multiple phase
4.    Is it worth evaluating when costs exceed benefits? Eg; calculating attributable impacts to one particular program may cost more than cost of program!
5.    Concept of evaluability assessment
6.    Focus evaluation on what you want to know
7.    Don’t do evaluation when you have nothing to learn from the answers of when you have no ideas of what you want to know. Don’t do evaluation when it is not worth it.
8.    Why do we collect data that is never looked at and never used and of poor quality?
9.    Potentially we could have ‘levels’ of evaluation – from very light to intensive. Focus evaluation resources where they can have most results
10.    Don’t evaluate a project when its been evaluated to death
11.    Need to always ask why we are evaluating – what is the purpose? Eg; when a project has really failed and everyone knows why it has not worked. What’s the point?
12.    Focus more on using evaluation results.

Participants: Mark Boulet, Che Sutherland, Kirsty Fenton, Sue Lewis, Colin Hocking, Vera L

Key Points:

•    Feel Blue – Touch Green (Dr. Mardie Townsend, La Trobe University)
•    Greensteps Program deliberately sets out to recruit students from across various disciplines to educate for sustainability – because sustainability is much broader
•    “Working across the disciplines is “Really HARD!!” – lots of struggles
•    Key Question: “When is making connections across ‘diverse’ fields (eg, human health, global health) needed?”
•    Some connections like people-health and sustainable transport

•    What are key topics that bring us together across disciplines?
•    Resilience and Adaptation
•    General observation that links between healthcare and sustainability are present
•    Health/Quit campaign network has a wealth of knowledge about people and behaviour change

•    Concept of “Real Synthesis” is a mid-level theory that brings together connections between high-level theories and lower level insights into specific problem focussed studies (eg, well design evaluation of a program) – can result in a expert

•    Observation that within the “Sustainability” field

•    Barrier to collaboration between the different fields can be the difference in language and clinging to expertise in their field

•    From Discipline to Discipline – we need to look for common ways in which we do our work (our tactics and approaches)

•    Another thing that cuts across disciplines is the emotions that our target groups

Participants: (It ebbed and flowed – quite a few bumblebees!)

Key Points:

•    The workshop was about exploring “lessons from the Dancing Guy” (Derek Sivers – YouTube) and the wave theory (AKA diffusion of innovation). I opened discussion with 2 examples – sustainable events work and designing a pilot shopping centre sustainability project; and how I was trying to use the theory with these initiatives.
•    Key questions to the group:
1.    What occurs to you on watching the Derek Sivers YouTube clip?
2.    What does this theory raise for you re monitoring and evaluation?
•    Key points from discussion:
•    Need to understand what motivates the first followers (and the nuts)
•    Government could create spaces and places that foster the “nuts” and the “first followers”
•    The first followers – makes an action simple, easy and public
•    If you want to work with the first followers (as a change aspect) you need to create apps for them to find you
•    What happens if your champions (your nut/first follower) doesn’t want to go public? Need to understand why and evaluate this
•    The discussion turned to suggestions for government change programs to support the first followers and nuts
-    create standards
-    networking spaces
-    recognition programs
-    peer reviewing from industry
-    “on the job” training programs