Over-simplifications in outcomes, monitoring and evaluation June 3, 2009
Posted by Paul Duignan in : Accountability, Attribution, Doing evaluation more efficiently, Easy Outcomes, Evaluation planning, Outcomes systems architecture, Outcomes theory, Reporting systems, Using the approach , trackbackAn evaluation colleague Patrica Rogers commented on an earlier blog posting of mine in which I was claiming that what I am trying to do it to make outcomes, monitoring and evaluation work ‘easier’. She challenged me on that idea and pointed out that often what we are having to deal with is over-simplification in the way people are working with outcomes, monitoring and evaluation. Her comment inspired me to work up an article on over-simplification in outcomes and evaluation and after getting underway with it I realized all of the different ways in which people approach outcomes, monitoring and evaluation with over-simplified approaches and the problems which these cause.
Obviously, we are not in the business of making things more complicated than they have to be, however there are some key concepts in outcomes and evaluation which are technical and which need to be understood by those designing outcomes and evaluation systems. Overly-simplistic systems end up with structural problems and usually cause their users much frustration because they simply cannot deliver what it is that is expected of them. This does not mean that we have to bombard actual users of such systems with lots of technical jargon – in fact we can keep things fairly simple for them (see Simplifying terms used when working with outcomes). But people whose job it is to think about evaluation and outcomes need to have a sufficiently high level of sophistication about how they think about such systems and this will, necessarily, involve the use of some technical language.
It often amuses me the way in which stakeholders, who are happy to routinely deal with complex accounting and economic terminology, when they come to outcomes work suddenly think that it should be absolutely simple and that they should not be expected to master a number of key concepts in technical language. Anyway, have a look at the article if you are interested in identifying areas where people are being overly-simplistic in outcomes, monitoring and evaluation work.
Duignan, P. (2009). Overly-simplistic approaches to outcomes, monitoring and evaluation work. Outcomes Theory Knowledge Base Article No. 245. (http://knol.google.com/k/paul-duignan-phd/-/2m7zd68aaz774/102 http://knol.google.com/k/paul-duignan-phd/-/2m7zd68aaz774/102).
Paul Duignan, Phd
Outcomes and evaluation blog (OutcomesBlog.org)
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