How can we tell if we're making progress?

Evaluation is more of a hobby with Dirk, likes clear plans, where are people heading and do they know what it means to be winning

Go-round

Pair-Share activity - What is the change you are seeing that you are trying to contribute to. What does success look like. If you're working on a specific project, look at that and see what it's trying to accomplish. If you're an IC, try to think about what is the success that you're trying to accomplish, with lots of different folks, what is your goal, what are you trying to do. what does that look like? Vision of success, what do things look like so i don't have to be doing this work anymore, so that I can comfortably work?

• Bruce - thats the model of social workers, how can we put ourselves out of a job, what's going to cause us to stop
• Go-around sharing the ~2+ goals we wrote down on post-it notes during pair share

These are our visions of success, what we're trying to accomplish. If had a full-day and paying dirk we'd really go deep into that. so instead going into elements, putting them on the ground and we'll arrange them in the appropriate order.

• Identify indicators of success.
• create strategies/tactics
• identify stakeholders+actors
• identify needed resources
• create a timeline
• articulate a vision of success
• identify the preconditions
• evaluate progress

Bruce - Midwest academy, out of Saul Allinsky's work ("doable, winnable and replicable")

Book - Rules for Radicals

Process

First, articulate a vision of success, so want people to have a vision of their long-term goal first. Often most difficult thing for them to think about, so have to give them tools/frameworks to do that. Often does a epitaph exercise, the world has changed and it now functions in a way that you no longer need to exist, had a peaceful change because the change was made, what does that epitaph say.

Identify the preconditions and identify stakeholders+actors. In this step Dirk has people draw out a vision of success and what they're doing differently. Preconditions - these people are doing (this) differently.

Identify indicators of success. think about preconditions, how people are behaving differently, and start articulating.. we know we are winning if we see these things happening. One of the things that's quite a buzzword these days is called "Theory of Change." We want to engage people in what we're doing, the change we're trying to make. So this area, of the 4 tiles, is what comprises the theory of change. However, a theory of change is something you should be developing with your key external stakeholders, be informed by those you are impacting and involved with.

So then can create Strategies+Tactics to identify it. If in an org this is where you engage staff, think about timeframe of next 3 years and think about how we're going to do...Create a timeline, how long is this going to take? This can be simultaneous in the first few steps. Once you figure out how long it's going to take, begin implementing, see if on timeline, and can Evaluate Progress, happens as we are going along, pay attention to indicators and see if we're getting smarter, not getting disempowered, disillusioned.

In terms of preconditions, what needs to happen before this happens and this happens...and identifying all the other bits that the organization is already doing helps inform the timeline. Look at all the bits while evaluating.

With social justice/social change work, need to have a picture of what that change looks like to us.

Tactics support strategies... Within strategies and tactics creating project plans, which is where when stopping is identified. How do we learn from this, when do we shift. Always jumping back and forth between evaluating and learning, when have we gotten too far, and looking at how we're impacting our users/stakeholders/who we're working with.