In my last post, I offered some common definitions of evaluative thinking compared to evaluation and stressed how critical evaluative thinking is to meaningful and useful evaluation. In this post, I want to share some tips for encouraging and practicing evaluative thinking within your organizations.
Setting the Stage
In their article Defining and Teaching Evaluative Thinking: Insights from Research on Critical Thinking, Buckley et al outline five key principles for promoting evaluative thinking (ET) in organizations, which I’ll paraphrase here and add my two cents.
- Be Opportunistic. Exploit opportunities to leverage and build upon intrinsic motivation. In practice, this means catching and riding waves of existing interests and priorities and embedding ET into existing practices. Intrinsic motivation is what really brings any effort to life. When people are musing, reflecting, and wondering out loud, dig into it! See the value in that!
- Start small and go slow. ET can be introduced into the ways your organization thinks, discusses, plans, and make decisions in small, unobtrusive ways. No need to announce an immediate deep dive into our most challenging and contentious questions.
- Provide opportunities to learn about and practice evaluative thinking. It is not the jurisdiction of one discipline or another, and it can be taught.
- Be prepared to combat biases and resistance. In the swirl of public discourse about the echo chambers created by biased news and social media, there’s been a lot of attention paid recently to cognitive biases – mental shortcuts that privilege or over-emphasize a particular perspective. Specifically, confirmation bias occurs when we look for information or interpret information in ways that confirm our pre-existing beliefs. This can stop evaluative thinking in its tracks. Asking questions and challenging assumptions can be difficult and sometimes threatening. People will need safe spaces and skill building to be able to identify, articulate, and set aside their beliefs before they can ask tough questions and be open to new answers.
- Practice in multiple contexts and alongside peers. The beauty and value of evaluative thinking is only fully realized when it is embedded in an organization’s culture and practices. It should not live only in the context of formal evaluation. It should not be the purview of evaluators only.
Getting Started
Evaluative thinking is an approach rather than a set of distinct practices or strategies. But there are some tactical strategies that build the habit and develop the skills. Here are a few ideas to get you started.
Opportunities
When should you be thinking evaluatively? All the time. No, seriously. Evaluative thinking is helpful any time you’re making decisions, plans, or changes. Ideally, this becomes the way your Board, executives, and staff think about their work. There are some cases when the need to think evaluatively is more pronounced and the opportunity is more ripe. You can begin thinking evaluatively when you are:
- Creating a Strategic Plan
- Hosting staff meetings
- Debriefing after events and activities
- Designing or changing programs
- Reporting to funders and other stakeholders
- Onboarding, training, and evaluating staff
Asking Questions
Evaluative thinking can start by simply asking some questions and investing in the process of answering them. Sometimes, the reflection and discussion themselves are as important as any answer you might come up with.
- Identify and Challenge Assumptions & Assertions
- “What are we assuming? Do we actually know that?”
- “How do we know that?”
- “What makes you say that?”
- Seek Out Blind Spots
- “What are we missing?”
- “Whose perspective isn’t represented?”
- “What other explanations could there be?”
- Capture Musings & Learning Questions
- “I wonder if . . .”
- “I bet if we . . .”
- “If I knew __________, I could _________.”
Tools
The fields of evaluation, performance management, and quality improvement are filled with tools that can help catalyze, organize, and test a team’s thinking. Here are a few that seem particularly useful in supporting evaluative thinking.
- Theories of Change and Logic Models are great tools for articulating and visualizing how change happens and how our programs operate. They also provide great frameworks for identifying the data you might need to test those assumptions and answer some key questions.
- Dashboards reflect key data points in visually simple and compelling ways. These, paired with some reflection questions, are great ways to get people to engage with data rather than passively consuming it.
- Mind Mapping, Affinity Diagrams, Relationship Diagrams, and other thought-mapping tools are great ways to take what’s in our heads and organize it, so we can really engage with and manage it.
- Parking Lots, Wonder Logs, and Issue/Opportunity Logs are great tools for capturing, displaying, and prioritizing unanswered questions and opportunities for learning and improvement.
Which could you try today? Where can you plug ET into your existing practices, tools, and conversations? Leave a comment and share your experiences.
References
Buckley, J., Archibald, T., Hargraves, M., & Trochim, W.M. 2015. “Defining and Teaching Evaluative Thinking: Insights from Research on Critical Thinking.” American Journal of Evaluation, 36(3), 375-388.