Writings

My writing

One way or another I seem to spend a lot of time writing. Mostly it is ephemeral and ends up on some email discussion group or other, but occasionally something sticks around for a while. Here's a sample of the more tacky stuff. Some of this is very old, but still relevant. This page also has a section on other people's writing that I really support. Scroll down for those important contributions

Ten Things You Need to Know About Evaluation

Every so often I get phoned up by someone wanting to undertake an evaluation for the first time. One day as an exercise, I decided to jot down everything I tend to say to them.

Networks, Coordination and Partnerships

I cannot stress enough how important this document has been to my practice. Networks, coordinations, collaborations and partnerships between government and non-government are a constant issue within evaluation, systems thinking, organisational development and, well, life in general

As part of a job evaluating a particular collaborative venture, I was asked to find out what had been written about networks, partnerships and all that. The original version of this document was product of that. Despite its age (2003), the contents have remained use and with the help and support of other colleagues, I've edited it down to the rather more coherent piece you can get here. I wish to acknowledge the work of Myrnal Mandal. Her insights in this field are second to none.

Key Features of Action Research

I was asked a while ago to describe the key features of action research. And this was the result. I still don't think it quite gets there, but it's a good start. Actually I think THE key feature is the quality of relationships. "Ordinary" research tends to emphasise more the quality of questions. As someone said to me the other day when I made that distinction, good quality relationships actually allow you to ask better questions. Nice point I thought.

Performance Indicators: The Tyranny of Numbers

From time to time I get hot under the collar about the current trend for measuring everything and the unquestioning use of "performance indicators". Here's something I wrote when the temperature singed my shirt. It draws from a variety of sources, including a small bit of research by yours truly. The article was originally published in the Australasian Evaluation Society (AES) "News and Comment".

Zen And the Art Of Contract Maintenance

This piece has a long history. Back in the early 90's Mary-Jane Rivers and I were asked to help negotiate contracts between a government agency and some community organisations. After some head scratching, this is how we approached the job. First we decided that contracts were fundamentally about relationships. We then asked ourselves what were the building blocks of good relationships ? We identified six. We then used these six core features to design a form of strategic planning which we put the various parties through. The actual contract document then fell out of this process.

For a while the approach was very successful, and we trekked around New Zealand helping people develop these contracts. Then the New Zealand public sector was thrust into a contracting environment that was the antithesis of what our approach sought to achieve. It was competitive, divisive, distrustful, and exploitative. The idea of contracts being based on good relationships was a goner, and with it went our little process. I was so bloody angry with what I saw happen as a result that I wrote this article for the "Public Sector" - the NZ Public Sector Association's journal. It was picked up and published in several other journals.

The download is the final version, written for the Australian Community Health Association. Apart from the general discussion of contracting it also includes a sample based on a real contract. I think the article has stood the test of time, although I'd probably make a better job if it today. I recently heard that some organisations still use this contracting approach.

A Survivors Guide to Self Employment

I've been self employed for over two decades, and I've often wondered how I've done it. Actually quite a lot of people wonder the same thing, and regularly phone me up to find out. So this is what I send them these days. My thanks to Mike Sherry who added a few more tips.

Tools for Organisational Change and Leadership - The Cultural Factors

The organisational development consultant Dick Axelrod (http://www.axelrodgroup.com) and I were talking one day about national cultural archetypes and the implications for organisational development. Dick told me of a conversation with the Japanese manager of a Japanese automobile assembly plant located in the southern USA. The manager mentioned to Dick that when he set a tolerance range in Japan - indicating the range by spreading apart his finger and thumb - Japanese workers would hit right in the middle, whereas in the States the engineers would give him anything within the tolerance range. "So what do you do ?" asked Dick. "Oh that's easy" replied the manager smiling. And with that he reduced the gap between his finger and thumb until they almost met.

The relationship between culture, motivation and change has always interested me. As a migrant who has worked in several countries I'm acutely aware that what motivates people in one country doesn't do the same in another. Even words have different meaning. I'm far from the only one to make that observation. In the mid 80's the US based AT&T were puzzled why Quality Assurance measures imported from Japan didn't seem to work in the US. As the previous paragraph suggests it wasn't because US workers couldn't produce quality work. So they wondered whether US workers engaged with the idea of "quality" differently from their Japanese colleagues. The research they did on this basically said "you have no idea how profound that difference is" and changed the way they promoted quality in their US workplaces. Australian consultant Colin Pidd (and his one-time colleague John Evans) took these ideas and generalised them beyond "quality" into a series of tools that could be used in Australian and New Zealand workplaces to help with strategy, motivation, change processes and leadership development. Their ideas are some of the most valuable on this website, and have got me out of no end of difficult situations.

Assessing Action Research Potential

Over the past few years I've been involved in several action research based projects. Some have worked well, and others ... well let's say not so well. So a colleague, Robyn Bailey, and I started to think about the kinds of conditions that helped and hindered action research. Could we ask some questions before we started that were good predictors of eventual success. We reflected on our experiences and read the literature.

We came to the conclusion that there were two critical aspects of the action research process - what makes it different from other kinds of inquiry. The first is about the ability of those involved to act on the basis of critical reflection, the second is the ability of those involved to reflect critically on action. We also decided that there were three aspects of the situation worth asking questions about; the people likely to be involved, the actual task or situation, and the environment within which the people and task reside.

This table, which is still in its early stages of development, is our attempt to structure some questions that will help us decide whether a particular situation is suitable for an action research approach. We welcome feedback on what you agree with, what you disagree with, what isn't clear, and what we have missed out.

Building Evaluation Capability

This is a very old piece of writing, yet evaluation capacity building has continued to be a constant topic of discussion. Just how do you get busy people in busy organisations to undertake high-quality evaluations of their programs and activities? Most of the focus is on skill development and (for want of a better word) promoting evaluation as A Good Thing. I'm less convinced by this focus, and distinguish between evaluation capacity and evaluation capability. This distinction has now become commonplace, and the ideas in the paper are still highly relevant.

Evaluation And Large Group Processes

I've long been interested in the use of large group processes in evaluation. By large group processes, I mean processes that involve 50 or more people in one place at one time.

I've been involved in large group processes that exceed 500 people, all involved in some form of evaluative activity. But is it real evaluation ? Some large group thinkers say that no it isn't and never can be, since large groups tend to be poor at processing and analysing data rigorously and accurately. In any case, they say, large group processes are primarily about developing commitment.

I'm not quite convinced by that argument, and still seeking some answers. Here are some thoughts I have on that. Again, an oldie but a goodie

Strategy and Strategy Development

As I've indicated elsewhere, I'm no lover of strategic planning. Unfortunately, that's what many people think is strategy. Indeed the confusion that surrounds what exactly strategy is, and what relevance it has, fascinates me. Here is an attempt to come to grips with the implications of some of my reading in this enormously diverse area.

Other People's Writings

As promised here is a space for things written by other people that are not exactly "tools" but worth a place in anyone's brain. As always please acknowledge the original source if you ever get to use them.

Introduction to the Work of Argyris and Schön

Chris Argyris and Don Schon's work has been enormously influential on my thinking and practice (e.g. the Values in Action workshop). Here is Bob Dick and Tim Dalmau's elegant attempt to explain their work and it's significance.

Accountability, Responsibility And Corruption: Managing The Public Production Process

This is not a piece of my own writing but a chapter by New Zealand academic Bob Gregory. It was one of the first critiques of "New Public Management" that really pressed home the theoretical impossibility as well as the practical impossibility of some of the "accountability" assumptions that underpin NSM. Based on a framework by public sector management academic James Wilson, Bob postulates that "accountability" can only be guaranteed under certain conditions; conditions that are rarely present in much public sector activity. The public sector essentially depends on practitioners having a sense of responsibility for their actions rather than accountability to someone for their actions. Furthermore he claims - and cites case studies to show - that attempts to force public sector activity from "responsibility for" into "accountability to" frameworks actually corrupts the public sector process. This is an extremely important but oddly overlooked contribution to the NPM and performance management debate. Bob gave me permission to copy and circulate this chapter.

Genuine Leadership Within Context

A few years ago a large package appeared unannounced in my mailbox. It was the complete draft manuscript of a book being developed by Robert (Bob) Terry on how do decide what kind of leadership fits which kinds of situations. I'd met Bob at a conference in Texas for about five minutes and emailed him once a few months later for some clarification. His response to my request was to send me the entire draft manuscript of a book. Now there is someone who understands what leadership is all about. Here's good summary of his ideas {and my thanks to Gene Shackman for hunting this out}. The book that eventually emerged shortly before his untimely death is called ""Seven Zones for Leadership: Acting Authentically in Stability and Chaos" (2001). He was not a single model snake oil man flogging off his particular take on leadership. He believed passionately that nearly all models of leadership are relevant somewhere. The trick is to pick where and most importantly when. In the manuscript and in the book he examines the major leadership models and shows how each fits a particular situation (zone) and then offers his own model, "authentic leadership," as the integrating approach. [My thanks to Michael Patton for telling me about the final publication]

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