Week three of Coastal Summer Camp is going to be mostly about our personal projects that we began today and will complete with the help of the CRC staff and resources here. My project is to prepare a report for our upcoming programmatic evaluation for Minnesota's Lake Superior Coastal Program. I talked with Stephen about monitoring and evaluation and about Section 312 of the Coastal Zone Management Act (the section that mandates periodic programmatic evaluations). Pino from Spain and I are working together in a 'study group' on our projects since she is also working on the thorny issue of evaluation. Our challenges form and interesting contrast since the biophysical and legal landscapes of our places are so different. The nub of both our challenges is very similar however. How do you effectively measure (and communicate) the effectiveness of the kind of work we do given the context of the environmental and social landscapes in which we do that work?
I hope to develop a document that incorporates responses to the findings of Minnesota's last evaluation report with a summary of accomplishments and covers some strategic planning for the next few years. I have to get this thing done as part of the preparation for our review scheduled for August so the opportunity to take advantage of some to the staff expertise here seems too good an opportunity to pass up. I've gotten a book on Outcome Mapping from Virginia, a couple of papers on evaluation from Stephen and have plans to line up some interview time with some others with experience in these evaluations in other states.
Today also gave me an opportunity to do a short (30 min.) presentation on using the principles of aikido to illustrate concepts of conflict management and conflict communication. The session was used as an "energizer" for our agenda and it succeeded very well in getting peoples' energy level pumped up after lunch. I hope it also worked to show some physical examples of things like active listening, systems thinking, and using out-of-the-box solutions to conflict problems. I got some good feedback after the session so I think it went pretty well.
2 comments:
Some of the systems thinking concepts demonstrated by Pat's exercise include:
policy resistance - we spend a lot of time having our efforts resisted by forces we do not see, and we often contribute to the problem by doing things that increase resistance.
balancing loops - we are used to thinking about positive reinforcement, that is, effort is followed by reward. but there is negative reinforcement as well, the more a factor increases, the lower the result.
leverage we want to find the strategies that, for little effort and resources, produce big results. Most of the akido techniques show this in action.
loop dominance at different times there are different forces at play causing a problem or contributing to a desired result. If the 'opponent' anticipates and learns our likely defensive response, we will be defeated. On the other hand, if we consider that there are other forces at play that we can influence, we have more leverage points available to us
dissolving the problem- by repositioning and guiding the energy of our opponents in a non-destructive way, the situation changes.
good enough is best choosing just one solution or approach and maximizing it reflects adapting to a current situation, and when that changes quicker than we can adjust, we fail. a systematic solution emphasizes adaptability, and having enough of key resources and capabilities to respond effectively to a wide range of situations. --Don
Yay! I'm glad you were able to sense all those things in the exercise. I hoped that those concepts could come across but for some people (like me!) it takes a lot of practice before one feels the the movement of energy in the system.
One of the participants told me today that the concepts in the exercise helped her get un-stuck from the problems she was perceiving in her personal project. Blending with energy can be a beautiful thing, especially when one realizes that sometimes less energy can yield greater results.
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