By Dione Hills, Principal Researcher Consultant (The Tavistock Institute of Human Relations)
7th October 2019
Picking up on the CECAN webinar last year on the topic ‘How to evaluate – or commission – an evaluation when everything is messy’, Dione Hills (Tavistock Institute and CECAN Associate) was asked to give a key note speech last month at the Norwegian Evaluation Conference. The conference celebrated the 25th anniversary of the Norwegian government evaluation network, and the 10th anniversary of the Norwegian Evaluation Association, and provided the opportunity for evaluators and commissioners in Norway to reflect on what they have learned over the last few years, and what new challenges lie ahead.
The topic of the key note speech was ‘How to evaluate in challenging and complex settings’ and Dione drew both on her and Helen Wilkinson’s material from the CECAN webinar, and other CECAN experience, particularly from our work in compiling the complexity annex for the revised Magenta Book (cross government guidance on evaluation).
Later in the day, Dione joined a panel with Kim Forss, Alison Pollard and Ida Lindkvist discussing long term perspectives in evaluation, the subject of their forthcoming book on this topic. Dione spoke to the theme of how a complexity framework can help situate an intervention and its evaluation in a wider context that includes both the earlier history on which it builds and the potential for sustainability going forward.
The conference organisers later reported that Dione’s name had come up in large letters on a word cloud they created using interactive software to ask what people had enjoyed so far in the conference. Participants told them that they had found the presentations stimulating and easy to follow, which was quite something, since Norwegian was the language in which most of the other conference events were presented!
For copies of the two presentations, please see https://www.tavinstitute.org/news/norwegian-evaluation-conference/