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Reynolds, Martin
(2023).
Abstract
Systems thinking is an arresting idea for meeting many of the systemic logistical, ethical, and political challenges of mainstream evaluation. Evaluative practitioners need to deal increasingly with logistics of interdependent variables in an evaluand, the ethics of contrasting perspectives amongst stakeholders including other evaluators, and the politics of institutionalised power relations relating to the governance of evaluations. Meanwhile, evaluators might be forgiven for the unsettled landscape of meaningful and appropriate systems thinking literacy to support their evaluative practice. The systems literacy can veer towards either seemingly being very shallow and flaky based on lose concepts of interrelationships, perspectives and boundaries (IPB), or alternatively very deep and intense, requiring considerable investment, for example, in learning constitutive rules of well-established systems thinking approaches. This paper maps out a more appropriate systems thinking literacy to work with in supporting evaluative practice – a literacy based on three principles of systems thinking in evaluative practice (STiEP) – relational thinking, perspective thinking, and adaptive thinking. The principles are accessible to evaluative practitioners; firstly, in dealing with systemic sensibilities without necessarily being shallow, and secondly being founded on traditions of critical systems thinking literacy without necessarily being obstruse. The principles can be enacted through a learning device – the STiEP heuristic - underpinned by an evaluative transdisciplinary approach of bricolage; a methodological approach that continually couples emergent systemic sensibilities with appropriate systems thinking literacy in order to generate STiEP capabilities.
The suggested STiEP principles are presented as a contribution to ongoing conversations amongst members of the Systems approaches to evaluation (SAE) thematic working group (TWG8) – approved by, and established under the auspices of the European Evaluation Society (EES) in 2022. The principles build on, whilst providing a point of departure from, principles published in 2018 by the sister American Evaluation Association (AEA) grouping Systems in Evaluation Topical Interest Group (SETIG). Whilst similarly based on ideas of IPB, the STiEP principles differ in terms of (i) having an explicit praxis orientation, (ii) being explicitly rooted in theoretical traditions of American pragmatism and critical social theory, and (iii) embedded in a methodological approach of bricolage that invites (multi) disciplinary, interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary conversations amongst practitioners.
Plain Language Summary
An appropriate systems thinking literacy to work with in supporting evaluative practice is described - a literacy based on three principles of systems thinking in evaluative practice (STiEP) – relational thinking, perspective thinking, and adaptive thinking. The principles are accessible to evaluative practitioners without necessarily being shallow, and also without being conversely obstruse. The principles can be enacted through a learning device – the STiEP heuristic - underpinned by an evaluative transdisciplinary approach of bricolage; a methodological approach that continually couples emergent systemic sensibilities with appropriate systems thinking literacy in order to generate STiEP capabilities.
CORE (COnnecting REpositories)
CORE (COnnecting REpositories)
