The second day of the conference brought more interesting food for thought. The morning keynote speaker was Tom Schwandt. Currently an academic at the University of Illinois, he has a psychology background, so his perspective was an interesting one. He talked about how society has an obsession with numbers and quantifying things. He made us all laugh by showing us some of the scales that exist today, including one for monitoring toddler’s digestive functions! His favourite scale came from the New Economics Foundation, who argue that GDP is not a good measure of how well the world is going. They have developed a measure called The Happy Planet Index that measures things like how connected people feel to each other, check it out! I think his conclusion was that we mustn’t get too obsessed with numbers, and instead focus on the more “fuzzy concepts” that actually tell us more in evaluation. Hear, hear.

I presented a panel today with Susan Williams (from DSE) on the evaluation we did of the Victorian Biodiversity Strategy. The talk went down very well. It described the bread and butter of what we do at Clear Horizon, including science panels, summit workshops and bringing stakeholders along for the journey. But clearly it was new to a lot of the audience.

However, it was really nice to be able to say that the evaluation did have significant influence! 　All the recommendations from the evaluation are listed in the draft revised strategy along with a page about how the revised strategy had accommodated these recommendations. It also appears that the process we used to engage stakeholders in the evaluation inspired the strategy team to continue with these relationships and develop a partnership approach. One person asked me in the question session: but when you do a summit workshop, you often end up analyzing things twice, is it worth it? I answered: absolutely it is worth it! How many evaluations are there that sit on the shelf and never get used? How many beautifully worded recommendations never get acted on? By getting the stakeholders and key actors involved in analyzing the data and developing the recommendations they are far more likely to get taken up! Lots of people came to talk to us afterwards.

Professor Eliot Stern closed the day with a keynote address about the possible demise of　the evaluation industry. It was a pretty gloomy talk! He began by talking about the demise of the industrial era, and how we are currently at a turning point. He called for a re-think of the whole evaluation profession, advocating that evaluators need to expand their services otherwise our space will be absorbed by others. He pointed out that we now have evaluators, auditors, quality assessors, designers, etc all working in separate silos.

He believes we have to become cross cutting, and use evaluative practice in different contexts. This was interesting for me because at Clear Horizon we already seem to do lots of things beside evaluation. We use our ‘evaluative practice’ in the fields of engagement, strategic planning, program design and organisational effectiveness. I think his talk was a reflection more of the situation in the UK, which I hear is going through terrible economic times and budget cuts. Nonetheless, the call for evaluation to embrace evaluation of evaluands that are ‘fuzzy’ such as policy evaluation, multi-partner strategies, emergent adaptive programs, felt relevant.