Musings of a systems-thinker
Putting the ‘me’ in ‘MEL’
A joint piece written with Kasia Kedzia. Human-centred design (HCD) is something we have seen increasingly appearing as a way to think about monitoring, evaluation, and learning (MEL). Yet, despite the claims of adherence to HCD, these examples still regularly forget to put the ‘human’ in HCD. In fact, in contradiction to the spirit of…
The power of analogy: idea translation
One thing that has become clear to me over the years is that people are creatures of stories. From young to old, initiate to master, we use the art of storytelling to navigate the world. As children we learn about the world through story. Aesop’s tale of the turtle and the hare, for example, helps…
Reacting or adapting? Purposeful adaptation and response to contextual change.
Adaptive management is increasingly on the ticket for development programming, and has been crucial in the wake of covid-19. I’ve been working with adaptive programmes for most of my career, and yet the question I hear frequently is ‘but what does good look like?’. I wanted to take time to reflect on that. This particular…
“One person’s granite is another person’s monzodiorite”: why I’ve done away with ‘outputs’ and ‘outcomes’
When you say Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning (MEL) specialist, your mind may go to someone quite nerdy in a pair of glasses, illuminated by the glow of a computer screen practising a boring yet mysterious dark art in an ivory tower – you don’t necessarily think of a young woman gallivanting half-way up a landslide…
Hello world
Hello world. That’s the standard start, isn’t it? It’s always hard to kick things off. There are hundreds of guides on ‘how to write a punchy blog’ and ‘power signposting’ and other such jargony things that were ironically painful to read, so I am just going to roll with it if you’re willing to roll…
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Rebel with Causation 