I want to build on last week’s conversation with a short reflection from Scott Chaplowe and Joyce Mukoma’s Evaluation and the Transformational Imperative (see attachment). Their core argument is simple but important. The scale of today’s crises means evaluation cannot remain tied to business-as-usual thinking if it is going to support the wider transformational agenda reflected in the SDGs. They define transformational change not as incremental improvement, but as deep, systemic change in how a system functions.
What I find especially useful is that the article does not present transformation as a single new method. Instead, it asks what is holding evaluation back. It points to four familiar fixations: 1) project fixation, 2) temporal fixation, 3) quantitative fixation, and 4) accountability fixation. In other words, evaluation too often stays trapped inside linear projects, short funding timelines, metric-heavy logics, and compliance-oriented accountability.
Scott and Joyce then suggest several pathways forward…complexity-adaptive methods, principle-focused evaluation, new transformational criteria, data science, and alternative paradigms, including Indigenous and feminist perspectives.
So for this week, I’d like to ask, “If evaluation is to contribute to transformation, what exactly must change first…our methods, our criteria, our institutions, our underlying mindset, or something else?
RE: From Hindsight to Foresight: How Evaluation Can Become Future-Informed
Kenya
Steven Lynn Lichty
Managing Partner
REAL Consulting Group
Posted on 30/03/2026
Welcome to Week 2
I want to build on last week’s conversation with a short reflection from Scott Chaplowe and Joyce Mukoma’s Evaluation and the Transformational Imperative (see attachment). Their core argument is simple but important. The scale of today’s crises means evaluation cannot remain tied to business-as-usual thinking if it is going to support the wider transformational agenda reflected in the SDGs. They define transformational change not as incremental improvement, but as deep, systemic change in how a system functions.
What I find especially useful is that the article does not present transformation as a single new method. Instead, it asks what is holding evaluation back. It points to four familiar fixations: 1) project fixation, 2) temporal fixation, 3) quantitative fixation, and 4) accountability fixation. In other words, evaluation too often stays trapped inside linear projects, short funding timelines, metric-heavy logics, and compliance-oriented accountability.
Scott and Joyce then suggest several pathways forward…complexity-adaptive methods, principle-focused evaluation, new transformational criteria, data science, and alternative paradigms, including Indigenous and feminist perspectives.
So for this week, I’d like to ask, “If evaluation is to contribute to transformation, what exactly must change first…our methods, our criteria, our institutions, our underlying mindset, or something else?