If nothing else, my recent Achilles’ tendon injury is providing some good food for thought (and blog posts). One obvious effect of being on crutches is that I can’t do everything I used to: driving is right out, going long distances on foot is not an option (and even a short trip outside is dicey […]
“Walk a mile in my shoes.” It’s a common metaphor, almost to the point of cliche, but one that I’ve been living, quite literally, for the past few months. Back in November, a moment of inattention on a set of stairs sent me tumbling and ended with a fractured metatarsal on my left foot and […]
It all starts with an idea. A new way of doing things. A risk, but a calculated one: if it pays off, it could change the whole game. After gathering some information and learning a bit about the context, we’re off and running, first in one direction but always adapting in response to conditions and […]
Earlier this week I came across an article in the New York Times on a third option for resolving the fiscal cliff in the United States, though in my opinion they could have been talking about any financial challenge, be it individual, organizational, or communal. When there’s a shortfall, the solutions tend to be framed […]
December marks the five-month anniversary of Strong Roots Consulting (five months and one week, if you use the July 11th date of my first post), and six months since I moved back to the prairies after living in Ontario for twelve years. There are many factors to credit for my surviving and thriving through these […]
One local initiative that I’ve recently joined is The Kolo Project, a community focusing on growing Saskatchewan’s entrepreneurial roots. At a recent steering committee meeting, we worked to refine our vision and mission and created a blueprint for our activities in the coming new year. Towards the end of the meeting, we were asked to […]
One resource that I have started to draw on are the websites and particularly blogs of others doing similar work in the fields of evaluation and community practice. Among the useful sites I have found are Chris Lysy’s EvalCentral which brings together several dozen blogs (including this one) that have a common interest in evaluation, […]
Chris Lysy over at Fresh Spectrum posed an interesting question: Do you have the capacity to fail? Venturing outside of “the way things are done” could lead to amazing success and a new approach to a previously unsolvable problem, but the more innovative and unproven the idea, the greater the risk that it falls flat. […]
It’s been a while since I blogged about one of the chapters from Getting to Maybe. I think now is the right time to return to that book after getting a refresher on developmental evaluation (which has been described as the “practice” to Getting to Maybe’s “theory”) and because the chapter on the Powerful Stranger […]
As pragmatic as I usually am, I sometimes get hung up on words – see here and here for two examples where I debate over the meaning and connotations of words that I use to describe myself and my work. More recently, before my trip to the American Evaluation Association conference I was grappling with […]