There are many ways of being an evaluator. In my earlier post, I muttered briefly about the need to describe the role and agree it with the people involved in the evaluation. I'm not sure it's possible to always be as clear as this. And in my post at the beginning of the year, I talked about the need for the evaluator to go more slowly - have a hand on the brake.
Yesterday, Norman and I shared a conversation with a colleague about a new strategy which we think is important to the University, but risks (we think) becoming a rhetorical position, with no action required. SCEPTrE's agendas are aligned with this strategy and we both see value in the direction of travel it signifies.
Because we are busy, we don't often work together in this way, but I found it incredibly valuable to be an informal, unspecified 'process evaluator', watching what was happening, observing my own feelings and telling a story to myself about the different intentions and needs of the other two people in the group. On the walk back to the office, I heard Norman's story of what he had seen and briefly shared my own version of events, in an appreciative sort of way. Together - as a three-some - I think we each showed different qualities of creativity and leadership - hard and soft: encouragement, pushing and pulling, clarification, identifying shared purposes, opportunities to voice anxieties and reservation with a final push to action.
As process evaluator, and because I think it's part of my role in this team, I found myself subtly 'giving permission' to go a little more slowly - mediating between the drive forward that Norman offers and the reluctance to rush in that our colleague was holding. We shall watch with interest whether this approach is better than the way we sometimes work, where the resistance happens after the push forward.
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