In Steal like an artist Austin Kleon wrote: “The great thing about heroes is they can’t refuse you as an apprentice. You can learn whatever you want from them. They leave their lesson plans in their work”.
This visual shows the process of creating ReThink Social Change cards and some of the key books and tools that inspired their design.
Utilization Focused Evaluation & Developmental Evaluation
I think I have 5 of Michael Quinn Patton’s book. He’s been pivotal in my evaluation education. Evaluation that is anchored in its reality. He electrified us with his Developmental Evaluation idea at the 2017 American Evaluation Association Conference! He called for evaluators of social innovations to work in partnership with program decision makers to ensure their interventions stay fit-for-purpose and make evidence-based adaptions to respond to changing environments.
A seminal manual produced by Search for Common Ground (SFCG) in partnership with the United States Institute for Peace and the Alliance for Peacebuilding that focused on the specificities of the conflict transformation projects and interventions. It addresses the many challenges faced by conflict transformation practitioners in their attempts to measure and increase the effectiveness of their work with practical tips and examples from SFCG programs around the world.
Getting to Maybe. How the World is Changed
Compelling stories of diverse social innovators – what triggered them to start, how they navigated their journeys, and the shared patterns of those diverse journeys. It’s not linear and it’s just fascinating how people play the cards they are dealt in life!
Critique of practices in the institutional ecosystem of aid, combined with insights from complexity theory that explain why development is non-linear and often unpredictable. Loved the emphasis on alternate approaches including, positive deviance, appreciative inquiry, and network analysis. Opened the aperture on the limits of aid and its potential!
A book every manager and organization leader should read. Senge packs the five disciplines that drive learning organizations: personal mastery, mental models, team learning, building shared vision, and systems thinking. My key take away: “organizations learn only through individuals who learn. Individual learning does not guarantee organizational learning. But without it no organizational learning occurs”. Leadership, vision, and disciplines all play a part in creating a learning organization!
Heuristics: Foundation of Adaptive Behavior
I knew nothing about Heuristics when I stumbled on the term. At the time I was tackling the issue of reflective practice. How do can ReThink Social Change cards help people make sense of knowledge to made decisions. This book answers one main question: How do people make decisions when time is limited, information unreliable, and the future uncertain? Chapters that discussed how people learn, hindsight bias, One-reason decision-making… of course it went beyond my needs but it opened my aperture to behavioral science.
Systems thinking and social change
making sense of the complex problems of our modern world if we are going to bring about any kind of meaningful and lasting social change. The current linear, cause and effect, blame-laden way of seeing and understanding issues no longer works with these multi-relational, multi-faceted social dilemmas.
Written by David Kelly from IDEO, this book dispels the notion that only some of us were born with creativity in our genes. Through engaging storyteller, Kelly walks us through origins of so many creative confidence builders and techniques that we are familiar with today. Using examples and anecdotes around creative pursuits and how they brought impact. We all have the ability to be creative, despite what we might have been told and taught over the years!
Dr. Edward de Bono, the originator of the term Lateral Thinking, dedicated his life to inspiring, encouraging and enabling us to be better and more creative thinkers. He created the famous The Six Thinking Hats® method which I used to enable individuals and teams to be more receptive to new ideas and to develop them constructively. This book helped me further unlock my mind. It contrasts lateral thinking with vertical thinking. That of Circlers and frameworkers if you will! It also gives strategies/exercises for how to set the stage for creative exploration.
Luma Institute Innovating for People
How do individuals and teams actually become more innovative? LUMA believes any individual, team and organization has the potential to innovate, but may not know how. They harnessed the power of human-centered design and distilled the most useful tools of ethnographic research, participatory research and evaluative research so that you and I can can tackle problems of all sizes. I discovered the method in 2016, first tasted its refreshing tang in 2020 when I became a practitioner, and in 2023 I drank the kool-aid and become a Certified Facilitator of the methods.
The Method Kit creates analog tools make it easier to work with everything from small projects to urban planning. From brainstorming in meetings to creative planning sessions. The inspired the Beta version of the cards to better clarify the terms/concepts of each card.
Thanks to all of these for the explosions that happened in my mind when I read them, used them… brought their ideas together!
Cheers,
Ratiba