Unlocking the Power of Developmental Evaluation: Learning, Adapting, and Designing for Innovation
Have you ever wondered how we can effectively learn from our actions, adapt to changing conditions, and take accountability for our decisions? Well, Developmental Evaluation (DE) offers an answer. Let me guide you through what DE is, its applications, and the process involved, and help you determine if it’s the right fit for you.
What is Developmental Evaluation?
So, what exactly is Developmental Evaluation? It’s an innovative approach to evaluation pioneered by Michael Quinn Patton. DE supports evaluating programs, services, and products operating in complex and dynamic situations. These situations are characterized by interconnecting relationships, evolving factors, and context-dependent variables that greatly influence the behaviour and outcomes of what you aim to evaluate.
Unlike traditional evaluation approaches, DE emphasizes gathering real-time, context-specific data, not creating generalizable findings. It focuses on synthesizing and making sense of this data to inform decision-making. DE achieves this by asking three fundamental questions throughout the process:
- What is being developed at present?
- What do our findings about what’s being developed…
