1049 - Applying Futures Thinking and Methods to Evaluation

Abstract Information: The past few years have demonstrated that our economy, climate, politics, and social order can change much faster than in past decades. Our present, and certainly our future, will continue to be volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA). For our evaluation clients, it is no longer enough to reflect on the past and the present in program development. Evaluators must actively anticipate what may happen in the future and feed that information back into decision-making and evaluation planning. Futures studies and foresight, the ability to use futures methods to inform strategy and decision-making, provide a rigorous and proven set of tools to perceive, make sense of, and act upon ideas about the future. In this Professional Development session, we present and demonstrate methods that can be readily adapted to evaluation practice or the Futures Wheel and Wind Tunneling with alternative scenarios. Participants will also explore the macro forces for change commonly referred to as ‘trends’ and ‘weak signals’ that are just emerging. As a result, participants will learn a new way of thinking that will strengthen evaluation thinking, helping them anticipate and integrate future opportunities and challenges in their evaluation plans.

Relevance Statement: The pandemic was an important wake-up call for evaluators to be forward-thinking and anticipate (and prepare) for the unexpected. Society was caught off guard and the consequences were devastating. Evaluators were no exception. In a rapidly changing world evaluators need to work with their clients to be able to think about possible futures and how they might be enabled, avoided, mitigated, or exploited. They need to develop nimble, forward-thinking designs that can navigate change as well as future-proof their theories, findings and recommendations. Similar to cultivating their ‘evaluative thinking’ skills, evaluators need to engage in a new way of thinking about and using the future or ‘futures literacy’ (Miller, 2018). At the field level, this requires a shift in orientation away from ‘rear view mirror’ thinking and assessing a program or policy ex-post with limited thought to how to increase a program’s resilience in the face of great change. As Carden (2023) argues, evaluators are almost by definition trapped in the past, and develop evaluation findings and recommendations that are an extension of the past and often fail to incorporate novelty and changing context. In practice, evaluators can no longer assume projects will continue as is; they must replace their aspirational sense of reality with one that is significantly “post-normal” and often complex and chaotic (Schwandt, 2019). This means that simple theories of change and methods characterized by linear ‘if then’ thinking precludes consideration of larger macro forces for change commonly referred to as ‘trends’ and a wider awareness of ‘weak signals’ that are just emerging. An easy first step to opening up the evaluator 'gaze' to include the future in evaluation thinking and design is to adopt foresight methods that can support specific activities in the evaluation process. The Futures Wheel, a method that identifies primary, secondary, and tertiary consequences of a specific trend or event can be used to broaden participant understanding of change when developing a program theory of change. Alternative scenarios of the future in 2040 can be used to test the resilience and fit of specific evaluation recommendations. Additionally, they provide a systems perspective that characterizes relationships and impacts.

References: Carden, F. (2023). Back to the future: Are we trapped in our past? Evaluation and Program Planning. Vol. 97. Miller, R. (2018). Futures Literacy: Transforming the Future. In Transforming the Future. Anticipation in the 21st Century. Routledge. Schwandt, T.A.(2019). Postnormal evaluation. Evaluation. Vol. 25(3) 317-329.