Things get better slowly. Achingly, painfully, snails-race-past slowly. They got better slowly in the US. As Chris Blattman recently pointed out, Andrew Jackson was a child soldier and genocidaire. My parents were married in 1969. If my mom hadn’t insisted on finishing her graduate work first, they would have needed to choose their wedding location with care. Anti-miscegenation laws weren’t eliminated in the US until 1967.
Things get better slowly in development. Sometimes at a speed invisible to the naked eye. Often at a speed invisible to our careers. That’s why we do monitoring and evaluation; it’s meant to catch the accretion of tiny changes that will eventually add up to something that matters. You don’t need to be able to see it when you have numbers to track it.
Of course, not all projects have M&E that works. Sometimes you’re tracking the wrong stuff, and you don’t capture slow change. Sometimes you’re not doing a very good job of tracking anything. That doesn’t mean the intervention isn’t working; it just means your M&E isn’t working. Sometimes it’s not working because it’s not well designed, and sometimes it’s not working because the trade-offs aren’t worth it.
Sometimes you stand there, throwing rocks down a well with no visible change. Just plop, plop, plop. Then, all at once, the water overflows in a big splash. You can’t see that with your naked eye, and the wrong kind of M&E will only capture how many rocks you’ve thrown, not the infinitesimal increases in the water level. But sometimes paying the money to measure the water level means you can’t afford enough rocks to throw.
Look at gay equality in the US. Years and years of discrimination and abuse. Court cases that went nowhere. Change that didn’t come. And then, apparently out of the blue, equality started winning. Now we’ve got gay marriage in Iowa. What do you measure to capture that slow change? The number of failed legislative efforts is a meaningless number; it’s not like you get to 139 and you’re done. Incredibly detailed public opinion polling would catch it, but that’s serious money. Money you could spend on strategic litigation instead.
You need to believe in your theory of change if you can’t measure what you need to.
That’s an act of faith. Faith is what we’re left with when M&E can’t answer our questions. Faith is a tricky thing. It can get you Freedom Riders or the Mayan apocalypse. You should save your faith for when it’s deserved. But it is, occasionally, deserved. Sometimes we just hang have to in there.
(PS: this one’s for you, Danielle)
Great post by @alanna_shaikh on pace of change and why M&E is essential. “Snails Faith: on M&E and the pace of change” http://t.co/XShVrebj
Snail’s Faith: on M&E and the pace of change http://t.co/UDbbKRdz via @alanna_shaikh
Snail’s Faith: on M&E and the pace of change http://t.co/6IiNH9QK via @alanna_shaikh
deadline extended. @alanna_shaikh: I’m a little late for the deadline, J, but I tried http://t.co/UfNyaM9X @TalesFromthHood”
Snail’s Faith: on M&E and the pace of change http://t.co/g2Ee1M7c via @alanna_shaikh
“You need to believe in your theory of change if you can’t measure what you need to.” http://t.co/pKe7Pmip
“Faith is what we’re left with when M&E can’t answer our questions….”
@alanna_shaikh on M&E and the pace of change http://t.co/GFr0VBlG
Thanks. I needed that. :o)
+1 Change happens slowly in international development http://t.co/yySH3u0X via @alanna_shaikh #globaldev @dgateway
Snail’s Faith: on M&E and the pace of change http://t.co/7tXvXEsf via @alanna_shaikh
Absolute must read
– for life as well as work: “Change happens slowly in international development” http://t.co/dbLVE3XT
This post makes me think of this poem, which I have hanging on my office wall. It’s less about the necessity of the long slow incremental progress part and more about the absolute serendipity and wonder of that tipping point.
On the Nature of Understanding
By Kay Ryan
Say you hoped to
tame something
wild and stayed
calm and inched up
day by day. Or even
not tame it but
meet it halfway.
Things went along.
You made progress,
understanding
it would be a
lengthy process,
sensing changes
in your hair and
nails. So it’s
strange when it
attacks: you thought
you had a deal.
Change happens slowly in international development http://t.co/JKpvBcpD HT @DAWNSDigest
“You gotta have #faith”: On #development and #Monitoring #Evaluation: http://t.co/nDCnb8nr @nettra
Things get better slowly in development. http://t.co/tENzmNEm
Change happens slowly in international development – on M&E and the pace of change via @alanna_shaikh http://t.co/yOYcnn95
Snail’s Faith: on M&E and the pace of change http://t.co/oc58gH6t via @alanna_shaikh
Beautiful. “Sometimes paying to measure […] means you can’t afford enough rocks to…” http://t.co/1TAZpXV2 via @MartinaBail #globaldev
Nail-on-the-head post from @alanna_shaikh on M&E & the slow pace of change http://t.co/KK456m4s
[…] started with Alanna Shaikh’s dedication of this blog post almost two weeks ago, in an effort to drag me up from the development doldrums where one […]
Snail’s Faith: on M&E and the pace of change http://t.co/FUnX5e6amt