Date: Tuesday, December 3, 2024
I’m Mari Gasiorowicz; I am an internal evaluator, and I lead capacity-building for Systems Thinking at Public Health Madison & Dane County, Wisconsin. Over the last 35 years, I have also worked in state government, international development, and consulting. My current focus is on Systems Thinking—seeing the big picture and focusing on interactions as much as on the parts. I strive to bring that lens to my evaluation practice.
Our team’s primary role is to help health department staff create evaluation plans for their programs, ranging from childhood lead safety to food inspection to violence intervention. Some programs explicitly identify systems change as a goal. For example, programs that lead coalitions want to know whether their Collective Impact work has strengthened relationships and thereby improved the quality of work. Social network analysis measuring the strength of ties among nodes (people or organizations) can help answer that question. Other programs serve individual clients and also want to measure their influence on the greater system. Ripple Effects Mapping provides feedback on their impact and serves as a catalyst for further collaboration. For these systems evaluations, FSG’s Evaluating Complexity, is a navigable bible.
But many programs do not identify systems change as a goal. Yet in public health and other social and educational sectors built on centuries of oppressive, inequitable systems, every evaluation should be a systems evaluation, just as every evaluation should center equity.
As evaluators, we routinely ask equity questions.
Similarly, our agency finds the Habits of a Systems Thinker cards to be helpful. The pictures and questions on the back push evaluators and program staff to think both more broadly and in more connected ways. For example, the habit, Recognizes that a system’s structure generates its behavior informs how we think frame and understand our cross-divisional efforts.
We asked questions informed by DP Stroh’s Systems Thinking for Social Change in interviews about housing quality and safety—questions like:
Many of the people we talked with really enjoyed the interviews and credited the questions for the non-blaming, generative nature of the discussion.
Even for programs without systems change goals, Systems Thinking strengthens their work. In a two-hour training session, program staff learn about characteristics of complex systems and then identify them for their own programs. These include purpose, elements, boundaries, dynamics, and interconnections. After listing the elements, like clients, staff, community partners, state funders and regulators, data systems, and policies, the teams draw a map of their system. This is challenging and it’s when the aha moments occur. In this process they ask questions, like:
One manager observed about two of her programs, “Making the map was very useful for organizing our thoughts and providing clarity around what we wanted this work to look like.”
We evaluators have evolved over the decades to center equity. Similarly, we can both better understand, and we can facilitate connections within and across programs and partnerships by asking Systems Thinking questions at each step of our evaluation process.
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