Excellence Institute Agenda

Hazel Symonette, Ph.D. University of Wisconsin-Madison [email protected] (608) 262-5347

MAKE EVALUATION WORK FOR THE GREATER GOOD: FUELING GENERATIVE VISIONS OF PROVOCATIVE POSSIBILITY AND RESPONSIVE PRAXIS IN LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT

KEEPING OUR EYES ON THE PRIZE: BACKGROUND AND CONTEXT An insistent chorus of hopeful voices from the future is vigorously calling our names! What is the leadership development world calling for from us and in what ways can the tools of the evaluation profession rise up to the complex challenges of this rapidly emerging world of diverse leadership needs and interests? Authentically hearing the full spectrum of voices through their multifaceted channels of communication will help us more fully know and better understand the wide range of hopes, needs and success vision expectations. They and we must keep our eyes on the prize in the midst of dynamic cross-cutting needs and demands and often turbulent social relations. What is “the prize”—the success vision—that various constituencies seek to keep their eyes on while vigorously exhorting us to do the same?

Like evaluators, Those involved in leadership development need refined capacities to authentically hear the full spectrum of stakeholder voices in full voice. Not surprisingly, then, responsive evaluation skills—informal as well as formal—are a critical competency to enable one to hear and enable other’s to hear a wider range of voices. within a leader’s repertoire. In fact, evaluation reigned supreme at the top of Bloom’s Taxonomy of Cognitive Skills (1956), a hierarchy which included six levels starting at the lowest level with the Knowledge domain (note: include illustration of Bloom’s taxonomy). In his taxonomy Bloom defined evaluation as...(note: perhaps add quote here) In 2001, Anderson and Krathwohl proposed revisions of the taxonomy that reversed the order of the top two cognitive skills and placed Synthesis/Creativity at the top of the cognitive domain. More recently (2004), however, W. Huitt proposed an even more useful re- conceptualization with parallel branches in the Educational Psychology Interactive: …it is more likely that synthesis/creating and evaluation/evaluating are at the same level. Both depend upon analysis [Level 4] as a foundational process. However, synthesis or creating requires rearranging the parts in a new, original way whereas evaluation or evaluating requires a comparison to a standard with a judgment as to good, better or best. This is similar to the distinction between creative thinking and critical thinking. Both are valuable while neither is superior. (p.1) Evaluative judgments are ubiquitous and often inescapably impactful. They are inextricably bound up with culture and context, so engaging diversity offers an essential resource. Excellence demands that we *know the prize* from multiple vantage points so that we can then more fully keep our eyes on it, in all its multifaceted complexity (note: refer readers to the theory of change chapter) . The ultimate prize resides in persons who receive an initiative’s services or products vis a vis its outcomes promises: what the success vision pictures them experiencing, learning, being able to do, etc. This is especially true when considering leadership development initiatives or initiatives in which leadership development figures prominently.

Hazel Symonette, March 13, 2005 1 CCLArticle342005 In higher education, for example, one asks in what ways and to what extent are curricular, cocurricular, pedagogical and other intervention activities breathing life into that vision for all segments of the target population? How do we know what we have accomplished and to what extent do our evaluative judgments resonate with the lived realities of the persons we evaluate — experiential validity? (note: can you rephrase to focus on leadership development of the role of leadership/leadership development in that context? Also this might be a good place to make explicit that not only those called “evaluators” need to develop and hone evaluation skills)

As organizations move away from command-and-control leadership structures towards flattening hierarchies and interdependent leadership roles, vibrantly responsive relationships and expansively dynamic information flows become foundational. Leaders need to provide resources that help themselves and others build their capacity in those arenas while mindfully articulating provocative possibilities in ways that can put firm wheels under success-vision expectations (note: it’d be helpful to provide an example of a success-visions expectation here). With an expansively refined set of polished lenses and filters, those involved in leadership development can serve as mirror-time stewards and cultivate others’ capacities to do the same. This is especially crucial in these times of fractured social contracts and eroded public trust. Leaders can help build capacities to craft sacred grace spaces for authentic and productive border-crossing communications where diverse stakeholders can hear and engage each other in full voice— increasing the prospects for speaking into their mutual listening. This is an especially critical role given increasingly diverse, globalized neighborhoods with many swiftly-changing, cross-cutting needs and interests. Teaching and allow leaders to use this capacity in leadership development initiatives, modeling this capacity in the evaluation of leadership development as well as evaluating the adoption of this capacity is important.

To maximize excellence, then, leaders need to proactively interrupt the operation of their own (and others’) often ethnocentric default settings because they result in trust-eroding inaccuracies, truncated understandings and twisted representations. Despite the best intents, they shortcircuit relationship-building potential. These difficulties are especially likely and problematic when differences are associated with “minority” status which is almost always dismissively treated as deviant and deficient or as extraneous variation and noise. Evaluators of leadership development initiatives must also be aware of their own ethnocentric default settings and those of the stakeholders of the leadership development initiative. These ethnocentric default settings are best explored during the design of leadership development initiatives (note: can you say more here about why and how to explore ethnocentric default settings and how not dealing with it can lead to poor design? For instance I imagine a bunch of folks designing a leadership development initiative without taking into consideration the wants/needs or cultural context/values of the group of intended participants) . Because of the complexity and unacknowledged/unseen nature of ethnocentric default settings, individuals often need to revisit how such setting are creeping into the process and values of initiatives.

We can keep our eyes on the often multifaceted nature of the prize through embracing culturally- and contextually-grounded planning and evaluation processes within our work settings and beyond. We can, then, more appropriately and effectively discern and respond to the full spectrum of voices from the future that are calling our names. These skills are especially crucial for leaders because they must model and be the change and thus radiate generative visions of provocative possibility. Excellence summons us to embed and embody such practices in the regular rhythms of our work and life path, rather than as episodic special events and products. There are no fast, easy shortcuts or quick-study intercultural/multicultural competence cookbooks, recipes or scripts. In fact, we rarely know, energize and engage excellence through mind and spirit-impoverished plug- in-sky approaches like 5-step cookbooks. In this chapter I share some of my experience and learnings from my own journey towards culturally- and contextually-grounded evaluation

Hazel Symonette, March 13, 2005 2 CCLArticle342005 processes.

Before embarking on this journey with me you should know, Tthe necessary journey is convoluted, open-ended and lifelong. The work commands that one stay light on one’s feet and responsive—making the path as it is walked and crafting the bridge as it is crossed. In such situations, assessment and evaluation tools are valuable path-discovering, path-making and path-navigating resources. I will describe these tools in this chapter. Through mindful increases in such developmental practices as part of the ordinary rhythms of professional and personal life, we each will walk with more conscious and authentic alignment of our espoused values/beliefs/principles/commitments. Talking-the-talk will more frequently and planfully coexist with walking-the-walk. As a result, we will more dynamically self-monitor with clarity and insight and, thus, more consistently Walk the Talk of personal, professional, organizational, institutional mission and vision. That is my expectation and my hope and, thus, the source of my passion around explicitly and tightly linking an appreciatively-grounded Excellence Imperative—personal, professional and organizational—with a mainstreaming evaluation agenda and a mainstreaming intercultural/multicultural development agenda. This is the creation-crucible and context from which the Excellence Through Diversity Institute emerges. I use examples from this Institute to illustrate concepts and tools associated making evaluation part of everyone’s responsibility and skill set and the cultural awareness and abilities to engage multiple perspectives in the process wisely.

KEY FOUNDATIONAL STRANDS

(note: if you could start out at a more general level then move into EDI as a case of those concepts/skills/etc. in action – that would help the reader apply the information to their context. I also wonder if looking a things from am individual and from an organizational level offer advice and tools for both)

Before moving into the particulars of the University of Wisconsin Excellence Through Diversity Institute (EDI), this section will provide a general background overview for each of the foundational strands that are being woven into the tapestry of this university-based leadership development initiative. EDI is a nine-month long campus workforce learning community for faculty, classified staff, academic staff and administrators.

 MAINSTREAMING EVALUATIVE THINKING AND BEING

(PROVIDE: OVERVIEW OF THE CONCEPT - GENERAL ADVICE –THEN MOVE TO EDI AS AN EXAMPLE/CASE OF THE MAIN IDEAS/ADVICE IN ACTION) As noted earlier, evaluative judgments are everpresent with broad impacts on the allocation and distribution of valued resources. Frequently, these practices occur with relatively little conscious transparency regarding judgment criteria and protocols. Furthermore, evaluation is often an obtrusive, non-neutral intervention, especially when in a formalized format. (Note: offer your counter to this approach in general? What advice do you offer?)

(Note: use EDI as a case to reinforce the advice you offer above – to give it more context and depth. “EDI accomplishes these things in the following ways...”) EDI is seeking to intentionally mainstream participants’ uses of evaluation as a conscious front-to-back capacity-building component of a leadership development intervention that works, first and foremost, for them in the service of their EDI project. More specifically, we are cultivating its use as a multilevel mirror-time resource—self-to-self, self-to-others and self-to-systems (note: it could be helpful to have a simple illustration here of the multi levels ) : one that has relevance at the visioning and design phase through the development and implementation phases and culminating in

Hazel Symonette, March 13, 2005 3 CCLArticle342005 outcomes evaluation and ongoing improvement reviews of the leadership development programmatic cycle. EDI continues to be an innovative project that is very much in process. We continue to model the uses of assessment and evaluation as iterative program development resources through major mid-course changes in order to be responsive to changing internal cohort needs/interests as well as external context needs and expectations (Note: how is this done in practice?).

 CULTIVATING EXCELLENCE AND COMMITMENT THROUGH HARVESTING EVERYONE’S WISDOM

(PROVIDE: OVERVIEW OF THE CONCEPT - GENERAL ADVICE –THEN MOVE TO EDI AS AN EXAMPLE/CASE OF THE MAIN IDEAS/ADVICE IN ACTION)

EDI uses participatory and collaborative approaches to more fully engage participants in sustainable co-creation processes that model, seed and support progressive change agendas. EDI aims to unleash healthy viruses through demystifying and making capacity-development processes transparent and accessible so that they can be more easily be passed on to others and thereby increase multiplier effects across campus and beyond.

 CULTIVATING MULTILATERAL SELF-AWARENESS AND RESPONSIVE PRAXIS (PROVIDE: OVERVIEW OF THE CONCEPT - GENERAL ADVICE –THEN MOVE TO EDI AS AN EXAMPLE/CASE OF THE MAIN IDEAS/ADVICE IN ACTION.

COULD THE SELF AS INSTRUMENT INFORMATION GO HERE? )

EDI encourages conscious self-calibration and mindfully cultivates multilateral self-awareness through the knowledge of and use of self as responsive instrument. This requires understanding self in dynamically diverse contexts within power and privilege hierarchies and understanding the contexts embodied in the self. Who one sees oneself as being and what one believes one brings to any given situation is very important--unilateral self awareness—yet still insufficient. Even more important for the viability, vitality, productivity and trust-building capacity of a transaction and relationship cultivation is multilateral self awareness: notably, who those that one is seeking to communicate with and engage perceives one as being? What relevant attributes do you and others perceive that you bring into a given context: those that you have to work with (assets/resources) versus those that you have to work on (blindspots, blankspots, triggers, issues)? What can you—are you perceived as being able to—call upon from your self-as-instrument portfolio to facilitate and support the success vision?

 CATALYZING GENERATIVE MOMENTUM AND COMMITMENT

( PROVIDE: OVERVIEW OF THE CONCEPT - GENERAL ADVICE –THEN MOVE TO EDI AS AN EXAMPLE/CASE OF THE MAIN IDEAS/ADVICE IN ACTION.

COULD THE MOBILIZING RESOURCES GO HERE?)

Appreciative approaches focus on the positive core through searching for generative reservoirs of provocative possibilities—notably, the life-giving forces that connect with and fuel energy flows. This calls for an appreciative mindset as well as a skillset, e.g., discovering, “tracking and fanning” the POSITIVE CORE of individuals, social relations and social structures in order to fuel what one wants to witness more of. Appreciative inquiry helps leaders to tap into and visualize the SEEDS, if not the full reality, of their success vision and to build others’ capacities to do the same regarding positive provocative possibilities.

CASE STUDY: THE EXCELLENCE THROUGH DIVERSITY INSTITUTE

Hazel Symonette, March 13, 2005 4 CCLArticle342005 This section will share insights and lessons learned through an appreciative, participatory approach to developmental evaluation that serves as a foundational component of a leadership development intervention. The University of Wisconsin Excellence Through Diversity Institute is an intensive train-the-trainers/facilitators workforce learning community organized around appreciatively- framed and culturally-grounded evaluation processes—notably, generative evaluative thinking and reflective practice for the campus workforce. Within our highly decentralized culture, EDI strives to build crosswalks among our many campus silos and mineshafts. We focus on cultivating and supporting leaderly behavior across our campus community rather than just focusing on the “anointed and appointed” occupants of leadership positions. The Excellence Institute is a leadership development resource for many campus initiatives and beyond. This intentional learning community strives for excellence through cultivating authentically inclusive and vibrantly responsive teaching, learning and working environments that are conducive to success for all.

In EDI, the most critical uses of evaluation are as micro-level self-assessment resources for participants, i.e., cultivating individual participants’ capacities to mindfully use evaluation tools and processes as personal and professional resources to increase the alignment of their actions with their envisioned contributions to the university and beyond. Such micro-level uses involve mainstreaming diversity-grounded evaluation processes as excellence-energizing competencies, formally as well as informally. EDI helps each participant to discover and bring forward their BEST SELF in full voice to do their best learning, their best engaging and their best work so that they can better help others do the same and also facilitate the university’s development of its capacity to sustain such transformational processes. Excellence personified!

SELF AS INSTRUMENT AND INTERPERSONAL VALIDITY Our sociocultural lenses and filters exert critical influences on the educational processes that we design and implement as well as our assessment processes and evaluative judgment-making. Who are we as knowers, inquirers and engagers of others? More specifically, who are we as educators and other service professionals and how do we know what we believe we know about ourselves?

 Who is the I that I know and believe myself to be?  Who is the I that others perceive and believe they know me to be? To what extent and in what ways do these beliefs converge or diverge? What might be some reasons for the likely disparities? What implications do such gaps have for appropriate and effective communication, educational and evaluation processes?

SELF AS INSTRUMENT AND MULTILEVEL ASSESSMENT Through mindfully attending to our ways of being and doing in the world, we discover that there are variations in the extent to which we are perceived as radiating and communicating respect, trustworthiness and soundness in our uses of self as knower, inquirer and engager of others, notably, in interpersonal validity. To develop and sustain this form of validity demands a lifelong learning and reflective practice journey that calls for dynamically scanning, staying light on one’s feet and responsive. The key evaluation domains are informed by three complementary stances: (1) the current self vis-à-vis the self-on-call in a given context, (2) the current self vis-à-vis the needs, interests, and expectations of others, and (3) the current self vis-à-vis the needs, interests, expectations of the relevant social systems or structures. A critically reflective self-assessment inventory needs to be conducted in each context to ascertain the utility and value of the social identities, roles and other attributes one brings to that context: notably, what one has to work with and needs to work on. Most often, such self-assessments are swift and informal but the quality would be enhanced by a more mindfully conscious, contextually-grounded and responsive review process.

It is especially important to know the overall configuration of one’s privileged identities and roles

Hazel Symonette, March 13, 2005 5 CCLArticle342005 since they tend to automatically confer what Cullinan calls presumptions of competence, presumptions of worthiness and presumptions of innocence. (p. ) In their shadow face, privileged identities are a source of “learning disabilities” and insensitivities but their radiant face is a potent potential source of personal power that can be strategically exercised to support ethnorelative inclusion, equity and more socially just evaluations.

CORE EXCELLENCE INSTITUTE INTERVENTION STRUCTURE AND PROCESS Cultivating self as responsive instrument challenges each of us to engage in dynamically interpenetrating assessment and evaluation at multiple levels—i.e., micro/macro figure-ground scanning, monitoring and responsive discovery and adaptation processes at the intrapersonal, interpersonal and organizational/institutional levels. The Excellence Institute steps into this challenge with an iterative experiential-learning and evaluation-grounded intervention model. Using self as responsive instrument, the EDI model uses double-loop learning to fuel a continuous spiral pathway towards excellence.

 WHAT NOW? TAKING STOCK AS YOU ARE LIVING YOUR “VISION “  Self-to-Self Baseline Needs Assessment  Excellence Institute Project Baseline Needs Assessment  What’s The Fit? Baseline Needs Assessment

 WHAT BECOMING? DECLARING COMMITMENT THROUGH TALKING THE TALK  SELF-TO-SELF Vantage Point (Foundational Prerequisite for All Projects)  SELF-TO-OTHERS Vantage Point  SELF-TO-SYSTEMS Vantage Point

 BY WHAT? PUTTING WHEELS UNDER THE VISION THROUGH WALKING-THE-WALK

 FOR WHAT?/SO WHAT? WALKING-THE-TALK AND DELIVERING OUTCOME PROMISES

 NOW WHAT? RISING EVER HIGHER THROUGH DOUBLE-LOOP LEARNING

MOBILIZING RESOURCE 1: EYES ON PRIZE FORCEFIELD The "forcefield" concept has a central role within the planning/development/assessment model I am creating for/with the EDI community. At each micro/macro vantage point noted above, the Eyes on Prize Forcefield aims to help participants explicitly declare their commitment and then keep the prize front and center. The forcefield summons an image of the self-as-responsive- instrument in the context of each participant’s project success-vision. As we walk in the world, multitudes of forces—people, processes, things, etc.--swirl around us. Each force may be judged as positive, negative or neutral relative to our success visions, values, beliefs, interests, orientations, etcetera. More specifically, it may serve as an energizing/enabling factor or as an erosive/undermining factor or as a non-relevant factor. A *key task* involves knowing, pumping up and organizing around the positive forces (assets/resources) in ways that make the negative forces irrelevant while also transforming key neutral factors into actively positive forces. The forcefield specifies the terrain for engagement and the action context for participants’ work: notably, what’s important to pay attention to—to look and actually see; to listen and actually hear; to touch and actually feel. Although the forcefield explicitly identifies and specifies the tension of push/pull forces, the focus should be on mobilizing and maximizing positive generative forces. This appreciative mindset sets the stage for strategically organizing around assets and resources in ways that neutralize or make irrelevant existing weaknesses, limitations, barriers. The expectation is that this framing will help us move beyond just Do No Harm towards honoring what I embrace as a core moral imperative: Leave Better Off.

Hazel Symonette, March 13, 2005 6 CCLArticle342005 MOBILIZING RESOURCE 2: THE STARFISH STORIES PORTFOLIO The Starfish Stories framework and survey instrument provides an evocative mirror-time resource for EDI participants to dynamically scan and evaluatively self-monitor their own behaviors and social relations: notably, to track their actions over time and changes that are making a difference. Starfish Stories deliberately serve as a “tracking and fanning” intervention resource as well as a data collection and documentation process that supports participants’ journeys during the Excellence Institute: self to self, self to others and self to systems.

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