Task 8 - Facilitate insights, adaptation and improvement | Australian Public Service Commission

Contents

The number 8 in bold black text, sitting on a white circle, surrounded by an light blue circle, denoting that this is Task 8

Formative evaluation drives improvement and innovation. When learning practitioners share evaluation knowledge through reporting, they’re helping others and themselves to learn.

This knowledge sharing taps into subject matter expertise and helps everyone learn from success and mistakes to improve learning initiatives.

Acting on insights

The insights generated through formative evaluation can foster a knowledge-sharing culture, guiding the allocation of learning resources, improving the design and implementation of initiatives, and achieving better outcomes.

Ultimately what matters is that the new evaluative knowledge that has been created is shared. Only then can learning initiatives be fine-tuned to advance agency outcomes in the future. This fine-tuning may include making adjustments to the logic model and what is needed to achieve the initiatives intended outcomes.

Facilitation

For this task, your role as evaluator transforms into that of a facilitator. The facilitator's job is to make it easier for the group to learn how to proceed together. To be constructive and improvement-focused, this participatory process must overcome biases that can thwart organisational insights, including:

preoccupation with success;
favouring action over reflection;
codes of engagement that limit innovation; and
an over-reliance on external experts.

Embed evaluative thinking

As the evaluation facilitator, you must embed evaluative thinking and evaluation findings into the process of reflection, dialogue and action planning. You must also enable group learning, tend to group dynamics and enable the flow of discourse. When what should be done is far from obvious, the facilitator focuses on collaborative sense-making and prioritises action.

Collaborative sense-making occurs though reflection and dialogue when people engage in the process of making sense of information about complex and dynamic situations. Often, this requires being able to scrutinise evaluation findings with an open mind.
Prioritise action-taking by considering possible options which make a positive difference and review the recommendations to operationalise the options. Good decision making relies on knowing what action it will take to bring about improvement, being clear about what needs to change, and as a result prioritising resources to achieve better outcomes.

Fact sheet 15 in the handbook provides a set of questions to prompt collaborative sense-making and action-taking, and describes deeply ingrained biases that can interfere with organisational insights.