We are all evaluators

I am currently several years into a set of evaluation and research contracts with organisations and local councils across the UK, working on place, on museums and galleries, and on creative health. Different sectors, different scales, different pressures. What they have in common is how they began.

Almost every team told me, in the first meeting, that they were not evaluators. They said it as a warning. We do not have the skills, we do not have the capacity, we can’t do this.

Then I asked them what they thought of the last thing they ran. And they talked for 40 minutes.

That is the whole of it, really. Evaluation is asking 'what did you think?' and then being disciplined about what you do with the answer. The rest is scaffolding. The language around it has sometimes been made deliberately technical and it has cost the sector something, because it has convinced people who are already doing the work that they are not qualified to come near it.

My early months of working with people are mostly demystification. I point at what is already happening. The team who debrief in the car on the way back. The front of house staff who know exactly which room people leave first and why. The producer who changed the running order in week two because something was not working, which is a finding acted upon, though nobody wrote it down. The skills are present. What is missing is permission and a shared language for it.

What happens next is the part I did not expect when I started working this way. Teams do not simply become willing. They become hungry. They want to know about sampling and about ethics. They want to know how to hold a difficult finding in a room with a funder. They start building their own practice, in their own idiom, shaped to their place and their people rather than borrowed from a template. Evaluation stops being a thing that happens to them at the end of a project and becomes something they use on a Tuesday, to decide whether to keep going, to make a change, to reassure themselves that a hard call was the right one, to hold themselves to account when nobody external is asking.

And they are not frightened of any of it. Not of the method, not of the negative finding, not of the funder. That loss of fear is the actual outcome of the work. Everything else is a report.