My friend Geoff Brown has done a good write up for the Show Me The Change Conference in Melbourne this May. I’m looking forward to taking part not least because I get to collaborate with Geoff as well as Viv McWaters, Chris Corrigan and Anne Patillo.
The event is focussed on how we can assess the success of behaviour change, in particular in the context of improving sustainablity.
Evaluation is one of the most challenging and frustrating parts of any change programme. Here in the UK, we’re painfully aware of the shadow side of performance targets in areas like health and education. Far too often, complex problems are framed as merely complicated, and treated as if they are engineering challenges.
Sadly, that kind of engineering approach is often applied to conferences, where expert keynotes and panels tend to predominate, as if everyone in the audience is expected to learn the same things, at the same pace, in the same way. The complexity of the audience is ignored.
So I’m happy that this event is going to much more conversational, using Open Space of much of the time. Geoff’s done a slideshow with a little more background:
