Moving Mountains: What Have We Learned?
Moving Mountains is moving towards the end. As we prepare to present a final report on the Initiative, we caught up with Katrina Donald, Moving Mountains’ Developmental Evaluator, to understand what we’ve learned and how we can all continue to learn.
As the principal consultant at ever-so-curious, Katrina Donald believes that listening and sensemaking practices bring us into community, reveal pathways forward, encourage and embolden us, and allow for greater impact. Her approach is relational and developmental; she works in partnership with people and organizations to co-design inclusive, collaborative and relevant evaluation strategies and organizational design.
Developmental Evaluation is an embedded approach to learning that is grounded in adaptation and complexity. It’s often used to support innovators – people who are doing things they haven’t done before – or things that haven’t been done before."
- Katrina Donald
Can you tell us what a ‘developmental evaluator’ does?
Developmental Evaluation is an embedded approach to learning that is grounded in adaptation and complexity. It’s often used to support innovators – people who are doing things they haven’t done before – or things that haven’t been done before. A developmental evaluator toggles between a few key roles depending on the work and what’s required.
Generally speaking, we support initiatives by:
- Identifying evaluative questions, gathering and making sense of data, and supporting the team to make use of findings to inform their strategy adaptation.
- Designing and testing small scale probes, interventions, and quick experiments to learn about early results
- Tracking what’s developing from the initial conditions and challenges of the initiative that the team wants to be sure to address and through the major developments as the work goes on.
- Framing – and reframing challenges, key concepts, assumptions about what is working and not working
- Documenting and providing accountability for the learning.
How did you work with the Moving Mountains Initiative?
For Moving Mountains, I mainly supported Jeanie and the Core Team as the initiative moved ahead – as a friend to the process in the thick of it, and in helping them to gather data, reflect, and contextualize their learning so it could inform the strategy from one phase to the next. Jeanie and I co-developed many evaluative tools like polls, dialogue processes, after action reviews, surveys, reflection templates, and interview scripts, and I also designed and facilitated findings sessions where the core team could make sense of the data, as well as supported the reporting processes the initiative was accountable to.
What did Moving Mountains learn about collaboration in the Bow Valley?
This has been a huge area of learning for Moving Mountains – mostly because there is no one way to collaborate! There are so many different collaborative models, so many ways to approach working together. It’s usually messy, complex, and a heck of a lot of labour – but the benefits and outcomes can be better than imagined. It’s clear our community has a huge desire for collaboration. A few key pathways we’re hearing about are:
- So much of successful collaboration seems to be centered around proceeding at the pace of trust. Taking the time to build relationships, align on why we’re collaborating in the first place, and understanding what’s important – whether we’re talking about different partners, teams, organizations, or communities working together. True collaboration is shared and there needs to be investment in the practice and processes of collaboration, and willing- and -readiness to shift out of entrenched ways of operating to find a way that works best for all parties involved – sometimes this actually feels more like proceeding at the pace of loss – taking time to tread carefully and being gentle with each other when shifting between new and established patterns of working. Rushing collaborative work usually results in shifts to the power dynamic, so that’s definitely something to be aware of – and transparent about.
- In addition to proceeding at the pace of trust, we’re hearing that regular synchronous connections between collaborators (between 1 – 4 times, virtually, by phone, or in person, per month depending on the scope of the work) is an ideal way to remain in good relationship and stay tuned to how the work is unfolding. Learn and Try groups also found it useful to connect asynchronously outside of regular meeting times – by email, text, direct message platforms – to keep the conversation moving along most efficiently.
- Another key pathway to enable collaboration we’re hearing about is organization and role clarity! Knowing who does what and when things happen doesn’t just materialize out of thin air. The governance structure is really critical to consider – how the project will be managed, what agreed on group norms and general ways of working are reasonable and helpful, what roles are required, and the division of responsibilities within the whole decision-making process helps keep the project momentum.
So much of successful collaboration seems to be centered around proceeding at the pace of trust. Taking the time to build relationships, align on why we’re collaborating in the first place, and understanding what’s important – whether we’re talking about different partners, teams, organizations, or communities working together."
What did the Moving Mountains Initiative learn about expanding civil society networks in the Bow Valley?
One of the interesting ways we’re seeing networks expand is through the definition of civil society itself. It wasn’t just non-profits and NGOs who responded to Moving Mountain’s calls to action – passionate individuals and grass roots entities were also drawn to this work. So right off the bat, people are meeting others they might not have known before – or even realized they were connected to via the social causes they care about. Through the community dialogues in Phase 1, Moving Mountains catalyzed conversation that created space for interested parties to identify what’s working and what isn’t within the 5 focus areas identified by civil society as those of priority focus (Local Economy and Indigenous Economy, Affordability and Livability – Food, Affordability and Livability – Housing, Mental Health and Wellness, Environment and Cultural Learning).
With the intentional design of these dialogues, community members were invited to connect deeply and begin to understand different perspectives on issues close to their hearts. Many relationships were seeded and continued to be invested in over the course of the initiative."
Another thing we noticed was through the learn and try groups – one of the questions Moving Mountains really encouraged was ‘Who else should we be talking to?’ The groups were encouraged to consider who was sitting around their table, or who was a part of their circle and then to expand that table or circle through research, recommendations, referral invitations, and by consulting broader connections. This made the groups more inclusive and began to really prime the pump for new ways of working together as folks were actively establishing new relationships and actively practicing new ways of being in relationship with each other.
I’d also like to highlight the two broader gathering events Moving Mountains hosted, the Civil Society Forums in August 2022 and the Gather and Share event March 2023. The design of these two connection spaces invited folks who connected to the work of Moving Mountains in ancillary, tangential, or even peripheral ways to hear about the work to date and have a chance to break out into smaller group conversations to discuss issues amongst themselves. Of course, more can always be done to expand networks. However, the way Moving Mountains moved between micro and macro efforts gave the community both intensive and accessible opportunities to come together respectively.
What have you found professionally and/or personally rewarding about this work?
I am super grateful to have participated in Moving Mountains. What I have really enjoyed is that it has been centered around doing things differently, together, in a community that I love being a part of, and learning as we go. To witness the labour, the trust building and connecting, the (often messy) non-linear wayfinding towards more inclusive and empowering outcomes has been such a rich experience for me. To get to support passionate, values-driven individuals and innovation processes that hold big questions is one of my favorite things about the work I do – I really believe that what has been learned during Moving Mountains will create ripples in this community, from personal learnings, to stronger relationships, from collaborative practices, to shifts in systems. I can’t wait to see what happens next!
The results from Katrina’s research will be available on the upcoming Moving Mountains digital report website.
WHAT’S NEXT
Moving Mountains wrapped up in May, 2023. The learnings – based on key data, research and reporting by Katrina Donald and others – will be available on a digital report website in June, 2023.
