This week marks the close of our blog series. For the past three months, this stimulating conversation has prompted a considerable amount of new thinking and pushed a number of sensitive buttons. On behalf of the IDEO team, I would like to thank GOOD for hosting this series and all of you who have contributed through blogging and commenting. We’ve certainly covered a great deal of ground—with contributions from design firms, foundations, social enterprises, and management…

This post is a response to “How Might We Emphasize Cost Effective Evaluation Tools?” Read more of the conversation here.

We face a time when efficiency, cost cutting, and preparation for the tough times ahead dominate our conversations. Many funding organizations are looking at reduced income due to diminishing returns on their investments, which can mean fewer grants and a much closer eye on what is invested in to begin with.

For some of the organizations I have…

Emphasizing cost effective evaluation tools can get us better results with less effort, enabling innovators to do more good with a given amount of resources. In this week’s discussion, we will think broadly about the costs associated with evaluation throughout the innovation process, and suggest we rethink how we approach evaluation in order to get better results with less effort.

To understand what it means to emphasize cost effective evaluation tools, let’s consider what types of costs…

This post is a response to “How Might We Use the Right Tools and Methods for the Task?” Read more of the conversation here.

“Right” means what is right for your organization, your project, your people, your environment, your context, your values, and your beliefs. I get frustrated with people who sell a specific tool or method without a full understanding of what an organization, project, or task is seeking to do. The answer rarely comes…

We recently met an organization who complained that it seemed as though evaluation methods are often simply an exercise in “checking the box” to appease their board and funders. For this organization, and many others like them, evaluation can be a time-consuming, costly process that does not lead to better decision-making or better work processes.

This is also at the heart of why so many large and expensive evaluation reports sit on the bookshelf—because before the evaluation…

This post is a response to “How Might We Measure in the Appropriate Timeframe?” Read more of the conversation here.

Many of the blog entries to date have focused on evaluation ranging from longitudinal research-based studies to system theory and the importance of designing the display of data for the greatest impact.

While many of my colleagues and new friends have written important and interesting posts, I am going to attempt to simplify my short entry down…

These short-term metrics are going to kill this great idea…
We need to give it more time….
We’ll just have to wait and see…
It’s impossible to know if this is working…

We’ve likely all heard these sentiments before (and probably thought them ourselves).

One of the most vexing challenges we face is how to simultaneously balance short-term and long-term results. Some things need to happen today; they just can’t and shouldn’t wait. Other equally or more important projects take longer…

This post is a response to “How Might We Visualize Data in More Effective and Inspiring Ways?” Read more of the conversation here.

What’s the difference between saying, “I’m pregnant” and this:

We have many dashboards available to us today in many contexts: finance, forecasts, consumption, demographics, etc. We witness the emergence of beautiful graphical representations more frequently than ever. Instead of flooding this post with examples of data visualization, I would like to put the spotlight on how we processes them, and what challenges that presents.

A couple of years ago, we were tasked at IDEO to design dashboard visualizations for Ford’s next generation hybrid vehicle, the Ford Fusion.…

This post is a response to “How Might We Measure What’s Most Meaningful?” Read more of the conversation here.

The dashboard is the holy grail of many non-profit boards—a repository of brightly colored bubbles that provides a quick diagnostic on the health of an organization. Green dots signal “this is going really well—no need to put focus here” and red dots warn “focus an hour of your meeting here—deep well of trouble brewing.” Of course, dashboards are…