Practising what we preach: our reflection and learning for 2022
By Emma Thomas and Judy Gold
At Cultivating Change, we have been working for a few years, learning and adapting our ways of working, as we evolve into a fully fledged partnership. We even have a website now!
We continually aim to improve by reflecting and learning about our practices, and our values. We try to practice what we preach! We do this in several ways.
Working in partnership with someone in consulting work means you always have a critical friend to problem solve, add to your thinking and get immediate feedback on your work. We do this almost every day with each other.
We also aim to collaborate with other consultants for the same reason - to learn new ways of working or bring in skills that we don’t have. By working together we add value for our clients, and add more tools to our tool kit. A shout out to Natasha Ludowyk, Jo Farmer and Fran Demetriou for your awesomeness.
We try to replicate a partnership approach directly with our clients by working in partnership with them. This includes having regular check ins, getting regular feedback and input on all aspects of a project, not just on deliverables. Our clients are experts in the communities and stakeholders they are working with and their projects. We continually learn from our clients.
We also have structured monthly check-ins at Cultivating Change. We discuss strategic challenges and opportunities, and debrief on things that are going well and not so well both from a business perspective and project perspective.
Finally we have just completed our first cycle of our six monthly reflection and learning processes. We asked ourselves - what did we do well this year, what didn’t we do so well and how could we do better?
We also asked our clients and other collaborators to provide feedback on a Miro board including what has changed for you as a result of working with Cultivating Change?. Because well - we are MEL people and we want to know if we are making a difference!
Some key themes we thought we would share that clients said about us:
People liked our:
Patience, responsiveness and flexibility
Ability to bring different evaluation approaches and frameworks to our work including trauma informed, systems thinking, and make it relevant to context
Collaborative ways of working and good communication
Difference we made:
Helped people thinking differently and more deeply about how they work to affect change
Helped to articulate how change happens for organisations and projects
Gave marginalized communities a voice and brought meaning to clients work
Showed evaluation can support learning, not just accountability
Things we could do better
Make clear expectations around internal resourcing needed for project to be a success, particularly for small organisations
How do you learn and improve in your work? We would love to hear from you, and particularly from consulting groups or internal evaluation teams.
Front image photo credit: Sourced from Active self-reflection promotes meaningful learning (a good read!)
