Book Review: Developmental Evaluation by Michael Quinn Patton
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I recently finished reading Michael Quinn Patton’s Developmental Evaluation: Applying Complexity Concepts to Enhance Innovation and Use (2011) cover-to-cover. I am working on a project using Developmental Evaluation (DE) and felt like I wanted to take a deeper dive into my understanding.
I decided to read it slowly, taking lots of notes, using my highlighter (until it ran out of fluid!), and writing notes to myself in the margins. I read only a handful of pages a day, and sometimes only a handful a week. It took me just over 3 months to finish, but I wasn’t in any rush.
Patton has a conversational style of writing. It’s casual, full of puns, jokes, tangents, and many, many stories. It’s no surprise, then, that his teaching style is by example. He doesn’t so much tell you how to do DE as he shares real-life stories and examples. He’s offering you the privilege of experiencing his experiences through his storytelling. The book is not light on examples to draw from.
Though he tries his best to lay out how the narrative showcases DE, it’s tricky. DE is many different things depending on your context. In fact, I struggled to even find a concise definition of DE! Briefly, DE is about “bringing evaluative thinking and data to bear, as a project is conceptualized and developed.” (page 3); “DE is designed …to nurture development, emergent, innovation and transformative processes.” (page 7).
If he’s not teaching through example, he’s teaching through repetition. Which, let’s admit it, is annoying when you’re in it, but super helpful in the long run. It makes those key messages sticky! He has dedicated ample pages to helping the reader identify situations in which DE may apply and explaining what about those situations make them a good fit for DE.
A quick rundown of the book goes like this: early chapters are dedicated to “What is DE?” and the role of the evaluator. It then moves into identifying situations to use DE – it doesn’t apply to every evaluation, so how does one know?
The book takes a bit of a detour (in my opinion) in Chapter 5 to talk at length about systems thinking, before going back to how DE applies to the lifecycle of complex programs. It’s not until Chapter 8 that we start to get a little more practical about how to do DE. But note that I say “a little.” One of the key points of the book is that there is no one way or one right way to do DE. It’s not about the methods or the approach so much as the principles and desire to develop that are foundational to DE. However, in Chapter 8, he does offer a practical list of inquiry frameworks that can be used in DE.
Chapter 9: “Bricolage” (meaning “something constructed or created from a diverse range of available things”) is like the junk drawer of DE information. It’s full of “other things to know about DE” before the book is wrapped up in Chapter 10: an excellent conclusion, summarizing places to use DE, core characteristics of DE and necessary characteristics of the evaluator.
If you don’t have the time to read this text cover-to-cover, I might suggest Chapters 1 and 2 for a comprehensive overview, and Chapters 8, maybe 9, and 10 for more practical application tips.
The tricky thing about DE is that one can’t really explain how to do it. It is not, itself, a methodology. Reading this book and hoping to gain a step-by-step how-to is a misstep. This book explains why DE is a necessary tool in the evaluator tool kit – why formative and summative evaluation are sometimes insufficient. The storytelling throughout the book is the point. DE is about going on a journey to arrive in a place that maybe you’d thought of, but likely didn’t predict. I found reading the book slowly to be helpful. Instead of blazing past the stories, I allowed myself time to think about them, to reflect, and I think that helped me to understand DE just a little bit more.
It was great to have a project that I’m actively working on to apply some of the strategies, to shape my thinking, and to reinforce key messaging to my clients using Patton’s own words. “I need to be included in strategic planning sessions and discussions” and “my job is to provide you with useful information in as-close-to-possible real-time, and for you to use that information. Let me facilitate a discussion with the team about what this means for you” have become my regular catchphrases.
I think the intended audience for the book is the evaluator: the user of DE, but it could also be a valuable read for those interested in social change, and those who don’t know how evaluation can help in their innovative, unplanned, complex situation.