Dear Antonio, Hector, Rituu, William, Peggy and Sean,
Thank you very much for these leads, I will enjoy the journey's they take me on.?
Hector, it seems that the IAF Journal has not been published since 2016 (if I am not mistaken), but past articles will be useful.?
Peggy, thank you for the resources around complexity theory, I will review your unpublished chapter, and look at the two references with interest and thank you for sharing that!
Sean, thank you for the Hardin reference, and those rules of thumb. This sounds very much like Jay Forrester from MIT who observed (and I paraphrase broadly) that complex social systems are incredibly resistant to change, that people do not tend to understand them, and when they try to intervene they are also likely to get the inverse of what they intended (or even to make matters worse).? I will enjoy reading Hardin.?
Bill, thank you for Kirkpatrick connection and it is interesting what Peggy shared about Marv Weisbord's reference to principles over techniques. I am finding literature from practitioners, but less with an empirical component. There are a number of studies that use university students as their subjects but less in real organizational contexts and even less in NGOs. The health sector is pretty good at documenting impact of faciliation in the field of nursing, mental health, and counseling, etc.? - business too from quality circles to large-scale facilitated change processes. Even short term impacts seem to be less a focus than tools, techniques, qualities, prestige of facilitators, etc.?
And, thanks Antonio, for those two additional avenues to follow, I hadn't thought of outcome evaluation.?
What a rich list, thank you all so much! I really appreciate this community for this kind of crowdsourcing.? This will keep me busy for a while (and if you think of others I will be happy to have them!)
All the best, Gillian
Gillian Martin Mehers