Big Green Challenge blog

It’s all in the mind: learning from Big Green Diffusion

Kerry McCarthy - 14.11.2011

Between October 2010 and March 2011 Cassie Robinson and I worked with NESTA's Big Green Diffusion (BGD) programme, evaluating the journeys taken and impact made by seven projects seeking to explore how their successful environmental initiatives could be spread to other communities more quickly and at greater scale.

In this guest NESTA blog I would like to reflect on something that was very salient in our work on the BGD - the importance to diffusion of recognising the need to consciously change mind-sets, to create spaces & experiences for people to shift between active, doing state of mind to ones which are more reflective, evaluating and focused on diffusion

Three minds

So, thinking about states of mind - and inspired a bit by Edward De Bono's six hats - imagine now three different minds.

Use whatever image works for you, maybe three brains, three empty skulls or three thought bubbles.

Your first mind is 'doing'. Fill it with thinking about keeping a project going, managing people, funding applications, day to day work, following up with contacts and opportunities as they are presented. Doing mind is full, focused just ahead and moving fast.

Your second mind is 'evaluating'. Fill it with reflective questions, about whether and how things have been working and how you can be sure. There might be some data floating about in there, or feedback from the people you have been working with. Evaluating mind does not move quite as fast as doing mind, and is focused a bit in the past.

Working on evaluations or learning support you get used to the mind-set shift that people have to make, from 'doing' and selling their project or organisation to 'evaluating' or critiquing. Part of good evaluation design is using tools and techniques to facilitate this shift in the most effective way.

With the Big Green Diffusion programme there was a third mind to work with. For the purposes of this post call your third mind 'diffusing' (but you could substitute diffusing with scaling, sharing, spreading, growing or replicating).

Diffusing mind is thinking about how to release value, how to spread the benefits of action more widely.  It is looking into the distance and lots of people are running around in there, bumping into others they didn't expect to see and making new connections. Diffusing mind is thinking about how to demonstrate relative advantage over current practice, about how to get in front of people and show how smoothly and easily their idea can be adopted and adapted by others.[1]

Through the evaluation we tried to be conscious of and work with all three minds - doing, diffusing and evaluating - and their different points of focus. For example, we spent a day with each of the projects to capture an in-depth story of what they were trying to achieve and where they were on their journey. Using the projects' proposals to NESTA we visualised the main parts of each journey as a set of picture cards, which projects arranged in order and added to. This allowed us to get the activities, the 'doing', down on paper quickly, with time for deeper reflection to identify the model for diffusion within all the climate change focused activity.

Focus on diffusion as a core business

One of the main findings from Big Green Diffusion was that to be successful projects need to focus on diffusion as core business, to keep their projects up and running while being focused on how best to support the diffusion of their work. To achieve this means being able to shift back and forth between doing mind and diffusing mind, between keeping yourselves going and spreading the essence and value of what you are doing in the fastest, most widespread and sustainable way. It's a big ask.

NESTA designed the Big Green Diffusion programme with this challenge in mind. The support provided to the projects shifted their focus away from day to day activity by creating space to dislodge them from their comfort zone of 'doing' into thinking about diffusion. The initial workshops[2]  for supporting the projects were rich in encouragement and techniques to refocus on how to diffuse rather than do. 

Despite this specific focus on diffusion, it was challenging for most projects to see their work as diffusion activity rather than climate change activity. Often the projects were only slipping into diffusing mind now and again; they were mainly in doing mind. By the end of the programme some projects had made a clear transition, for example during the final action learning workshop the Local United team described their "core business is autonomy transfer and network management".

There is important learning here, on the need to manage expectations about what can happen 'organically' in terms of diffusion. Funders might want to consider building in structured support to help practically minded community groups shift in between the focus of doing to diffusing.

The importance of data and indicators

Where does all of this leave evaluating mind? Without a doubt the projects were engaged in considerable reflection and thought about their work, individually and when they came together as a group for action learning workshops. But evaluating mind didn't have much data with which to test and validate different reflections, or to demonstrate the extent of spread of their projects. This may reflect the initial lack of focus on diffusion - compared to the focus on day to day running of projects - or it may reflect limited capacity, time and insight on how to best collect and manage data. Going forward it would be useful to plan for simple indicators that capture how projects release the value from their work to others, preferably as part of structured, rapid feedback loops to help rapidly identify, in real time, what is working - and what should change.[3]

Kerry McCarthy works with evaluation, learning and innovation methods to support the design and delivery of more effective services.

You can contact her at Kerry@kclarity.org and find out more about her work through Twitter @kclarity

[1] Adapted from Rogers, E. (1995) The Diffusion of Innovations (4^th Ed)New York: Free Press

[2] Undertaken by Bath University

[3] For a more in depth discussion of this approach see http://www.mcconnellfoundation.ca/en/resources/publication/a-developmental-evaluation-primer; http://www.mcconnellfoundation.ca/assets/Media%20Library/Publications/DE%20201%20EN.pdf and http://www.scribd.com/doc/57548064/Evaluating-Innovation