ALE Webinar Series: Systems Thinking as Fertile Ground for Evaluation

Based on the overfilled session at the Annual Learning Event, CES-NCC is bringing you a series of Lunch & Learn webinars in April.

Buy your April webinar package for:

FREE for ALE delegates
$50 for CES Members
$75 for Non-Members

April 1, 2025
Systems Thinking as Fertile Ground for Evaluation

Systems thinking is an approach and a suite of tools that helps to think and act in complexity. It invites us to examine issues in terms of systems, and to focus on the interdependencies. Systems thinking rejects fragmentation, focusses on relations, embraces contradictions and invites deeper, more transformative questions (and action).

This presentation will propose systems thinking as a framework to enhance the scoping and planning of evaluations. In 2023-2024, I worked as an analyst at la Maison de l’innovation sociale in Montreal, a non-profit organization that puts systems thinking at the core of its work to improve communities. I will share with other evaluators some thoughts and references that can be part of an underpinning strategy to work in complexity and align evaluations with the greater good.

The presentation will cover:

Briefly: what is Systems Thinking and some key concepts
Ideas for applying systems thinking to evaluation scoping, questions development, and background research for planting the seeds of change
Systems thinking skills that evaluators can develop and other references to consult