Date: Wednesday, August 26, 2026
Good morning, AEA365 readers. We are Cristina Magro and Beverly Parsons. Before joining the evaluation field, Cristina worked as a linguist, and Beverly as a medical technologist and a physiological chemistry research assistant. Drawing on our expertise and experience in evaluation, neuroscience, language, culture, epistemology, systems thinking, and cross-cultural evaluation, we argue that the evaluation field needs profound changes to address the accelerating systemic imbalances and to fulfill its transformative role, an argument we developed in the paper ‘Revisiting evaluation as a science’, at the JMDE forthcoming publication. The fortunate conjunction of our gazes enables us to navigate situations, drawing on Scriven’s aspirational transdisciplinary model, which highlights three dimensions of evaluation: epistemological, political, and disciplinary. Our focus is on the epistemological pillar, advocating for shifts that can make evaluation more adaptive and better equipped to meet today’s challenges.
Evaluation shares with scientific fields and institutions the need to rethink its core pillars, including the belief in objectivity independent of interpersonal agreements, linear causality, in which one event is selected as producing one or more targeted effects, predictability, the belief in expected ‘normal’ outcomes, and reductionism, an attitude underlying the Western scientific stance. Drawing on the social-ecological systems standpoint and Maturana’s perspective, we instead advocate principles aligned with emergent systems science. These principles include: 1. Rejoining living and non-living beings, including humans, in a social-ecological system; 2. Rejecting the idea of an observer-independent world; 3. Recognizing that multiple social-ecological systems emerge from different languages, cultures, and ecologies, and that multiple realities (rather than one version of reality) align with experience; 4. Emphasizing recursion and disruption in system history; 5. Using nonlinear reasoning to understand cascading interactions beyond simple cause and effect. The diagram below illustrates these shifts using the International Evaluation Academy’s (IEAc) 3 Horizons (3H) initiative.
The movement from Horizon 1 to Horizon 3 thinking is not simple. It demands working across interconnected disruptions, adopting tools suited to complexity and emergence, embracing responsibility and purpose, and reflecting critically on daily practice and personal experience to make sense of the world in a different way.
To support this shift, we suggest practices for transformative thinking such as Theory U, which combines systems thinking, innovation, change leadership, and awareness practices. The diagram below shows its five movements from inner awareness to creative change.
In evaluation, Theory U helps people let go of Horizon 1 assumptions and see situations differently to move toward Horizon 3. This means loosening narrow ideas of science and evaluation and opening space for new possibilities.
Human beings are often unaware of the assumptions that guide experience, from paying a bill in a restaurant to performing professional tasks. We often take event configurations for granted and are disturbed when things go differently, as, for example, when interacting with an unfamiliar social-ecological group.
Digging into epistemological reasoning is a reflexive deep dive into our experience, even (or especially) when it contradicts our culture’s traditional assumptions. Be serious about it and enjoy!
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