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CECAN Webinar: Trophic Analysis of Directed Networks

CECAN Webinar: Trophic Analysis of Directed Networks

Directed networks are used in many domains. Particularly relevant examples to evaluation and appraisal are systems maps and influence maps. Trophic analysis indicates how far up or downstream each node is and computes a quantity called trophic incoherence, but perhaps better called circularity, which indicates the extent to which the network fails to line up with each node feeding to nodes at the next level.

Centre for Connected and Autonomous Vehicles

Centre for Connected and Autonomous Vehicles

The Industrial Strategy established Grand Challenges to “put the UK at the forefront of the industries of the future, ensuring that the UK takes advantage of major global changes, improving people’s lives and the country’s productivity”. These are developments in technology that are set to transform industries and societies around the world, and in which the UK has the opportunity to play a leading global role. The Future of Mobility is one of these Grand Challenges, with the aim of the UK becoming a world leader in the way people, goods and services move.

Part 1 – Modelling the Coronavirus: Why All Public Health Models are Not the Same

Part 1 – Modelling the Coronavirus: Why All Public Health Models are Not the Same

In response to these advances, the current post is meant to be the first of several addressing the complex challenges of modelling the coronavirus as a public health issue. It is also about clarifying for a wider audience how and why such modelling is important, as well as the value and power of complex systems thinking and computational modelling for public health policy. Still, this does not mean modelling will answer all of our questions; nor does it mean that all models are equally useful! 

CECAN Webinar: Mapping the Cognitive Landscape of Productivity in Northern Ireland: A Systems Approach to Understanding Productivity Policy

CECAN Webinar: Mapping the Cognitive Landscape of Productivity in Northern Ireland: A Systems Approach to Understanding Productivity Policy

Like the rest of the UK, Northern Ireland has experienced weak productivity growth since the 2008 Financial Crisis despite broader economic recovery. Consequently, boosting productivity has been a central goal of contemporary economic policy even to the extent that both UK and Northern Ireland industrial strategies have been described as productivity policies.

CECAN Contributes to Norway Anniversary Evaluation Conference

CECAN Contributes to Norway Anniversary Evaluation Conference

Picking up on the CECAN webinar last year on the topic ‘How to evaluate – or commission – an evaluation when everything is messy’, Dione Hills (Tavistock Institute and CECAN Associate) was asked to give a key note speech last month at the Norwegian Evaluation Conference.

Complexity and Evaluation Failure

Complexity and Evaluation Failure

People attending CECAN training and events often want to hear about evaluations that ‘failed’ because the wrong (i.e. not complexity appropriate) methods or approach were used. Providing such examples is not easy: accounts of evaluations that ‘fail’ are rarely published, and when we have examples from our own practice, confidentiality – or embarrassment – can make it hard to talk about these in public. 

Value, Values and Valuing Nature

Value, Values and Valuing Nature

Artists and academics and everyday people who care about the health of the planet have been doing the calculus for a long time. There is a new urgency to these calculations now, partly thanks to the School Strikes and Extinction Rebellion, and underpinned by a wave of action-oriented estimates about the state of the global ecosystem and its capacity to carry all life, including a human race projected to reach nearly 10 billion people by 2050 (UN 2017).

Slipping into Simplicity

Slipping into Simplicity

We and our colleagues often talk a good game when it comes to complexity. We want to understand nuance and context, and we know things are messier than we realise. Yet, we still struggle to grapple with complex issues and can feel frustrated with our lack of progress, or others’ seemingly foggy thinking.

CECAN Webinar: The Human, Learning, Systems Approach to Managing in Complexity

CECAN Webinar: The Human, Learning, Systems Approach to Managing in Complexity

The webinar views the challenge of creating complexity-informed evaluation by seeing it as a public management challenge. How can public management adopt a more complexity-informed approach? The session will outline an emerging complexity-informed approach to public management: the Human, Learning, Systems (HLS) approach.

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