I’m Steve Gill, a long-time, independent consultant living in Ann Arbor, Michigan. I’ve been a mental health therapist, community mental health worker, university professor, program evaluator, small business owner, employee training and development specialist, strategic planner, and management/leadership consultant.
Rad Resource – The Performance Improvement Blog: This is my blog. I post once a week about topics related to increasing learning and effectiveness of leaders and managers in all types of organizations. Often these posts are about evaluation and its application to organizational performance improvement.
Hot Tips – favorite posts: Over the past four years, I have written over 345 posts to my blog. Here are five that I think exemplify my writing about evaluation:
- 06/13/11 – The Learning Alliance and Kirkpatrick’s Four Levels of Training Evaluation: Kirkpatrick’s four levels of training evaluation have made an important contribution to the field of workplace learning, but the model is inadequate in explaining the causal link between learning and bottom-line outcomes.
- 06/08/11 – Evaluating Training Through Stories: Evaluation of training programs should describe how a learning intervention contributes to business results. This can’t be done with surveys; it can only be done by telling stories.
- 07/20/10 – Seeing the Gorilla in Program Evaluation: Evaluators need to be open to unexpected behaviors and events as demonstrated in a video by Simons and Chabris.
- 02/08/10 – What Gets Measured Gets Done…or Not: Simply because something is measured does not necessarily mean it will be improved. It takes not only measurement, but also the will to change.
- 07/31/09 – Measure Success or Measure Failure?: I believe we learn more from successes than from failures. As evaluators we should put our emphasis on telling success stories.
Lessons Learned – why I blog: I blog to learn and to facilitate the learning of others. In order to blog, I must stay current on what’s happening in my areas of interest and what’s happening in current events, as well as reflect on what I’m learning from my own consulting practice. I find it very rewarding to engage others in conversations about these reflections and observations. In addition, my blog is like a personal, professional library. When I’m investigating a topic, I start by searching my own blog.
Lessons Learned: The blogosphere is frequented by many people who would rather read anonymously and not engage in public conversation (i.e., post comments). My blog has some regulars who often post comments, but there are many more who read my posts and never comment…and that’s okay.
This winter, we’re running a series highlighting evaluators who blog. Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this aea365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post on the aea365 webpage so that we may enrich our community of practice. Would you like to submit an aea365 Tip? Please send a note of interest to aea365@eval.org. aea365 is sponsored by the American Evaluation Association and provides a Tip-a-Day by and for evaluators.
Thanks for sharing your views.
Susan, your comment is “music to my ears”. It makes blogging worthwhile. Thank you!
Steve, thanks so much for sharing your Performance Improvement Blog. I particularly found value in the “Seeing the Gorilla in Program Evaluation” and “Evaluating Training Through Stories” posts. We’re starting a number of teams and I was about to distribute the infamous Likert scale survey to team members. Wait! Stop! Shame on me (passionate ethnographer that I am)! even if I launch the survey, I will at the very least give team members the opportunity to tell their stories of how the team experience has enriched our organization.