Kurt Wilson — IDPE Doctoral Student, WMU

Evaluation Cafe: February 15th, 2011

In this Evaluation Café, Kurt Wilson draws on the classic book “Leadership and the New Science,” in which Margaret Wheatley, EdD challenges traditional organizational structures based on Newtonian science, demonstrating how ideas drawn from quantum physics, chaos theory, and molecular biology could improve organizational performance. These ideas are a provocative challenge to evaluation, which has similarly been rooted in a Newtonian perspective with linear logic-models, measurement tools based on averages, etc. This Evaluation Café will provide a brief background to these ideas with the intent of sparking a lively discussion about the specific needs and opportunities for new evaluation theory and methodology.