I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how to connect the plurality of frameworks in the collection to the idea that the frameworks can be GUIDEing (Guiding, Useful, Inspiring, Developmental and Evaluable from Michael Quin Patton’s Principles-focused Evaluation).  It is probably safe to assume that many of the frameworks are guiding, useful and inspiring based on the anecdotal feedback I get from talking to people and seeing comments to my posts on LinkedIn. 

But what about Developmental and Evaluable?  I have a few stories of my own where I can talk about how the Community of Practice framework helped a CoP I facilitate manage the tension between those who were happy to spend time building trust and sharing tacit knowledge and the CoP members who wanted to get right to action planning.  I also used this framework to pull examples of the steps of building trust to sharing tacit knowledge and building shared practice from transcripts of our gatherings.  Max, Chris and I have also used the Complexity Theory of Outcome Creation (CTOC) as a tool to guide a reflective evaluation of the Semester in Dialogue (accepted manuscript due out soon).

But if I zoom out on this idea that the frameworks are developmental and evaluable, what does that look like?  I might have a clue from the rabbit hole I went down this morning.  I’ve been working with Max, Harry and Chris on a paper that is intended to be a retrospective of the two decades following the publication of the UK Government Office for Science’s Foresight report entitled “Tackling Obesities: Future Choices – Building the Obesity System Map”.  Since I’m the sherpa for this collaboration and I have the time, I thought I would try to write a draft of the document which at this point might be less of a retrospective and more of a critique of how the heuristic drove 20 years of research that has had little impact.

Anyway, as I was reviewing the draft yesterday so I can send it off to my collaborators, I got the idea of applying CTOC to a large database of papers that cite the Foresight map.  With the help of Notebooklm, I pulled examples of the Four Types of Human Complexity that make up obesity, a set of interventions that helped reduce complexity or increase capacity, and the types of interventions that have been applied as examples of the core capabilities from CTOC. That was kinda cool.

Most exciting was when I asked the AI to just match the core capabilities to frameworks that could be helpful in development and evaluation (see table). 

This is for sure not comprehensive and needs more rigour in the mapping, but I really like where this is heading!

CTOC Capability	Relevant Frameworks from the Complex Systems Collection
Stewardship	Rules to Principles: Highlights how using principles rather than rigid rules acts as a form of stewardship that allows for necessary adaptation. Information and Agency: Helps address the imbalance where high-level decision-makers have agency but lack frontline information, while frontline practitioners have the information but lack agency. Action Scales Model: A conceptual tool to help policymakers and practitioners identify the appropriate levels to intervene within a complex adaptive system.
Coordination	Alignment to Coherence: Demonstrates how stewardship and coordination work together to move systems beyond mere alignment and toward genuine coherence. Collaboration Spectrum: Useful for evaluating the depth of coordination, mapping relationships on a spectrum from competition to full integration. Collective Impact: Provides a structured approach for multi-stakeholder coordination, focusing on shared elements that are important to outcomes.
Adaptation	Fragile to Antifragile: Reflects adaptive capability in action, helping organizations design systems that actually “gain from disorder” and improve as contexts change. Adaptive Cycle: A model describing the cycles of change, which can help evaluate where an intervention or system is in its lifecycle of change and renewal. Cynefin and Stacey Matrix: Conceptual models that help leaders and teams decide how to adapt their actions based on the degree of unpredictability or chaos in the environment.
Learning	Accountability to Learning: Helps guide the paradigm shift from punitive accountability to a culture of continuous learning, which the core capabilities support. Feedback Loops: Crucial for identifying the places where the output of a process feeds back into the system as input, influencing future actions and learning. Triple Loop Learning: A framework useful for evaluating the depth of learning and insight generated within an organization or system.
Partnering	Process of Building Trust / Types of Trust: Essential for evaluating partnerships, recognizing that trust is the “invisible engine” powering effective collaboration. Collaboration Spectrum: Useful for evaluating the nature of a collaboration from competition to full integration. Transactional to Relational: Helps evaluate the shift from simple, cause-and-effect interactions (transactional) to deeply integrated, relational partnerships.