Description

My company, Nexus Evaluation Ltd, had the pleasure of working with an organisation that works to improve the working conditions of people in global supply chains. For years, they have been collecting micro stories: a few lines to a paragraph or two, on the type of conversations, narratives and exchanges emerging from their factory visits and convenings. These narratives include quotes from factory workers, main questions raised during meetings, stories shared and field observations.

The organisation has now collected over 4,000 micro stories, and this number is increasing as we speak. They had spent quite a lot of time coding each story against a set of themes and categories, ranging from organisational values to specific human rights issues. And they engaged Nexus to lead a new type of analysis on all these stories, albeit with a very limited budget and time.

We quickly realised that each story offered but a glimpse of very complex systems and challenging lived experiences, and that together they tell you something more than the sum of their parts. Given all this, we were keen to use a mix of approaches as follows:

1) Systems thinking, which included pattern and trend identification and systems mapping.

2) Feminist and gender-transformative approaches to address country-specific and emergent global issues.

3) Strategic and organisational design principles, to add more value. This meant carefully crafting questions that guided a couple of facilitated sense-making discussions. The questions aimed to inform new ways of working, strategic direction and improve organisational capabilities and potential for impact.

4) A decolonial and humanising approach to storytelling.

I will describe in more detail how we put the above in practice, and share the findings and recommendations.