Assessment - Dilemmas LO16565

Richard Karash (rkarash@karash.com)
Thu, 15 Jan 1998 23:28:39 -0500 (EST)

Bob Putnam of Action Design offered some dilemmas in assessment of
organizational learning.

First, Bob offered a declaration of perspective. He said, in his
perspective:

- Everyone is assessing all the time. The word "Assessment" is heard as
relatively formal, quantitative, evaluation. I mean the word another way,
more like Etienne's inherent assessment.

- It is only the assessments that the players themselves make that can
affect actions. We always act on our own assessments, inlcuding ass of the
assessments brought to us.

Then Bob offered these Dilemmas:

- Decision makers genuinely want objective outside evaluation. Have an
expert come in and tell us "Is it helping?" How to respond to the
legitimate interest behind that request? Valid info about how investments
are paying off.

- In general, our practices about emotion-laden things are not very good;
they are error inducing, and error enhancing. For example, performance
assessment between boss and subordinate. Quality of these is abysmal.
Ability to assess how group X is doing vs. it's goals is poor. So, it's
rational for people in an organization to avoid these, seek an outside
evaluator.

- Assessment will cost enough that it ought to be assessed.

-- Rick

-- 
      Richard Karash ("Rick")    |  <http://world.std.com/~rkarash>
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