Blogging and Twitter superstar Maddie Grant actually posted all the comments she got on her evaluation form when she and Jeff De Cagna did a pecha kucha session at the ASAE annual meeting in San Diego. I thought their session was excellent. Convening a group at the conference to actively reflect on their learning was really cool, and I am now a big fan of the pecha kucha presentation format. But one of the comments in particular struck me:

I walked out of this with a weird feeling. The session was kind of touchy feely, but upon reflecting on it, it helped shape my experience at this year’s event and I realized that I probably took away more from this session as I told my peers back in the office about my experience.

Evaluation is hard. I have challenged the effectiveness of traditional meeting evaluation (the happy sheets), but this comment also shows that a more qualitative instrument–had it been administered at the event–would have missed this important reaction and learning.

We want to do X and get result Y, and most of the time it’s not that simple. That’s bad news for people who want to schedule (and budget for) simplistic evaluation processes. And it reminds me of how terribly important the following question is: how are we learning from what we are doing?