“We need to target teachers in our advocacy campaign.”
“How do you know?”
I used to be a teacher. The message will resonate with them…
I surveyed different audiences and they are most likely to benefit from our advocacy efforts…
My son is a teacher and he liked the material…
They have a lot of power in our community and can share our message broadly…
They deserve the information…
The list can go on and on.
As an evaluator, I am constantly asking people for their perceptions and opinions on different aspects of their work: What do they think we should pay attention to? What are the biggest challenges in our context? Why did that activity work so well?
When I’m trying to understand answers to these questions, I ask people to be explicit about their assumptions, to provide concrete examples of what they’re describing, and to explain how their idea came to be. Our ideas can come from many sources: years of experience, our respect for someone’s opinion, rigorous research, and our intuition. While none of these ways of knowing are inherently better or worse than others, it’s important to know where ideas come from so that we can decide whether and how to act on them.
Asking people to articulate how they know something isn’t always straightforward, simple or obvious. At an individual level, helping people talk through the basis of their perceptions can lead to people becoming more confident, explicit and detailed in their stance. It can also have them revise or retract previously held beliefs. Neither outcome is inherently preferable; however, the process of critically examining the sources of our ideas is always helpful.
When you ask “how do we know?” in a group setting, it helps the collective make more informed decisions about what information to act on and to make sense of it together. It also decreases the tendency to listen to or dismiss ideas because of a person’s title, our relationship with them, or their formal power. This is especially important in a collaborative process, which needs to be perceived as fair. When people’s ideas aren’t judged fairly, people are less likely to share them or invest in the group.
Like any critical question the more you ask, “how do you know?” the more natural it will be for others to be clear about where their ideas come from. It’s a practice that helps us work better together and be more confident ourselves. In any effort, we need to take people’s perspectives seriously. It only strengthens our ability to create change when those perspectives are developed carefully, transparently, and critically.