Michael Quinn Patton’s influence in the professional evaluation field is profound and pioneering, making him a key architect in its development. Starting his career when evaluation as a profession was in its infancy, Patton used his Ph.D. in the sociology of organizational development and social change to address emerging needs. His early work, initiated under the auspices of evaluating the “War on Poverty/Great Society” programs by the U.S. Congress in the 1970s, positioned him at the forefront of creating systematic evaluation methodologies.
Reflecting on the dramatic evolution of this field, Patton’s journey began when the concept of professional evaluation was still in its infancy. From the absence of a structured profession, no evaluators, associations, scholarly journals, university programs, or conferences to a vibrant community of over 75,000 professionals worldwide, his career mirrors the remarkable growth and institutionalization of evaluation. This transformation is a testament to the critical role evaluators like Patton play in assessing the efficacy of programs designed to combat societal issues, paving the way for systematic change and learning from triumphs and setbacks.
So, brace yourself for an exploratory journey into the impactful world of Michael Quinn Patton and the transformative field of professional evaluation. This piece not only charts the expansion of the evaluation profession but also highlights Patton’s pivotal contributions to elevating program effectiveness and tackling societal issues through the lens of thorough evaluation.
1. Could you recount a defining moment in your early years that played a crucial role in shaping your path as an entrepreneur?
The University of Minnesota was one of five universities that received federal support to train evaluators. I was accepted into that program as a postdoctoral fellow in its first year (1973) and became its director the following year. To provide coherence to the program, I established a research project to investigate how federal health programs and agencies used evaluation. The findings of that study became a book entitled Utilization-Focused Evaluation (1978).
That book established me as a leading-edge innovator in the emerging field of evaluation, with special attention to and insights into the theory/practice connection. The book provided a scholarly basis for why evaluation should be done and a pragmatic basis for how it could be done to make it useful.
I placed the book with a new entrepreneurial publishing house, SAGE PUBLICATIONS, positioning itself as a premier publisher of applied social science. The owners and publishers, Sarah and George McCune, saw the book’s potential and the ideas contained therein and developed a successful marketing plan that put the book on the map. Thus, my innovative ideas for the field-aligned synergistically with the entrepreneurial vision of the publishers, and that relationship has endured for five decades as SAGE has become the world’s premier publisher of evaluation books, including several of mine.
2. How do you balance the demands of being a CEO with your personal life, and what strategies do you use to maintain this balance?
Evaluation focuses on criteria for success in any endeavor and assesses whether those criteria are met in practice.
We call this “evaluative thinking.”
I apply evaluative thinking to both my personal and professional life. This includes being explicit and intentional about work-life balance, getting feedback from those close to me about how they perceive that balance, and adapting my behavior over time to incorporate that feedback and change strategies and parameters of balance as my circumstances have changed. Both my family life and professional life have evolved. Evaluative thinking then permeates my personal and professional lives and integrates them.
3. What non-work-related passions or hobbies help you become a better version of yourself?
Early in my career, I had the opportunity to evaluate an Outward Bound-type wilderness experience program for higher education administrators and leaders in the Southwest United States. The program was aimed at helping leaders become more thoughtful about how learning occurs by putting them in steep learning curve situations in the wilderness: hiking with heavy backpacks, mountain climbing with ropes, and river rafting and kayaking in fast-flowing streams and rivers. Those experiences led me to become an avid wilderness explorer, spending 2 to 3 weeks a year with the program director hiking remote areas of the Grand Canyon. Evaluative thinking helps decide what kinds of risks to take and how much risk to undertake when faced with potentially life-threatening routes and survival decisions in the harsh terrain of the Grand Canyon. I subsequently wrote a book about those experiences after taking my three children separately into the Grand Canyon for coming-of-age experiences.
(Grand Canyon Celebration: A Father-Son Journey of Discovery, Prometheus Press, 1999)
A key dimension of my entrepreneurial journey has been to engage in systematic and disciplined reflective practice by writing about my experiences to elevate my consciousness about what I had experienced, systematically extract lessons, and become intentional about applying those lessons in the next stages of my personal and professional life journey. That commitment to formal and systematic learning through writing books and articles has been the foundation of my success, including attracting clientele who appreciate the commitment to learning and the substance of the lessons learned. Those interested in applying the process and substance to improving their organizational and programmatic effectiveness have become longtime clients.
4. Can you recall a personal failure or setback that taught you a valuable lesson?
Early in my career, opportunities emerged to work with local programs in developing countries worldwide. When I met with leaders, staff, and participants in those programs, I typically began by telling them about myself and what I had to offer them. I talked too much and too long. I learned to begin by listening, asking questions, connecting to their world, learning their perspectives, and building relationships. Only then did I learn whether turning to the tasks was appropriate. This manifests the principle of “Go slow to go fast.” Taking the time to build relationships leads to speedier action on tasks later on.
5. Can you share a risk you took in your personal life that unexpectedly impacted your professional path?
In the 1960s, I was a Peace Corps volunteer in Burkina Faso (then Upper Volta). I lived among and worked with the Gourma people in the rural bush, where subsistence agriculture made for a hard life. Those two years of experiencing a dramatically different culture, learning about a fundamentally different way of living and knowing the world, struggling with language and behavioral differences, and ultimately finding shared humanity, mutual respect, and genuine admiration for people far removed from my previous experience and world. What I learned as a young man in the African bush has been the foundation of everything I have done since.
6. How has your approach to personal growth and development evolved over the years?
I have come to understand that personal and professional growth and development go hand in glove. They are mutually interdependent, interactive, and interconnected. Evaluative thinking is the thread that weaves them together, creating the red carpet of opportunity for the future, personally and professionally.
7. In moments of self-doubt or adversity, what motivates you to keep going?
Carlos Castenada, an ethnographer who studied and wrote about the worldview of indigenous sorcerers in Mexico (The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui of Knowledge), offers the concept of Controlled Folly. This is a deep Yin/Yang conception of human agency and experience in which, at any given moment, in the face of either success or adversity, one must simultaneously understand that everything a person chooses to do matters hugely and that nothing a person chooses to do ultimately matters at all. Hubris and humility co-exist as yin and yang. There is no understanding and experience of self-doubt without experience and understanding of individual accomplishment. There is no understanding and experience of adversity without understanding and experience of resilience. Controlled folly constitutes a middle path of practical forward movement between the extremes of hopelessness and over-optimism.
8. What role does your family play in your career, especially considering your work with your daughter in your field?
A decade ago, my daughter, who was working in a nonprofit, approached me and asked what I thought of her joining as a partner in my Utilization-Focused Evaluation business. I was thrilled and energized. We have worked together ever since, including co-authoring a new fifth edition of the book that began it all, Utilization-Focused Evaluation (2022). She was one of the first second-generation evaluators in the profession, which I think bodes well for evaluation’s future.
9. Can you tell us about the inception of Utilization-Focused Evaluation and your role in its development?
From the beginning, evaluation has faced the challenge of being primarily perceived as a compliance-based, paperwork and filling-out-forms accountability enterprise. I envisioned evaluation as useful, practical, meaningful, and learning-oriented.
In that vein, I developed a consulting practice and training program for leaders across sectors (public, private, nonprofit, philanthropic, international). The message of that leadership training was the importance of engaging in serious and ongoing evaluative thinking as a cornerstone of leadership and entrepreneurship. I called the approach Reality-Testing, Results-Driven, Learning-Focused Leadership. The joke became that I didn’t use the “E” word (Evaluation) but instead spotlighted what evaluative thinking delivers and makes possible. Positioning evaluation as useful and meaningful was what set my approach apart from the dominant compliance accountability models. And still does.
10. Can you discuss a controversial or unconventional decision you made in your business and how it played out?
I have done many public speaking workshops and training on strategy development, systems transformation, organizational effectiveness, and useful evaluation. Appreciating that people learn and respond in different ways, I began incorporating humor (always dangerous), storytelling (takes time), dramatic renderings (unexpected), and singing together (always surprising) to keep the subject matter fresh, engaging, and memorable. Some are always put off by these unconventional and, some say, unprofessional communication and teaching approaches. However, most react positively and experience greater engagement and retention due to mixed learning and engagement modalities.
In more recent years, I have turned to make YouTube videos that incorporate these mixed modalities to reach the next generation of leaders and evaluators, many of whom are less inclined to read than engage with visual and social media.
11. How do you see the field of program evaluation evolving in the next decade, especially in the context of emerging technologies like AI?
The challenge of our time is to get people to THINK. Information by itself doesn’t inform. Information has to be processed, digested, discussed and made sense. Evaluative thinking is required to make sense of information and data. Artificial intelligence is a form of information. But it does not think. Humans have to think. Evaluative thinking is the antidote to widespread and insidious disinformation, intentional misinformation, fake news, deception, the Big Lie, reality distortion, and political manipulation. Democracy depends on not just an informed citizenry but a thinking citizenry. Every evaluation is a learning opportunity and exercise that provides a chance to deepen evaluative thinking and sense-making for those involved. The future of humanity depends on applying the capacity to think evaluatively to the challenges of the future.
12. How do you approach decision-making in complex, high-stakes business scenarios?
We live in a time of “poly-crisis,” a term denoting multiple, intersecting, and interacting crises like the climate emergency, economic turbulence, political uncertainty, global health crises like the pandemic, growing inequities around the world, and cyber terrorism, to name but a few among the many challenges affecting the future of humanity. This means scenario-based decision pathways must move beyond siloed and singular risk assessments to look at, understand, and anticipate systemic, interconnected risks and their implications. Identifying criteria to interpret systemic risks, generating data to understand emergent and long-standing patterns, and developing short-term metrics to inform long-term strategies are examples of applying evaluative thinking to decision-making in complex, high-stakes business scenarios.
13. What strategies do you use to stay ahead in your field and maintain your expertise?
I read voraciously in areas outside my expertise, including the humanities, science fiction, natural science developments, and cutting-edge social science. I seek opportunities to engage with people from different cultures and political systems worldwide. I watch what’s developing in the entertainment world: films, television, and music. That means considering seriously the implications of Taylor Swift being named Time magazine’s 2023 Person of the Year. There is much to learn from her story about entrepreneurship, astute decision-making, calculated risk-taking, genuine and authentic responsiveness, and how to have fun.
14. Can you share your thoughts on evaluators’ ethical implications and responsibilities in today’s world?
The cumulative threats to humanity’s future mean the call is for “all hands on deck.” This means evaluators cannot become mere technocrats and bureaucrats doing compliance-oriented accountability reports. All evaluations must address issues of sustainability and equity, systems transformation, and increasing and enhancing the capacity of those involved to engage in evaluative thinking. That is both a methodological and ethical obligation.
15. How do you reconcile the need for objective evaluation with potential biases and subjectivity?
Objectivity is a myth. No one is objective. The nature of information processing in our brains and cultures undermines any notion of objectivity. Rather, we must be as transparent and reflective as possible about how our experiences and worldviews affect what we do and how we make sense of the world. It means being open and thoughtful about how we each have skin in the game and, because our values guide what we care about, how we each can have soul in the game.
Don’t seek an evaluator who pretends to be value-free, neutral, and objective. Seek evaluators who are aware of their patterns of perception, what they know and don’t know, what they know how to do and don’t know how to do, and what they care about and don’t care about. By illuminating and discerning what they bring to the work, you can assess what value they would add to the challenges of the context in which the work occurs.
Let me give you an example. When I have worked with programs aimed at preventing the spread of AIDS or supporting people living with AIDS, I don’t present myself as neutral and objective. Instead, I say the following:
“My younger brother died of AIDS early in the epidemic before there were anti retro viral drugs. We encountered and came to know well other families devastated by AIDS as well as the effects on entire communities in places around the world. We have been involved in AIDS marches and volunteer activities in AIDS programs. That means whether your program is effective matters to me and my family. That means I will be on you like fly-on flypaper to examine closely what is working and not working in what you’re doing. It means I won’t cut you any slack because the stakes are too high to ignore ineffectiveness. It means I will give you my best shot because I care about your effectiveness. And I hope that that is what you want from me because you care about your effectiveness. And together, using evaluative thinking rigorously and systematically, we can enhance your effectiveness.”
In this way, I communicate that I have skin in the game and soul in the game, which lets me take my game to the highest level.
16. In your opinion, what are the most significant flaws in the current state of program evaluation?
Most organizations treat evaluation as a routine, standardized compliance and accountability reporting exercise. Organizational leaders delegate evaluation to low levels of their organization as a data management and external reporting obligation and exercise. The result is thoughtless filling out the forms, routine data collection, simplistic analysis, and superficial reporting.
The opportunity loss is huge.
Serious, thoughtful, relevant, timely, and meaningful evaluation should be a leadership function undertaken at the highest levels of the organization. Evaluative thinking should be a way of doing business. Evaluative thinking should be infused into the organizational culture. Making that happen is a leadership function. If a CEO is not modeling evaluative thinking, it won’t manifest at lower levels throughout the organization—and that means your organization is less effective and less prepared for the future that could be.
17. For those interested in learning more about your work or contacting you for collaborations, what are the best ways to reach you, and are there any upcoming projects or publications you’d like to mention?
I have a YouTube channel with over 100 videos about the various aspects of evaluation. My daughter, Charmagne Campbell-Patton, and I are working on a new addition to our book Developmental Evaluation: Applying Complexity Concepts to Enhance Innovation and Use. That book will be out by the end of the year. In the meantime, our new fifth edition of the utilization-focus Evaluation is up-to-date and forward-looking.
We extend our heartfelt gratitude to Michael Quinn Patton for sharing his journey and contributions to the field of professional evaluation. His pioneering work and the development of systematic evaluation methodologies have been nothing short of revolutionary. We invite our readers to comment or share their insights on Michael Quinn Patton’s transformative impact. Your engagement deepens our community’s discussion on the importance of evaluation and improving things to make our world better today.
