Russ Osguthorpe Insights

These excerpts from this interview with Russ Osguthorpe point out the view of evaluation as "finding out what is really going on" or the truth. Many evaluators I've interviewed see evaluation as a search for truth so they can then make decisions about actions they need to take or encourage clients to take that will deal with that truth authentically.

R: I’ve told you this before, but in the mission field, your particular phrase or word or something was to find out what's really going on. Evaluators find out what's really going on. Not what people say is going on, but what's really happening and why it's happening. Those words in the mission field were invaluable to me, actually. And I told people quite regularly. And I actually tried to train my zone leaders and assistants. I said, I want you to find out what's really happening and why—what is motivating some of this behavior that is not productive or that is damaging to the mission. What's causing it? We've got to find out so that we can help this culture change. And when I got back off the mission and I saw you and told you about the mission experience, you said, oh. You're doing appreciative inquiry. I said, what is that? Because it was while I was on the mission that that really came to the fore. And I hadn't heard of it. But I was doing it, absolutely. I was very much doing it, and...But the appreciative inquiry part came in a sense after I found out what was really going on. I needed to know because it was new turf for me, it was a new area, a new experience. I had to find out, what actually is happening here? And when I look at when the missionary department talks, perhaps about a mission president that's having trouble, I am so convinced he does not know what's really going on and what is motivating what's happening. Doesn't know.

DDW: And doesn't know how to find out.

R: He doesn't know how to find out. Doesn't know how to... Like on my first trip around the mission, my first zone conference. On my way to the meeting, I said to the assistants, I want you to think about words that I would not know coming into this mission, but all the missionaries know and they have little lingo, little code words. I want to know all the code words. For them it was like, what? And I said, are there any code words. They said, actually there are.

They hadn't really thought about that way?

R: Never thought about it that way. Never thought of it. I said, I want you to think of all the words you can that people outside this mission would not know the meaning of the way we use them here. And once they understood the task, they said, this is going to be kind of fun. So for three hours, that's all we talked about on the way to Casper, Wyoming. And they came up with some words that I said, uh-oh. We’ve got problems. That word and the meaning of that word—we’ve got problems. And I won't go into details, but it really queued in to me that there were problems.

But also what it did for me, although some of the words were so negative I never used them. I wanted them out of the mission. I wanted them never used. Here you have Elder Ballard standing up in front of the mission presidents’ seminar who said, don't let your missionaries use the word greenie. He said, I don't know where that came from, but he said, that's demeaning to people to call them these little greenies, these little,  oh, you're a greenie. That's derogatory. Get it out of your mission. Well, we had words much worse than greenie, let me tell you. And to designate all kinds of things. And we got them out. Took a year and a half. Because some of the missionaries who used them had to leave. But we got them out. And I mean that was just a tiny part of what happened, but the point I'm making is, I had to find out what was going on and what I was coming into. And it was so useful to me just to have an evaluation mindset rather than a kind of here I am, I'm going to fix everything, and I’m going to make everything great and I said, well, before I do that, I better know what's going on.