Over the past year I have been working with a group of colleagues on several projects that fall within the Complex space. These projects are work that is trying to understand the impacts of a particular issue on people and place. What has become apparent with the projects is that it is no longer sufficient to try to measure only outcomes as these do not tell the whole story. There are multiple perspectives to impacts of an initiative and there was a need to develop a way of understanding this.
Consequently we formed a collaborative group to think this through. Complexability was developed along with an approach known as Monitoring and Measuring All That Matters. This is currently being applied in work with Portraits in Blue and with Meals On Wheels NSW with considerable success. We envisage it being applied to community based programs and initiatives where the impacts are multiple and cannot be understood by quantitative and qualitative measures alone.