ABSTRACT
And how could all this have taken place at the peak of the eras of research, evaluation and total quality management?
Do we just need lots more specialised professional research and evaluation projects, and to gather lots more data, statistics, evidence, observations and measurement? And write lots more policies, protocols, procedures and performance improvement schedules, and more researchers and evaluators competing for more grants to produce more findings for more books and journals? Or, like the fat man at the pie-eating contest, are we risking feeding more of the same to a ‘body politic’ that is really suffering from something else altogether missing? Are we becoming something of a Tower of Babel with all the existing efforts clamouring without altering the patterns of injustice, exclusion, short-sighted reactivity and lack of compassion? Again the thought comes to mind that without changing our patterns of thinking we will not be able to solve the problems we created with our existing pattern of thinking in the first place (Einstein in Ackoff 2004).
