Cynicism, hope, burnout (and AES Brisbane)

I’m writing this as I sit at Brisbane airport ready to head home on a plane full of Lions supporters. At the same time, back at the convention centre, Andrew Leigh is currently onstage presenting his vision for the Australian Centre for Evaluation. I’ll definitely be interested in hearing others’ reflections on his presentation and the following discussion, but for now, I’ll take the time to share some of my own thoughts after four days in Brisbane.

Firstly, in many ways, I feel invigorated by attending the AES Conference, as I have on most of my previous attendances. It was fabulous to reconnect IRL with familiar faces after 4 years of being away from the AES conference, and just as good to meet new people. I learnt about the interesting work that many are doing, found new people to share and collaborate with, and novel ideas to incorporate into my own practice. It's an unusually FUN conference.

I can have a tendency to come to these events and only go to see the sessions which reinforce my existing paradigms and methods, but this year, I forced myself to listen to new ideas and surprised myself at how interested I was.

That said, I still found myself nodding along most fiercely with those whose ideas mirror my worldviews, approach to evaluation and commitment to social justice.

But here’s where I started to get stuck.

I nod vigorously when Katherine Trebeck speaks eloquently about how the economy should be in service of society and the environment, and not the other way around. I get excited by Donna Mertens sharing her hope for evaluation as a tool for transformation. I can’t disagree with Maggie Walter when she shares passionately her vision for Indigenous data sovereignty and evaluation methods steeped in First Nations lifeworlds.

But I’ve been nodding vigorously at these ideas since my first AES Conference in 2015, and for even longer since I started to develop an unhealthy interest in research and policy from a young age.

In my own work, I talk about the importance of recognising and redistributing power in the work that we do. In many ways, us evaluators are extremely powerful people. Typically evaluators working in Australia (myself included) are privileged, in terms of their education, backgrounds and identities. We hold the immense power to make value judgements about policies, programs and people. Too often, evaluators fail to reckon with this power, with damaging effects for the communities we’re working with.

That said, throughout much of the conference, I was left feeling like we weren’t talking about a giant elephant in the room – while evaluators have immense power on the micro level of projects, we hold little to none of the power to do transformative social change in the complex systems that we keep discussing in our discussions on evaluation theory and approaches.

We are aiming for transformation, without any of the power to do it. And in doing so, are we fundamentally set up to fail?

All the plenary speakers spoke right to the heart of the deep inequalities that exist in Australian society. The levers of change are also deeply embedded in systems of racism, inequity and marginalisation, and the hands on those levers have vested interests in keeping them stuck, welded, to where they are.

Donna Mertens and Katherine Trebeck were both asked directly about how they hold hope for transformative work from their positions. My time in Brisbane has helped me realise I’m nowhere near as optimistic as Donna, and I don’t think I’m even as optimistic as Katherine, who admitted to having extremely limited hope for change.

The glimmers of hope they identified seem illusory to me. We have policy documents that increasingly use systemic language, but rarely do I see this matched in practice, as power holders lack the time, resources, capability and will to work in ways that don’t just communicate across siloes, but genuinely and deeply integrate.

They both spoke to the hope that comes from having a passionate group of evaluators together, sharing knowledge and reinvigorating their commitment to change, but I worry that the voices who need to hear these ideas are not in the room, and that even if they were, it would do little to meaningfully challenge the ease and advantages that comes from upholding the status quo.

Which leads me to my last reflection, which was ironically my first of the week. On Tuesday, alongside Jade Maloney and Sharon Marra-Brown, we facilitated a workshop on building a sustainable evaluation career. The activities we worked through with our lovely workshop group prompted us to think about our values, our passions, what we’re good at, and the change we want to see in the world. Several of the activities that Jade and Sharon had planned in the session were ones I hadn’t previously done for myself, and I found the workshop a helpful space to reflect on my own experiences, as well as guiding our participants through theirs.

I’ve always been cynical. I was a stereotypically moody and cynical teenager who turned into a cynical and sarcastic adult (an attribute once memorably described by a former manager as “career limiting”).

Until now I’ve viewed my cynicism as a strength as an evaluator. Question everything and always doubt yourself (hat tip to Sara Lystlund Hemi whose anthropological lessons I enjoyed on Wednesday). These undoubtedly make me better at my work.

…Up to a point it seems. Because cynicism is not enough, and perhaps I am starting to find it career limiting. There must also be hope that investing time and energy in evaluation is not simply in service of the status quo, but will lead to change and improvement. As Maggie Walter said, if you’re not going to do it properly, don’t do it.

Reflecting on my values and passions on Tuesday helped me to recognise there is some misalignment between the way I’m currently working, and how I’d like to work, and more importantly how I’d like to be. I don’t think there are any clear root causes, but is perhaps an inevitable reflection point after over a decade of work and a heavy tendency to overwork. It’s leading to cynicism. My work in trauma-informed evaluation, and before that in workplace mental health, means I know what that means. It’s a major warning light for burnout. While I don’t think I’m there yet, if there’s one thing I’ve learnt being mad for 20 years, it’s to pay attention to those warning lights on the dashboard.

I’m leaving Brisbane feeling invigorated, though not invigorated in quite the way I had anticipated I would be after the conference. I’m invigorated to investigate my looming burnout, and identify how I can make the changes I need to make to keep the hope alive and stave off the cynicism.

Some of the hope does come from those I’ve shared time with over the last week. Evaluation colleagues with whom I can be vulnerable and share some of these challenges I’m facing. At various points in the conference, both during planned presentations and in conversations across cuppas, I’ve shared my experiences as a queer person, a person who’s experienced violence, and a person who has often not wanted to exist anymore. It’s very special to be able to do that with mostly strangers and come away feeling safe, and it’s a credit to the AES’ membership that that’s possible. It’s in these courageous conversations where you find the allies and the ideas to make change.

So that’s where I’ll draw hope – it’s not always in the work, but in the power of connection.

Photo by Engin Akyurt: https://www.pexels.com/photo/green-leafed-plant-on-sand-1438404/