Most Significant Change (MSC)

• It is participatory because many project stakeholders are involved both in deciding the sorts of change to be recorded and in analyzing the data.
• It is a form of monitoring because it occurs throughout the program cycle and provides information to help people manage the program.
• It contributes to evaluation because it provides data on impact and outcomes that can be used to help assess the performance of the program as whole.

Like monitoring, MSC provides ongoing data about program performance that assists program management. But MSC goes further than most conventional forms of monitoring in that it also focuses on outcomes and impact, involving people in making judgments about the relative merits of different outcomes in the form of MSC stories. In this way, MSC contributes to both monitoring and evaluation.

MSC also has the potential to influence organizational learning within an organization, and maybe even within its associated stakeholders. The horizontal dimension is between a group of participants engaged in discussing and selecting the most significant of a set of stories. Vertical dialogue involves exchanges of views between groups of participants at different levels. The vertical dimension is very important if the MSC process is to aid organizational learning throughout the organization. It depends on good documentation and communication of the results of one group’s discussion to the next.

The process pf MSC involves the collection of significant change (SC) stories emanating from the field level, and the systematic selection of the most significant of these stories by panels of designated stakeholders or staff.

The kernel of the MSC process is a question along the lines of:

• Looking back over the last month, what do you think was the most significant change in [particular domain of change]? or
• From among all these significant changes, what do you think was the most significant change of all?