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?

For a successful MSC implementation, it is necessary to create and facilitate the following contexts:

• An organizational culture where it is acceptable to discuss things that go wrong as well as success
• Champions (For example, people who can promote the use of MSC) with good facilitation skills
• A willingness to try something different
• Time to run several cycles of the approach
• Infrastructure to enable regular feedback of the result to stakeholders
• Commitment by senior managers

Implementation steps of MSC technique:

1. Starting and raising interest
2. Defining the domains of change
3. Defining the reporting period
4. Collecting SC stories
5. Selecting the most significant of the stories
6. Feeding back the results of the selection process
7. Verification of stories
8. Quantification
9. Secondary analysis and meta-monitoring
10. Revising the system

Step By Step^[2]

Step 1: Starting and raising interest

• If you are the person attempting to initiate the adoption of MSC, it may help to use one of the following metaphors to explain it:
  • Newspaper

    Newspapers are structured into different subject areas in the same way that MSC uses domains.

  • School of fish

    MSC helps the individual fish to communicate with each other and to swim in the same direction, away from what is not good and towards what is good.

  • Holiday memories

    MSC helps teams of people focus on the memorable events and uses these events to help realign effort towards achieving more of the wonderful things and less of the terrible things.

  • Restaurant menu

    MSC does not present one version of what is happening but a series of glimpses of what a program is achieving. Stakeholders can select from these glimpses in much the same way as they would select food from a restaurant menu.

• Start small. It is a risky exercise to implement a huge and complicated MSC system without first piloting it on a smaller scale.
• Identify key people (champions) who are excited by MSC. These champions can:
  • Excite and motivate people
  • Answer questions about the technique
  • Facilitate selection of SC stories
  • Encourage people to collect SC stories
  • Ensure that feedback occurs
  • Ensure that the stories are collected and organized and sent to review meetings
  • Develop protocols to ensure confidentiality where necessary

Using domains of change helps organizations to group a large number of SC stories into more manageable lots, which can each be analyzed in turn. The “any other type of change” domain is a useful open category that allows participants to report significant changes that don’t fit into the named domains.

Between three and five domains is a manageable number. The limiting factor is how much time participants are willing to spend in discussing each domain.

Domain can be identified before SC stories are selected or afterwards by sorting SC stories into meaningful groups. This depends on the extent to which the organization wants to be open to new experiences rather than continuing to be guided by past experiences.

Building capability for effective MSC^[3]

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