ParEvo enables participants to creatively think about alternative futures, and how they do that thinking (meta-cognition). It’s also a prompt to consider ways of responding to possible futures to exploit or mitigate the consequences.

It could be used at different stages of a project, during planning, implementation or evaluation. At the planning stage it would help think through different scenarios that the project might have to deal with. During implementation, it could provide a mix of both scenario analysis and interpretation of history. At the evaluation stage it might provide different versions of the project history, for external evaluators to look at. Outcomes can be both cognitive (e.g. how we think about the future) and behavioural (e.g. how we respond to the future).

The process is designed to be used by multiple people, to produce a collective good – a set of storylines. It generates data on the structure of participation – how people have collaborated to produce storylines. Participants are anonymous and can choose the extent to which they collaborate with others. Participants are also able to tag, comment on, and evaluate the storylines that are generated.

ParEvo was designed by Rick Davies an Independent Consultant and leader in the field on M&E. It’s free for anyone to use, contact Rick to gain access rick.davies@gmail.com.

The tool is extremely versatile and has been used by many different groups including International development projects, Ugandan farmers, secondary school students, climate change volunteers, Clear Horizon, Coronavirus plus, ODI and Prolific.co.

The impacts using ParEvo vary depending on the individual facilitator’s objectives. These have included influencing the content of a strategic plan, the publication of papers in an academic journal, informing the content of an evaluation, the revision of risk management protocol and changes to plans for ensuring research uptake.

We used an Agile process with a focus on user centred design. Rick commented that we offered ‘Lots of good support, including quick responses to the very occasional emergency problem’

We enjoyed working on this project because it’s a new innovative idea that presented interesting design challenges. It meant the UI design choices were often not obvious, because there were no similar tools that we could call upon for inspiration. This meant the project needed more focus on helping the users understand how the tool works.