Applying "Technical Intuition" to Social Sector Organizations

Social Sector practitioners are often drawn to the work, having followed tradtional paths of education before joining the field. As a result, these individuals follow well tread paths into social work, social sciences, and policy - with the intent to impact communities; only to realize once they've arrived that their skill set is very different than the one necessary to develop effective frameworks.

In social enterprises, data driven learning requires skills like data collection and analysis capabilities, which often aren't part of the core skill set of the people doing the work.

Project Evident works with organizations of various sizes and stages of growth to develop and implement comprehensive evidence building, and find that organizations often don't have staff members with the ability to sense or use technology to guide decision making.

Alix Dunn, author of the article linked to this post, makes a case for developing technical intuition in the social sector:

"Technical intuition is a foundation for agency in and about the digital world and a missing cornerstone of the solution to many of our techno-political challenges."

Executive Directors and those tasked with leading measurement, evaluation and organizational learning would do well to develop "technical intuition" within their organizations, and to recognize its importance to building an effective evidence framework.

As organizations move forward, technology is becoming ever more important to missions - giving practitoners access to research, evaluation and data tools that may have previously been inaccessible. Building teams with strong technical intuition helps these organizations to advance quickly, modernizing and streamlining their work.

Click here to learn more about how technical intuition can help your organization.