The vast majority of projects decide in advance exactly what they're going to achieve, and list these achievements under headings like "outcomes" and "indicators".
This is good thing to do in itself - it's always good to have a plan - and is often a requirement of funding.
But too great a focus on outcomes and indicators can risk missing any unexpected changes your work has led to. Outcomes and indicators also rarely say much about which of the changes that happened were the most important for the people you worked with.
Most Significant Change technique addresses this problem by focusing on the qualitative, storytelling aspect of evaluation that is so important for establishing the quality of a project's outcomes, as well as their quantity. It has been around for many years now, and is a tried-and-trusted technique for many evaluators. The original (and very accessible) guide from 2005 is still the best starting point for using it.
At the same time, our starting point at SERC is always that any evaluation technique is only as valuable as the sensitivity with which it is used, together with the amount of co-production from a project’s beneficiaries it can enable.
This means that even as useful - we would perhaps even say, essential - an approach as MSC sometimes needs adapting depending on the context within which it is being used.
For example, MSC in its purest form presupposes that its use is within a hierarchical, larger organisation where the stories from project participants are "then analysed and filtered up through the levels of authority typically found within an organisation or program[me]".
Page 10 of the guide linked to above also further relates the formality of MSC in its most technical manifestation: "Each level of the hierarchy reviews a series of stories sent to them by the level below and selects the single most significant account of change within each of the domains. Each group then sends the selected stories up to the next level of the program hierarchy, and the number of stories is whittled down through a systematic and transparent process."
Nevertheless, if used with care, MSC is flexible enough to adapt for less hierarchical, more co-productive situations too. Indeed, in our experience, even if it is only used in the most, basic, stripped-down way - which can be as simple as just making sure to ask participants, without any prompts, what the MSC (if any) was for them from a project - any organisation's learning can benefit from using it in some form.
