This post develops an emerging idea: Cubist Evaluation, a manifesto for doing evaluation rigorously in complex and contestable spaces. It gathers and builds on key points from earlier posts and a conference presentation.
A brief history
I’ve learned a lot from John Gargani over the years, including comments he shared in jest that stuck with me. Among these, that the best ideas are stolen ones, and that there are many different kinds of evaluation - realist, constructivist, feminist, pragmatist… but not yet Cubist. So it felt only fitting that I should steal John’s idea and try to develop Cubist Evaluation into a genuinely novel and useful approach.
The first opportunity arose at the 2023 Australian Evaluation Society Conference in Brisbane, when Kate McKegg invited me to join a panel on Adapting and embracing new conceptions of rigour for evaluation practice in complexity. The idea for the panel came out of a blog post that Kate had co-authored with Keira Lowther, which you will find here.
In my contribution to this panel (slides included here), I floated Cubist Evaluation - noting that the early 20th-Century Cubist art movement represented a major shift that had enduring influences on art, architecture and film, and arguing that evaluation can draw inspiration from Cubism too. In a subsequent post, which you can read here, I developed the idea some more. This post distils and deepens the key principles from both and responds to a question I was asked more recently: how is it different from bricolage?
What is Cubist art?
Emerging in the early 1900s, Cubism, pioneered by artists like Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, broke radically from traditional perspectives. Instead of depicting a scene from one fixed viewpoint, Cubist painters fractured objects into geometric forms and reassembled them to show multiple angles at once. In the early Analytic Cubism phase, they often did this using a deliberately limited, almost monochrome palette, so that attention stayed on the structure of planes and relationships rather than colour. The Cubist approach challenged the assumption that reality is singular or static, opening new possibilities for how reality can be seen, represented, and interpreted. See here and here for examples.
Beyond technique, Cubism was a philosophical shift: it invited viewers to engage in active interpretation, recognising that meaning arises through perception and context. This multi-perspectival philosophy of seeing and interacting with the work is what Cubist Evaluation seeks to evoke - an evaluative practice that deconstructs, reassembles, and collaboratively reimagines value while holding onto important nuance.
What is Cubist Evaluation?
Cubist Evaluation is a manifesto for rigorous evaluation in complexity, setting out a provocative (I hope) set of principles for evaluators to argue with, adapt, and extend.1 It is not a prescribed method, tool, or framework, and at this stage is intentionally incomplete – a nascent idea with room for development.
At heart, Cubist Evaluation makes four bets. First, in complex settings, evaluative reality is multi-layered and not well captured from a single vantage point. Second, evaluative judgement is stronger when it draws on multiple ways of knowing and reasoning, rather than hoping one is enough. Third, rigour is not the tidying away of tension, but the disciplined working-through of it with the people whose lives and interests are at stake. Fourth, Cubist Evaluation is a way of designing evaluations so those commitments show up in practice, through a purposeful choreography of methods, perspectives, and reasoning.
Cubist Evaluation argues that rigorous evaluation in complex environments needs more than any one perspective or technique. It calls for treating a diversity of viewpoints as epistemically and axiologically important, and aims to contribute new insight through deconstruction and reassembly so that subjects which may have been taken for granted can be usefully viewed from new angles. Just as Cubism opened up new possibilities in art, Cubist Evaluation aims to stretch evaluative practice - in particular, by blending mixed reasoning, eclectic methodological approaches, and collective sense-making, and moving beyond mechanistic evaluation frameworks to make sense of impact and value in richer ways.
How is it different from bricolage?
I’ve been pondering that since Matt Healey and Tenille Moselen put that question to me in their podcast. Bricolage and Cubist Evaluation both seek to disrupt narrow, technocratic forms of evaluation that can marginalise lived experience, minority viewpoints, and methods that, for whatever reason, have lower status in mainstream policy discourse. They share a commitment to methodological and paradigmatic pluralism, flexibility, reflexivity and attention to context. Both approaches draw on a variety of methods to create richer, more nuanced understandings.
However, where bricolage often emphasises the creative, context-specific assembly of what is at hand, Cubist Evaluation builds more explicitly on a set of principles that echo Cubist art – deconstruction, multiple perspectives, unsettling dominant narratives, and rethinking how meaning is made. Put another way, bricolage tells us something important about how evaluators can work; Cubist Evaluation is additionally trying to say something about how evaluative reality is depicted and how judgements are composed. Its added claim beyond methodological flexibility is the deliberate refusal of a single vanishing point on value.
Cubist Evaluation principles
Cubist Evaluation translates the central themes of Cubist art into a set of working principles for evaluative practice. Just as Cubist painters showed their subjects from several angles at once, these principles approach value, evidence, and rigour from different but connected perspectives, each revealing something distinct. Together, they invite evaluators and stakeholders to purposefully deconstruct and reassemble value stories, hold multiple viewpoints in play, and experiment with new ways of making sense of impact, merit and worth in complex, contested settings.
1. Contributing new meaning through deconstruction and reassembly
Cubist art fractured and reassembled objects to offer new ways of viewing things. Cubist Evaluation applies the everyday practices of analysis and synthesis as tools for fracturing and reassembly, deliberately using them to disrupt how value is depicted and communicated, and inviting people to see familiar things in new ways.
For example, instead of simply reporting who benefits and who does not, a Cubist Evaluation of a national employment program might pull apart its core assumptions – the efficiency case, the equity case, the political narrative, and the diverse lived experiences of participants – and treat each as a distinct, and sometimes competing, value story, rather than aiming for a unified verdict. In a sense-making workshop, stakeholders might then reassemble these fractured pieces into an account that openly acknowledges how the program can both entrench precarity for some groups and create opportunity for others, forcing a redefinition of what “success” should mean and what must change in the next policy iteration.
2. Honouring multiple perspectives
Rather than limiting depiction to a single viewpoint, Cubist Evaluation, like Cubist art, brings together diverse vantage points and treats each as a legitimate lens, revealing the subject in a broader context. In evaluation, this is about multiple voices contributing to the evaluation discourse. Different people experience and “value the same things differently”. Cubist Evaluation recognises that variation as important information, and asks us not to assume any single perspective is sufficient to disclose the full evaluative picture.
Imagine an emergency department initiative where the main visible success story is a waiting‑time target. The headline objective is to bring average wait times under four hours. A Cubist Evaluation would bring together the perspectives of patients and families, clinicians in different roles, managers, and system‑level data on flow, safety, and equity, and treat all of these as legitimate lenses on value. In a shared sense‑making process, people might surface that shorter waits have come at the cost of rushed conversations, poorer continuity of care for some groups, and increased burnout in parts of the workforce, even as headline targets are achieved. Honouring multiple perspectives here means noticing how easily any single one – whether it is the target, the clinician view, or the patient story – can stand in for the whole, and instead working with stakeholders to craft a judgement that does justice to all of them.
3. Challenging dominant narratives
Cubists bravely challenged prevailing approaches to painting. When they sliced and rearranged reality, they were intentionally unsettling what counted as a “correct” way of seeing. Instead of aiming for idealised or photorealistic paintings of nature, they showed things from multiple angles at once, abandoning Renaissance rules of perspective to reveal more complex views.
In evaluation terms, this principle is about how we work with power in valuing - whose definitions of “good" set the terms of debate, and whose experiences are sidelined when one view dominates. The deconstruction and reassembly of evidence and values described in Principle 1, and honouring multiple perspectives described in Principle 2, are enacted in ways that deliberately trouble the taken-for-granted story about what “good” looks like. Challenging dominant narratives isn’t just for fun; it pushes back against unquestioned assumptions that can marginalise people, ideas, or inconvenient pieces of evidence in complex settings. In that sense, this principle is not only interpretive but ethical, because it asks who gets to define what counts as good, successful, or valuable in the first place.
For example, imagine a national digital inclusion initiative, described and funded under a simple banner of “more devices and connections = success”. A Cubist Evaluation would name that as the dominant narrative and then pull it apart. It might distinguish the infrastructure story (households connected), the capability story (who can actually use the technology with confidence), the equity story (who is still excluded or harmed), and the lived‑experience story (what online access changes, whether intended or unintended, and what it doesn’t change in people’s daily lives), treating each as a distinct, and sometimes competing, value story rather than privileging one headline about coverage.
The evaluative work is to keep those tensions visible and renegotiate what counts as success – for example, by adopting a multi‑dimensional theory of value that balances coverage, affordability, accessibility, safety, data sovereignty, and cultural fit – rather than allowing a single performance story to dominate.
4. Thinking in multiple dimensions
Early Cubist painters experimented with more than three dimensions of reality on a flat canvas – fusing different angles, moments, and even the “in‑between” spaces into a single, simultaneous image, suggesting a world that is spatial, temporal, and psychological all at once.
If objectivity means observing individual, external phenomena, then Cubist Evaluation says we need more dimensions than that. It can be useful to distinguish at least four dimensions, including: inter-objectivity (conceptualising systems, networks, technology, government, and the natural environment as collective, external phenomena); subjectivity (individual, internal observation of thoughts, emotions, memories, perceptions, and states of mind); and inter-subjectivity (shared values, meanings, language, relationships, cultural backgrounds, ways of knowing, and collective-sense making).
For example, a Cubist Evaluation of a youth justice initiative might bring together rearrest rates and cost data (evidence that fits the above definition of “objective”, while acknowledging that measurement systems are inescapably value laden), alongside patterns in how different agencies and systems interact (“inter‑objective”), young people’s own accounts of safety and dignity (“subjective” lived experience), and a facilitated dialogue about what “justice” should mean from the whole community’s perspectives (“inter‑subjective” development of value). Instead of treating any one of these as the definitive reality, it would deliberately use all four dimensions together - like a Cubist composition that only comes into focus when you take in all its planes - to inform decisions about which responses are preferred overall.
The four dimensions used in this example are offered not as a definitive typology, but as a practical illustration of the broader claim that evaluative reality is multi-dimensional, the mental models we use to make sense of the world are choices, and using several models instead of just one can support situationally appropriate and rigorous evaluation.
5. Opening up new possibilities
Where the first four principles focus on how we could approach an individual evaluation (how we analyse and synthesise evidence and values, whose perspectives we bring into view, which stories we unsettle, and how we mix conceptual models), this one is about how that thinking can diffuse into wider evaluation practice.
Cubism revolutionised artistic expression. It offered radically new ways of depicting reality, breaking from earlier artistic conventions and influencing painting, architecture, film, and later experimentation with abstraction. In a similar spirit, combining varied approaches to evaluation can widen the palette of options available to evaluators and evaluation users, helping them imagine new possibilities, make richer sense of what is happening, and communicate value in fresh ways.
6. Disrupting how meaning is made
In Cubist painting, the artist does not offer a single, polished view of reality; they rearrange the subject so that the viewer has to make sense of it, actively piecing together multiple angles into their own account of what is going on. Meaning is no longer delivered as a finished product from canvas to audience; it emerges in the interaction between the painter’s choices and the viewer’s interpretive work.2
Cubist Evaluation treats evaluative judgement in a similar way. Instead of the evaluation team retreating to produce a closed verdict, they involve stakeholders as co-creators of meaning - interpreting what the evidence means together, weighing different value stakes, testing whether judgements feel right and debating those that do not, rather than having them handed down as a single, authoritative conclusion. This shared interpretive space is where the real evaluation happens.3
The evaluative judgements that emerge are collectively reasoned and contestable. If there are genuine tensions, ambiguities, or contradictions, the judgements will be brutally honest about them, treating them as legitimate features of the landscape that the evaluation must make room for, document, and sometimes leave partly unresolved. Rather than concluding "good value overall” you’re more likely to get a layered account such as “good value for some groups on some dimensions, and contested or uncertain on others - and here is how different stakeholders weigh them.”
Just as Cubist paintings refuse a central vanishing point and ask viewers to navigate a field of intersecting planes, Cubist Evaluation refuses a single vantage point on value. The work of evaluation is to host and provoke interpretive labour, designing deliberative processes to make sense of mixed-methods evidence through mixed reasoning - intentionally combining multiple ways of thinking (systematic, social, intuitive) to turn evidence into shared, defensible judgements.
Does this add anything new?
None of this is entirely novel. Many evaluators already work hard to honour multiple perspectives, think in multiple dimensions, challenge dominant narratives, and engage stakeholders in deliberative sense-making. Cubist Evaluation bundles and names these habits. It also pushes against the way evaluations can too easily tidy away conflicting impact stories and value stories into a neat, single narrative (like “performing strongly overall”) that feels rigorous but privileges one account and hides nuance, diversity, and uncertainty. Cubist Evaluation adds an explicit invitation to design for those tensions, holding different value stories side by side and working through them with stakeholders and rights-holders, so that multi-perspectival judgement and collective meaning-making become the core work of evaluation. Over time, its ambition is for these practices to move from the margins to the mainstream.
What Cubist Evaluation adds, beyond existing traditions, is a shared metaphor and a set of design prompts for putting that work at the centre of how evaluations in complexity are conceived, conducted, and defended.
Philosophically, Cubist Evaluation sits in a pluralist space. It draws energy from constructivist and interpretivist ideas about meaning-making, from realist traditions that emphasise how outcomes emerge through context–mechanism configurations, from critical traditions that pay attention to power and marginalisation, and from pragmatic mixed-methods thinking that values fitness for purpose over paradigm purity. But it is not reducible to any one of these. Its distinctive feature is treating evaluation as the deliberate composition of multiple viewpoints, mental models and reasoning modes in order to develop richer and more defensible judgements in complexity. This is a pluralist stance, not an anything-goes relativism: different perspectives are invited to the composition, but judgements still have to be argued for, tested, and owned - more like the disciplined, limited palette of Analytic Cubism than an indiscriminate splash of colours.
Who is Cubist Evaluation for?
Cubist Evaluation is for people working in and around evaluation who are wrestling with complexity, plurality, and power, and dissatisfied with single-method, technocratic answers.
Primary audiences include:
Evaluators who work in complex, uncertain, and contested settings, where mixed methods and mixed reasoning already feel necessary, but existing frameworks do not fully accommodate the diversity of perspectives and values in play.
Commissioners and funders who want rigour without reductionism, and who are open to evaluative processes that explicitly surface different value judgements and support collective sense-making.
Practitioners and learning partners (for example, in NGOs, public agencies, philanthropy, and systems-change initiatives) who see evaluation as a tool for reflection, adaptation, and innovation, and who are ready to experiment with co-designed, multi-perspective approaches.
I don’t want to limit who Cubist Evaluation might be for, but I think the people and contexts it might particularly suit include:
Teams working on initiatives that cut across multiple systems or lifeworlds, where inter-objective and inter-subjective perspectives matter as much as conventional “objective” indicators - e.g., a cross-agency initiative on youth wellbeing working in multiple cultural contexts and spanning health, education and justice.
Evaluators influenced by realist, developmental, feminist, Indigenous, or critical traditions, who want an integrative metaphor that legitimises combining technocratic, deliberative, tacit, and narrative forms of evaluative reasoning. Cubist Evaluation isn’t meant to replace these traditions; it offers a metaphor and rationale for combining different ways of reasoning.
Organisations that want evaluation to question dominant stories about performance and value, bring marginalised voices into judgement processes, and generate new meaning from evidence rather than simply reconfirming existing frames.
Critical thinkers who are comfortable with the idea that not everything is a consensus and that multiple perspectives can coexist in tension, each having validity without requiring another to be wrong.
People who would rather confront questions that are hard to answer than accept answers that may not be questioned, for example by recognising both the benefits and the harms of major social, technological, environmental, energy, or public health policies, positions, and interventions - rejecting the Manichean dualism of everyday political narratives and instead surfacing tensions and trade-offs, and seeking to understand what is gained and what is lost in context.
What next?
Cubist Evaluation isn’t just for fun; it’s a call for evaluation that stays rigorous in complexity, making sense of values, evidence and uncertainty in ways that are inclusive and richly informed by diverse forms of knowledge and experience. Its value proposition is about generating new, useful, collectively owned insight that can change lives for the better. It’s just getting started - there is much more to explore, both theoretically and in practice.
For example:
How would we design a Cubist Evaluation from scratch? What would it look like to intentionally build in mixed reasoning, multiple perspectives, and collective sense-making from the very first conversation with commissioners and stakeholders?
What practical operating principles might guide a Cubist Evaluation team day to day - e.g., in how they fracture and reassemble evidence and values to invite people to see familiar issues in new ways?
How do we know when we’re really honouring multiple perspectives, as distinct from just adding more methods or voices without shifting who materially contributes to reaching conclusions?
When different value stories point to different preferred options, what does a Cubist judgement (or set of judgements) look like in practice, and how can we make the path from plural perspectives to a concrete decision transparent and accountable?
What kinds of visual, narrative, or dialogic projects would feel “Cubist” in evaluation terms - not just in the report, but in how we facilitate workshops, sense-making processes, or board conversations about what the evidence means?
How might we document and defend rigour in a Cubist Evaluation in ways that satisfy more conventional audiences, while still challenging the very ideas of rigour that don’t fit complex, contested settings?
How will we know if any of this is useful and makes a real difference - meeting Cubist Evaluation’s value proposition of making rigorous, pluralistic evaluative judgements in complex settings and generating new, collectively owned insight from evidence?
If this resonates, stay tuned - and get in touch if you have a live project where you want to experiment with Cubist Evaluation in practice.
Thanks for reading!
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By “complexity” I mean features that systems- and complexity-informed evaluators often point to, such as situations where causes and effects are interacting, non-linear, and emergent rather than predictable, and where multiple stakeholders hold different values and can reasonably disagree about what the evidence means.
You might be tempted to say this all sounds like constructivism dressed up – but not so fast. For clarity, Cubist art pre‑dated and influenced – but remained distinct from – the Constructivist art movement, which, aside from its name, has no significant connection to constructivist or interpretivist paradigms in social research. However, the notion of the viewer interacting with and making their own sense of the artist’s work is reminiscent of those paradigms’ emphasis on meaning‑making. Meanwhile, Cubist Evaluation happily draws on constructivist-interpretivist ideas without committing to them exclusively: it is deliberately pluralist and trans‑paradigmatic, combining multiple traditions, ways of knowing, and ways of valuing. It is pluralist rather than exclusively constructivist because it treats meaning-making as crucial without assuming that all valid evaluative claims reduce to negotiated interpretation. For example, the door remains wide open to post-positivist lines of inquiry, as long as they promise to play nice and not dominate the picture, contributing valuable fragments without claiming to be the only legitimate way of knowing what is going on.
