Why assess? We assess collaborative efforts, among others, to:

• Understand, improve and strengthen our collaboration
• Make our individual and collective expectations explicit
• Help set criteria and standards for our work

Traditional assessment approaches. A great deal has been written about how to do conflict or situation assessments. Often the tradition has been to commission a neutral expert who plans a set of interrogatories, established a list of interviewees (sometimes grouped by importance), and begins phone or face to face interviews. During the course of interviews, the expert may improve the approach/questions. The expert may draft and circulate for comment a report of his/her findings and recommendation for the path forward. Based on comments, the report may be improved and finally decisions made about whether/how to start a process to improve the collaboration or situation.

The traditional assessment as the "expert" model of assessment. The traditional approach could be called the "expert model" in the scheme described by organizational development author Edgar Schein in Process Consultation Revisited, 1999, Addison Wesley ("Revisited").

As Schein notes (see Revisted at 7-8), the expert model works a several key assumptions that can be adapted to making assessments aimed at recommending a process to bring about change or resolve conflict:

• Have the the multi-party group or the convening authority correctly diagnosed this need?
• Have the multi-party actors, or the lead actor, correctly communicated the needs to the expert?
• Does the expert have skills to provided the requested diagnostic service?
• Have all parties considered the effects of even conducting the assessment 
• Does an external reality exist that can be studied and reduced to useful knowledge?

What if any one or more of these assumptions is not correct? However, in fact many of such traditional assessment well serves the multi-party groups to which they are provided. 

Does the 'facilitated self reflective' approach offer other benefits? In this approach I suggest that we may be able to make the changes we seek by relying less on 'expert' advice and more on the stakeholders' ability, with facilitation, to self diagnose and thereby start making the adjustments within the self assessment rather than in response to the formal expert report. Ideas for change, both individual and organizational, could emerge during the process itself. This tracks Schein's view that even the assessment itself is an intervention. So, if the assessment is an intervention, it can be helpful to make full use of it as an intervention.

How facilitated self reflective assessment works? This approach would use the phone and face to face interviews of the traditional approach change the level of reliance on those interviews and also adds web surveys, web page reports, conference calls, webinar reporting and other methods to interact more frequently with stakeholders than a single expert report. What precisely is used is flexible and depends on context.

Sample survey questions - format

Flexibility and adaptation. The charts below are samples; in practice, the facilitated self reflective assessment should be flexible and responsive

Making self reflection realistic. The facilitator of this process needs to shape the process to ensure that to the greatest extent possible, participants doe not sink into confirmation bias or merely confirming illusions. The discussion of the results of these self assessment efforts with the group must ensure that participants do not merely avoid deeper issues, inadequacies or obvious realities.

Concept sources: Assessment, Student Outcome Assessment Committee, College of DuPage, IL., www.cod.edu

                                Comparative flow charts (sample)

Traditional assessment

Facilitated self reflective assessment