And then there were two: Argentina vs. France.
Only time shall tell who the winner of the 2022 FIFA World Cup is going to be. Can’t wait!
Not sure how but this tweet made it to my feed yesterday, and I enjoyed it. It’s from Ian King, about how weaknesses in all the teams in the competition emerge as it quickly unfolds, even after plenty of pre-tournament hype and predictions. Having said that, I simply can’t buy the idea that France has been very lucky as many seem to suggest and debate. I also suppose that Kane missing that penalty at the end was a simple stroke of luck, but who’s to say that France wouldn’t have found a way to win anyway? I think they would have done it.
So, the point I am driving at today is that soccer is a beautiful game. A lot has already been written on soccer and teamwork, collaboration, communication, and clarity. However, as researchers and evaluators, we tend to become (or grow to be) more siloed and less collaborative especially when we begin working on our respective projects. We do expect our clients and projects to be more collaborative and participatory and say so in our reports.
However, we tend to not walk the talk.
As reporting deadlines approach and clients begin to demand the deliverables without really understanding what it takes to complete a comprehensive report; it’s one of those each to their own situation. As a team, we barely (or even avoid) communicate and less so, collaborate to make it happen.
Three years ago, we were faced with a challenging situation. It was a multi-year, multi-layered project that was ending after a rather interesting 5.5 years of planning and full implementation with unrealistic deadlines and lofty expectations from the client (who was late in sending us the data, yet, wouldn’t change the deadline.)
It was crunch time. At MNA, I engage 2-3 team members on a large-scale grant at various stages of the work. However, due to the severe time limitations, I ended up engaging all five team members to do the work to meet the deadline.
Our statistician did his magic with the complex data analyses and reported them to our qualitative researchers who were finishing up coding the qualitative data and corroborating them with the quantitative data; while the graphic designer was designing the parts of the report as they came along while working in tandem with the editor who was editing parts of the report’s sections as they came and finally passed the report sections over to me for my additions, edits, and that final touch.
No, definitely NOT Messi style. He is the Messi.
It was a collaboration in action. I don’t recall if we’ve done work in this style since then but I think it was a rare instance where the full team came together for the common goal.
Just sharing since I have been watching these games that have brought back memories of past evaluation work that was all about teamwork, collaboration, communication, and clarity.
PC: Home of Messi, Rosario, Argentina. By Rodrigo Abd/AP.
