Causal Map presents at UKES 2025
Last week, our co-founders Steve Powell, Fiona Remnant and James Copestake attended the UK Evaluation Society Conference 2025! This year, the conference had the theme “Data in focus: driving evaluation excellence”, which is right up our street!
Panel Stories as data:
Steve, James and Fiona joined Michelle James and Rick Davies to discuss the role of qualitative narratives in evaluation and how these stories can be effectively gathered, analysed, and used as data.
Takeaways:
- Glasgow is great! But we missed Dena Lomofski and Steff Deprez.
- Causal mapping can help capture, analyse and visualise stories
- AI is exciting because unlike ordinary data science techniques which are restricted to numbers, it can input and output stories. But how to use it in a verifiable and robust way?
- Look at stories as a kind of knowledge graph or model
- Stories are fractal: we can query them to generate other evidence / other stories
Talk: Linking evaluation and futures thinking through causal mapping of narrative data.
James and Steve also took the stage to share how to use causal mapping to add rigour to qualitative futures thinking. They walked through an experiment inspired by Michael Albert’s book, Navigating the Polycrisis: Mapping the Futures of Capitalism & the Earth (2024). Using AI-assisted causal mapping, they mapped out the connections in Albert’s work to help make sense of complex futures thinking.
Takeaways:
- Futures thinking and evaluation overlap and could learn from one another.
- Using our AI engine Causal Map Workflows, we were able to reproduce Albert’s high-level causal diagrams on the basis of the actual sentences in the text.
