The Practice of Not Knowing
Right Intention in Evaluation
The Lotus Sutra tells a story. A man visits a wealthy friend who, seeing him fall asleep, sews a priceless jewel into the lining of his robe. The man wakes and leaves, not knowing about the gift. He wanders for years in poverty, struggling to survive. Eventually he meets his friend again, who points to the jewel that was sewn into his robe all along. The man realizes he was already wealthy the entire time.
I think about this story when I think about evaluation. We show up with our frameworks and our methods, searching for insights, trying to produce findings. But the people we’re evaluating already have the jewel. They already know things about their experience, their community, their program that no external evaluator could discover. The question isn’t whether the truth is there. It’s whether we can help them see it. And whether we can see it ourselves.
The Question Before the Question
Within Buddhism right intention is part of the Eightfold Path. It asks: why are you doing this? What’s driving the action?
Evaluation has a version of this question, but we rarely ask it out loud. Why are we evaluating? What do we actually want to learn? Or are we trying to prove something we already believe?
The intention shapes everything that follows. It determines the questions we ask, the methods we choose, what gets measured, what gets ignored. Two evaluations can look identical on paper and produce completely different results depending on the intention behind them.
I’ve been involved in evaluations where the intention was performance, not learning. I knew what the funder wanted to hear. I shaped the questions to get there. I didn’t fabricate data or lie about findings. But I knew which doors to open and which to leave closed. I knew how to frame the results so they landed the right way.
That’s not fraud. But it’s not right intention either.
Three Intentions, Three Evaluations
Evaluation for control. The funder wants to know if you did what you said you’d do. Did you hit the targets? Did you spend the money correctly? Did you follow the plan?
This isn’t wrong. Accountability matters. But it’s limited. Evaluation for control asks whether you followed the plan. It doesn’t ask whether the plan was any good. It measures compliance, not learning. It looks backward at what was supposed to happen, not forward at what could be different.
Evaluation for justification. You already know what you want to do. You need data to support it. You commission a study that will give you the numbers you need. You hire the evaluator who asks the right questions. You frame the findings to match the decision you’ve already made.
This is DOGE. This is decision-based evidence making. The conclusion comes first, and the evidence is assembled to justify it. The intention corrupts the method. You find what you’re looking for because you’ve designed the process to find it.
Evaluation for learning. You genuinely don’t know. You want to find out. You’re willing to be wrong, willing to discover that the program isn’t working, willing to hear things that complicate your assumptions.
This is rare. It requires giving up control of the outcome. It requires humility about what you think you know. And it requires something else: participation.
Evaluation for learning has to be participatory. You can’t walk in as the expert and extract the truth from people. Each participant, each stakeholder, holds a piece of it. The community worker sees something the program manager doesn’t. The beneficiary knows something the funder never will. The field officer notices what the headquarters team misses.
Our job isn’t to arrive with the framework and fill in the blanks. It’s to create conditions for collective understanding. Not consensus, necessarily. People can disagree. Different stakeholders can hold different truths that don’t fully reconcile. But the understanding we build together gets asymptotically closer to reality because more perspectives are in the room, because the knowing is shared.
The participants already have the jewel. They don’t need us to give them insight. But they do need us or we wouldn’t be there. What they need us for is to help them see what’s already sewn into the lining.
Beginner’s Mind and the Evaluator’s Stance
Shunryu Suzuki wrote: “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s mind there are few.”
The evaluator’s temptation is expertise. We’re hired because we’re supposed to know things. We show up with frameworks, rubrics, theories of change. We ask questions we already know how to answer. We look for patterns we’ve seen before.
But if each stakeholder holds a piece of the truth, then our expertise is actually a liability. It narrows what we can see. It closes off possibilities before we’ve even started. The framework becomes a filter that lets through only what fits.
The best evaluations come from not knowing. From genuine curiosity. From sitting with the question before rushing to the answer. From letting the people closest to the work teach you what you couldn’t have figured out from headquarters.
What does it look like to approach a program with beginner’s mind? To ask the obvious questions that experts are too sophisticated to ask? To notice what you’re assuming? To hold your framework lightly enough that you can set it aside when it doesn’t fit?
I think about my sitting practice. There’s a moment when you notice you’ve been thinking instead of breathing. You got lost somewhere, followed a train of thought, forgot you were meditating. The practice isn’t to never get lost. The practice is to notice and return. You don’t beat yourself up. You just come back.
Evaluation has a version of this. You notice when you’re imposing instead of listening. You notice when you’re confirming instead of learning. You notice when you’re performing expertise instead of sitting with not-knowing. And you return.
Who Is the Evaluation For?
Right intention also means right relationship. If each stakeholder holds a piece of the truth, then we owe something to each of them. Accountability can’t only flow upward.
Most evaluations are accountable to the funder, the board, the government. The community is the subject of the evaluation, not the audience for it. We interview them, survey them, observe them. We extract their knowledge, synthesize it in our frameworks, and deliver it to someone else. They never see the report. They never get to contest our interpretation. They shared their truth and we gave it to someone else.
This is extraction dressed as learning. The intention might feel pure. We might genuinely want to help. But the relationship is wrong. We take the jewel and hand it to the funder.
What would it mean to flip that? To design evaluations where the community sees the findings first? Where they can say “that’s not what we meant” or “you missed the point” or “here’s what you didn’t understand”? Where the collective understanding we’re building includes them as authors, not just sources?
This echoes what Indigenous scholars and practitioners have long articulated. Consent as ongoing relationship, not a checkbox. Reciprocity as obligation, not charity. Stewardship over ownership. The OCAP principles: Ownership, Control, Access, Possession. These aren’t just about data governance. They’re about who the knowing belongs to.
Right intention in evaluation means asking: who benefits from this knowledge? If the answer is only the people who commissioned it, the relationship is wrong. If the people who shared their truth never see what we made of it, something has been taken.
The jewel belonged to them. We should make sure it stays that way.
The Practice of Not Knowing
Evaluation isn’t a one-time event. It’s a practice. Like sitting, you do it over and over, and you get a little better at noticing your own patterns. You get a little faster at catching yourself when you drift into expertise, into performance, into extraction. You learn to return.
The practice is: pause before acting. Ask why. Notice when you’re attached to a particular answer. Let that go if you can.
This doesn’t mean being passive or wishy-washy. It doesn’t mean refusing to draw conclusions or giving equal weight to every perspective. It means acting from clarity instead of reaction. It means holding space for disagreement without collapsing into false consensus. It means trusting that the collective understanding will be richer than anything you could have produced alone.
DOGE acted from reaction. From ideology dressed as efficiency. From certainty that needed no evidence. That’s wrong intention in action. No pause. No questions. No room for what they didn’t already believe. They knew USAID was corrupt before they looked at a single contract. They knew the federal workforce was bloated before they understood what any of the agencies did. The evaluation was predetermined. The chainsaw was already in hand.
Right intention doesn’t make evaluation easy. It makes it harder. You have to give up the comfort of knowing. You have to sit with ambiguity longer than feels productive. You have to let other people’s truths change yours. You have to be willing to point at the jewel even when it’s not the one the funder wanted to find.
The Jewel Is Already There
The man in the story wandered for years, struggling, searching, when the wealth was already with him. Evaluation can be like that. We search for insights when the knowing is already in the room. We impose frameworks when the truth is already sewn into the lining.
I don’t have this figured out. I still do evaluations where the intention is mixed, where I’m performing for the funder, where I’m not fully present. Where I show up as the expert instead of the student. Where I take the jewel and hand it upward without asking who it belonged to.
But I’m trying to notice. That’s the practice.
Right intention doesn’t guarantee right outcomes. But wrong intention almost guarantees wrong ones. If you go in knowing the answer, you’ll find it. If you go in needing to be the expert, you’ll miss what only the community could have taught you. If you’re accountable only upward, you’ll take the jewel and give it to someone else.
The invitation is simple, and hard. Before the next evaluation, before the next decision, before the next action, ask why. Sit with it. Notice what you’re attached to. See if you can let it go.
The jewel is already there. The question is whether we can point to it.
Anthralytic is a strategy and evaluation studio using human expertise, data, and AI to help mission-driven teams clarify and amplify their impact.
