Reflections from a Learning Circle on the “Most Significant Change” technique
When I looked back at my notes from a recent Learning Circle on the Most Significant Change technique, I noticed something peculiar. Rather than recording the steps of the method, my notebook was crowded with questions.
Which stories matter?
Who decides?
What gets lost in translation?
A few arrows connected them. Several phrases were circled. The page looked less like a set of notes and more like a conversation with itself.
The Learning Circle, organised by PRIA International Academy (PIA), brought together participants from diverse professional backgrounds to explore the Most Significant Change (MSC) technique. It encouraged participants to exchange perspectives, ask questions and explore ideas together. I had joined expecting an introduction to another tool from the world of monitoring, evaluation and learning. What I encountered felt closer to a conversation about stories.
And significance.
MSC uses stories to understand change by inviting participants to share experiences and discuss what they consider most significant and why. The technique itself can be explained in a few sentences. The conversations it generates are another matter. As the discussion unfolded, the conversation shifted towards what made one change more significant than another.
The More We Spoke About Stories…
The question was not only whether change had occurred. It was also about meaning. Which changes do people remember? Which changes do they talk about? Which changes come to represent something larger?
By the end of the Learning Circle, my notebook contained fewer notes on implementation than questions about listening, interpretation and significance.
One comment from the group discussion kept drawing me back to my notes. Stories, a participant observed, do not always travel intact. A story told in one language may acquire a different texture in another. A phrase that carries emotional weight in a community meeting may appear flatter in a report. The challenge is not only whether stories are heard, but how they are carried forward.
What exactly travels when stories move from people’s lives into organisational learning? What gets amplified? What becomes difficult to communicate? And how do we ensure that experiences remain recognisable as they move across languages, institutions and audiences?
Attention soon shifted to the idea of ‘significance.’ What counted as significant seemed to shift depending on who was speaking. A project team might highlight one outcome. Community members might remember something else entirely. Before long, the conversation centred on one question: significant for whom?
Much of development work involves documenting change. MSC invites a different kind of conversation. It encourages people to explain why particular experiences matter to them and to place those perspectives in dialogue with others. Stories become occasions for discussion, disagreement and learning.
Some participants spoke about how stories create space for people to articulate experiences in their own words. Others appreciated the possibility of learning from unexpected outcomes – changes that may never have appeared in a project’s original plans. One observation stayed with me: stories help us notice dimensions of experience that are difficult to capture through numbers alone.
One question kept resurfacing in my notes: what changes become visible when we begin with stories? Perhaps, part of the answer lies in the richness stories carry. They communicate not only events, but also relationships, uncertainties, hopes and meanings. Sometimes they reveal what an experience felt like.
Beyond the Story Itself
Stories occupied the centre of the discussion. What stayed with me, however, was what happened after they were told. As stories moved through conversations, reports and institutions, they gathered new interpretations. A phrase carrying emotional weight in a community meeting could lose some of that meaning in a report. The discussion reminded me that stories do not simply document experiences. They also change as they travel.
One participant observed that storytelling is a skill. That comment opened another line of thinking. Some experiences naturally become stories. Others unfold gradually through changing relationships, growing confidence, new responsibilities or altered ways of seeing the world. Their significance may be deeply felt by those living them, even when they resist neat narration. I left the Learning Circle wondering: Are all meaningful changes equally easy to tell?
The conversation also returned repeatedly to questions of selection and significance. Who decides which stories come to represent change? How are those decisions made? What happens to the many stories that remain in the background? The discussion suggested that listening is only the beginning. Interpreting and selecting stories also require careful judgement. Such judgements require us to remain attentive to whose voices are heard, whose experiences are recognised and whose perspectives may still be missing.
The Learning Circle brought into focus the challenge of recognising what matters in other people’s lives. Participatory methods such as MSC create space for these moments, helping organisations attend not only to what changed, but also to how people understand and assign meaning to those changes. Some changes announce themselves. Others become visible only with time. Perhaps that is why the questions from the Learning Circle continue to linger. Not because they demand answers. Because they change what we notice.
Every method teaches us to notice certain things. The Learning Circle suggested that participatory approaches sharpen our attention to how people understand, negotiate and give meaning to change. If these questions resonate with you, PRIA International Academy offers courses and programmes that explore participatory approaches, community engagement and experiential learning, bringing educators, practitioners and communities into dialogue with one another. We invite you to explore them and continue the conversation with us.
