I was re-reading the Most Significant Change Guide developed by Rick Davies and Jess Dart today (their manual is an excellent resource available freely on the web here) and I noticed this list of why organisations have found the technique useful.

• It is a good means of identifying unexpected changes.
• It is a good way to clearly identify values that prevail in an organisation and to have a practical discussion about which of those values are most important.
• It is a participatory form of monitoring that requires no special professional skills. Compared to other monitoring approaches, it is easy to communicate across cultures. There is no need to explain what an indicator is. Everyone can tell stories about events they think were important.
• It encourages analysis as well as data collection because people have to explain why they believe one change is more important than another.
• It can build staff capacity in analysing and conceptualising impact.
• It can deliver a rich picture of what is happening, rather than an overly simplified picture where organisational, social and economic developments are reduced to a single number.
• It can be used to monitor and evaluate bottom-up initiatives that do not have predefined outcomes against which to evaluate.

The last point is one of the main reasons we use MSC to monitor complexity based interventions because from the outset we can never know exactly how the intervention will unfold.