Evaluating for Impact on Complex Challenges: A Cross-Disciplinary Perspective

Abstract Information: Organizations face increasingly complex problems. Some are shared across contexts, like figuring out how to survive through climate change or hire people with the required skills when there is a gap in the skills market. Other complex problems reside within the organization itself, like issues around retaining employees or customer satisfaction. Regardless of the scope and scale of these problems, they are all what we would consider "adaptive" challenges, an idea presented by Ron Heifetz, keynote speaker at the 2019 Evaluation conference. These adaptive challenges require collaboration and communication across multiple actors and sectors, as well as the ability to adapt to changing contexts and learn from feedback. Organizations may try to address these adaptive challenges with simple programs. Consider the relative impact of a sustainability challenge relative to the enormity of the climate change crisis. Such programs often lack the necessary scope to effectively address complex and adaptive problems, which involve multiple interconnected systems. Though this does not necessarily diminish the value of these programs, evaluators play a role in helping organizations keep long-term impact in mind, regardless of the complexity of a challenge. This session will focus on how we can take the best from the fields of program evaluation, adaptive leadership, and collective impact to provide more useful information for decision-making and improvement under these complex circumstances. By leveraging these scholarly insights, we can help our organizations think more rigorously about impact under complex circumstances. In just five minutes, the presentation will briefly highlight the key principles of adaptive leadership, collective impact, and evaluation practices focused on strategy and systems. The unique contribution of the presentation is to bring these areas of scholarship together to show how we might design more effective evaluations for programs and systems focused on adaptive problems. Intentionally broad and theoretical, the goal is to expose the audience to ideas they might not be familiar with and ignite ideas for how they might use them in their evaluation practice.