Giving Compass' Take:

• Nigel Simister argues that program teams in the sector should aim for adaptive management by focusing more on intensive internal evaluation (with flexibility), while keeping external ones short and sweet.

• How does this align with your management structure? Is it possible to make this assessment across a broad range of nonprofit work?

• Read about how nonprofit are learning lessons about management from business (and vice versa).


Managing and evaluation (M&E) needs to change to better support adaptive management. This is already well covered in development literature and debates, but based on my own experiences and opinions, deeper and sustained shifts are necessary to truly embrace adaptive management.

Firstly, adaptive management may require a lowering of barriers between formerly discrete processes. In simple projects and programs the divisions between planning, monitoring, review, evaluation and research may be relatively clear. But adaptive management requires programs to approach problems from another angle; first deciding what type of information is needed and then designing a suitable process.

For example, a program team might discover that some groups of stakeholders are failing to benefit from a program intervention. It might decide as a result to develop some purposefully sampled case studies, and then conduct cross-case analysis to find out why they are not benefitting. To do this it will need to decide on issues such as whether to use internal or external staff, how much money and time to spend, what questions to address, what tools to use, and how to feed the findings into decision-making. Whether this exercise is called impact monitoring, evaluation, review, research or simply ‘a study’ becomes almost irrelevant. Once a certain level of complexity has been reached the terms tend to lose their meaning. Each exercise is different, and each will need to be designed accordingly.

More internal and less external evaluation

This may have major implications for how evaluations on adaptive programs are conducted in the future. There may need to be:

  • very short and focused studies, rapidly designed to achieve specific objectives;
  • long-term relationships between evaluators and program teams; and
  • more internal (or mixed) teams that can provide many of the functions of evaluation, but on an ongoing and flexible basis.

Read the full article about the roles of internal and external evaluation by Nigel Simister at INTRAC.