Being Comfortable with Uncertainty
Last week I was invited to speak at FHI360’s Challenge Conference, the theme of which was “Deepening Systematic Engagement.” I was asked to be part of a panel called “From Polarity to Emergence in Systems Part 1: Accountability and Adaptive Learning”, and my charge was to speak about Adaptive Management, and tools to support it. This blog is based on the brief “lightning talk” I gave on the topic, with a bit of additional content I didn’t have the time to speak about directly last week.
At its core, Adaptive Management is an intentionally flexible and iterative approach to program design and management that recognizes the inherent complexity of the environments in which we work. It therefore builds flexibility into program design from the outset, including planned pause-and-reflect moments throughout the implementation timeline, and requires ongoing and intentional learning, monitoring and—when appropriate—iterating. This intentional approach is based on the notion that we, as development practitioners, work in complex, unique, and often-changing conditions, and that we need to be prepared to make course corrections along the way.
This may sound like common sense, but it is actually much more difficult in practice. Planning for uncertainty is not always comfortable. Translating adaptive management principles into practice means accepting that an activity, a contract, or a project will always be a work in progress, and requires champions, resources, sustained commitment, and phased implementation. One of the best analogies I have heard for adaptive management is the title of Rachel Kleinfeld’s new paper: Plan for Sailboats not Planes. After all, international development is rarely a linear process free from external influences.
Adaptive management approaches are currently being tested and scaled up in USAID missions, and with its partners, across the globe. In Uganda, for example, the Mission and the Panagora Group have included an adaptive approach into the School Health and Reading Program (SHRP). Activities are continuously evaluated and real-time performance is provided on a monthly basis so that they can be constantly adjusted to optimize impact. Some of the intentional, systematic, and resourced methods and tools also include more consultative and collaborative strategic planning; learning-focused Portfolio Reviews; Before- and After- Action Reviews; CDCS mid-term reviews, and many others. While these may not seem like anything new, the innovation is that these approaches are intentional, systematic, and resourced.
But adaptive management isn’t just about technology and tools. The importance of a supportive organizational culture, as well as looking at existing processes that can be tweaked to support adaptive management, cannot be over-emphasized. One of the key principles that we espouse is that good organizational learning doesn’t mean adding an entirely new level of activities; rather, it identifies existing processes—such as monitoring, portfolio reviews, evaluations, and other such touch-points—where one can clearly frame the exercise to identify (a) what we are learning, and (b) if it means that a course correction is necessary. And that means providing a culture in your mission or your organization in which something going off course is not necessarily an outright failure, but rather an opportunity to learn and adapt in a complex environment. As long as we can get comfortable with the idea of uncertainty, and put plans in place to assess and monitor regularly, we can implement adaptive management more intentionally.