Leveraging Observational Evidence and Innovative Reflective Practice for Adaptation

‘We must learn!’ is a common cry on projects often resulting in a dry and static ‘pause and reflects’ that – if you are lucky – include evidence on occasion. Frontline staff in peacebuilding activities observe change first-hand, and structured channels for this to reach leadership to inform decision-making, learning, and adaptation are rarely created. We wanted to change that.

As part of the Durable Communities and Economic Opportunities (DCEO) IDIQ, the 100 Solutions for Stability activity uses participatory dialogue approaches to identifying problems and associated solutions with communities across Iraq. We saw an opportunity to innovate our CLA approaches and ensure that the community dialogue team could not only learn, but inform adaptation across the activity.

Hierarchical Card Sorting (HCS) as a CLA approach can expose the mental models brought to day-to-day work and understands that not all evidence is numbers on a page – often observational, and qualitative, evidence is more revealing and useful for decision-making and informing adaptation. We adjusted HCS to be friendly to a group setting and used it to support our peacebuilding staff to reflect on community dialogue processes based on their observations, as well as to test assumptions in our theory of change with a weighting exercise. The results of this informed significant adjustments to the activity's dialogue approach.

Our submission reflects the subcomponents of adaptive management and continuous learning and improvement.