This piece was written by Lea Simpson, co-founder of Brink and part of LeanAdapt, funded by DFID to inform their work in adaptive programming.

How many times have you worked on something that you know is failing, or just isn’t going as well as we’d all have hoped, but you don't speak up for fear of what others might think?

Or gotten to the end of a project and thought: I’d do this differently if I could start again?

That’s what being adaptive is all about. Setting our work up so that we can refine our approach as we learn, making good use of those insights when they happen, following the insight, not the plan.

Over the past three years, I’ve been part of a team called LearnAdapt inside the UK's Department for International Development (DFID). Our job? To explore and codify the ways teams in the department might embrace adaptive management.

Much of what happens at DFID involves working on complex issues, which generally means that linear, multi-year planning is unlikely to work except where we clearly know what to do (e.g. building a bridge). By instead practising adaptive programming we give ourselves room to work through options, test ideas and deepen our understanding of the situation as we go.

These are my top tips for adaptation based on three years of learning from the brilliant staff and advisors across DFID’s 27 countries of operation.

1. Design for adaptation

The realities of government are that you’ll most often need to set out a five year business plan to get started — exactly the kind of linear planning that we are trying to avoid — but there are ways to design these plans to make room for adaptation.

Instead of the standard mid-term report, annual report and final evaluation approach, you can break your five-year goal into chunks of work with stop/start/continues along the way. Clearly mark the signals of success you’d be getting along the way.

  • Reframe risk: Our natural instinct might be that these new approaches are risky. In an uncertain context, it’s more risky to just pursue one strategy that might not be right, than it is to experiment with a few options to see what works first.
  • Make space: Sometimes you have to get off the dance floor and onto the balcony. Pre-plan timeouts and review points to stop, take a step back and reflect on the action from a distance.
  • Don't adapt if you don’t need to, or without purpose: if you know what you need to do to get the job done, an adaptive approach won’t add value.

2. Take a new approach

If you’re not clear on the best route to achieve your goal, take a portfolio view - think about how you’d balance more certain strategies, with bolder, less certain options, running in parallel.

A portfolio is useful because it says we don’t know how to achieve the goal yet and allows us to test a few ways. Remember, just because you can set out a plan that feels linear and predictable does not mean the world will fall into place for that plan.

By definition it means stopping things that aren’t fruitful too. Here’s what you need to consider:

  • Accountability, differently done: This is not an invitation to be random. Portfolios demand a different kind of accountability. A clear goal, theses, measures of success — a portfolio without these isn’t adaptation or innovation, it’s gambling.
  • Consider routes and weight them: Structure your portfolio against a golden ratio of 70/20/10, which is broadly shared in the world of innovation. Give routes most likely to deliver impact 70% of your time and financial resources, adjacent ideas 20% and the side bets 10%.
  • Plan formal gates for reflection and decision-making: Use timely reflection points or gates within your plan to stop doing things that aren’t working and reinvest that effort in things that are.

3. Monitor and learn — don’t just evaluate for the sake of doing so

A lot of measures of success in government are there to monitor and evaluate: “has this worked, or done the job?” Adaptive ways of working, in contrast, use data to answer the question: “what do we know now that we didn’t know before?”

  • Use dynamic measurement: Adaptive work in its very nature changes, so you need dynamic measurement methodologies to capture output and understand what works. In other words, a theory of change that is updated and reflects what the team have learned, not one that sits on the shelf in between annual reviews.
  • Value learning as an outcome: Make learning an outcome and optimise all your processes in line with that.
  • Beware the vanity metrics: forget measures that focus on hard numbers that tell us nothing. Knowing that x thousand people were reached may be good for our vanity but tells us little. Is that a lot, or most of the people, or a small fraction? Meaningful measures, by comparison, tell a story, like rate of production, adoption as opposed to people reached. This will help us to make better decisions and, of course, correct where needed.

4. Lead and nurture the culture

Managing adaptive teams demands that we undo the old orthodoxies of leadership. Adaptivity isn’t about command and control. It’s about fostering a supportive and conducive environment to experimentation and learning, including providing incentives to work adaptively and embrace uncertainty.

  • Ease discomfort with uncertainty by organising what you know, guess and don’t know: When you know something, act on it. When you guess something, run experiments to test whether you’re onto something and when you don’t know, explore possibilities through research.
  • Give yourself more time: adaptive programmes take more time and greater collaboration. For new pieces of work, successful DFID teams have been seen to set out a longer inception period to set the team up for success and ensure alignment.
  • Using novel approaches can be lonely: find friends and other like-minded people who are working in similar ways. Support and encourage one another. At DFID, they have set up an Adaptive Management Network for colleagues to work with and learn from one another.
  • Speak the same language: lingo can create bigger divisions when used without intention and without first getting on the same page, so take time to make sure you all mean the same thing.

Remember it takes a while for people in a team to come round to a new way of doing things. It will take time for teams to trust that they have permission and space to work in this way.

5. Set your partners up for success

Humans change from one context to another. Our contracts with partners and collaborators set a context for our behaviour.

How a partnership is framed will, in large, part be dependent on the procurement/contractual arrangement in place. Check, and then double, triple check incentives to make sure your call for adaptivity isn’t just lip service. Fixed milestone delivery payments fly in the face of adaptive working, for instance.

  • Learning as an outcome: An alternative to a focus on outcomes is to shift the way we look at measuring how partners are delivering on the ground. The kinds of things we’d be looking for include: conduct tests, use evidence, generate good evidence and applied learning… without preempting what the tests or evidence will be.
  • Hold teams to account by asking: what did you think was going to happen, what did happen, why was there a difference and what will you do differently next time? It’s their answer to this question that matters most.

Remember, even when you get all of this right, partners will be naturally nervous to tell you when things aren’t going to plan - and this isn’t just likely but a guaranteed part of adaptive work. Become a partner, sit on the same side of the table.

If you put these tips together, you’ll have a team that’s primed to be adaptive. A team that’s confident about what they’re aiming for will experiment and take calculated risks, safe in the knowledge they can stop what’s not working or amplify what is. By following learning, you will iterate your way towards real impact. — Lea Simpson

(Picture credit: Unsplash)