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Evaluation use in organizations- Start looking at the architecture of the decision-making environment

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  The Evidence Paradox: Why Your Best Data is Collecting Dust (and How to Fix It) We’ve all been there: a meticulously designed evaluation, robust methodology, clear findings, and a final report that—despite its brilliance—collects digital dust. For strategy leaders and senior evaluators, the frustration is real. We often operate under the "Enlightenment Model" : the belief that if we provide high-quality evidence, rational actors will naturally use it to optimize performance. But organizations aren't laboratories; they are complex, living ecosystems. If we want to bridge the gap between production and utilization , we have to stop looking at the data and start looking at the architecture of the decision-making environment. Here is why the "truth" often loses to the "system." 1. Timing: The Perishable Nature of Insights In the C-suite, a "good answer" today is worth infinitely more than a "perfect answer" next quarter. Evidence use...
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Problems, Solutions, Participants, and Choice Opportunities: Evaluation in a Garbage Can

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Problems, Solutions, Participants, and Choice Opportunities: Evaluation in a Garbage Can Why evaluations in international organizations go unused — and what it would take to change that An Inconvenient Starting Point Evaluation in international organizations rests on a foundational assumption: that producing rigorous evidence about what works and what doesn't will inform and improve organizational decisions. It is a compelling premise. It is also, for the most part, wrong — not because the evidence is poor, but because the assumption about how decisions are actually made is flawed. Study after study confirms what most evaluation practitioners quietly know: evaluation findings are chronically underused. Reports are acknowledged, management responses are filed, recommendations are "accepted" — and organizational behaviour remains largely unchanged. The profession has spent decades trying to fix this by improving evaluation quality, strengthening follow-up mechan...
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The Evaluator’s Imperative: Understanding whether interventions were actually designed to solve the right problem.

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  In most development programs, solutions precede problems, and evaluators should not perpetuate this. In international development, we often see well-intentioned projects that achieve all their stated outputs but fail to create lasting, systemic change. We focus intently on evaluating effectiveness and efficiency — Did the project deliver what was promised, and at what cost? —yet we frequently miss the most critical question of all: Was the intervention designed to solve the right problem? The reality is that much of the development sector suffers from a fundamental design flaw: Solutions often precede Problems. Development practitioners often arrive with pre-packaged tools, often due to organizational mandates or donor preference, and then try to fit them to a perceived local issue, bypassing the complex, time-consuming work of deep problem analysis. This process—sometimes described as "organized anarchy" or "Garbage Can Theory" in public policy—creates program...
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