Collaborators
We collaborate with other great practitioners, who each bring their own expertise, experience and wisdom.
Systemic Development Associates
An essential part of Adaptive Evaluation work is Systems Thinking. While its value is widely recognised and more organisations are adopting it, the key is to maintain the depth and power of Systems Thinking yet make the approach practical.
We collaborate with Systemic Development Associates (SDA), who have been doing that for decades. They have been using innovative systemics techniques to address complex issues across various sectors on seemingly intractable business problems. SDA has a long history of building Systems Thinking capacity into organisations through project-based leadership enablement programs. For example, with a national bank, they identified embedded assumptions within annual strategic reviews, built executive capacity to detect weak signals in banking behaviour, foster innovation and transform strategic outcomes. For the Australian Taxation Office, SDA designed and delivered Systems Thinking leadership courses which enabled participants to address many complex issues including unveiling hidden tax avoidance schemes which lead to policy changes.
SDA’s ability to capture diverse stakeholder insights and focus them into strategic options helps organisations to identify pathways to manage the complexity of their business issues. It means organisations can get to the real business challenge and the change they create is sustainable. We are inspired by this and other work of SDA, as we continue working together to bring systems thinking to measurement and evaluation.
Qualie
We recognise the limitations of relying solely on quantitative data and we have been exploring ways to harness the power of qualitative data. How do we get better data at scale (for example, in culture transformations)? We need to gather richer pictures from people, data that better reflects what people really experience in organisations. If we want organisations to be less mechanistic in their decision-making, we have to help decision-makers get more human data, which reflects organisations as living systems.
We were excited to find a partner in Qualie who share a commitment to bringing more humanity into organisations. Over the past twenty years providing data for campaigns, brands and products, Qualie evolved ways to tell more of the human story. They took their techniques of eliciting rich qualitative data – being authentic, genuine inquiry, guiding individuals and groups – and applied this using video. They show how video offers layers of interpretation that traditional surveys and interviews simply cannot provide. It brings much more of the human into stories, providing real-time reflections, subtle shifts in emotion, and unexpected insights.
Qualie are doing two remarkable things that change the game of qualitative data. Firstly, collecting extremely rich human data (a story) in 60 seconds to convey deep emotional thoughts and experiences about a topic. And then, applying a process where these stories are upvoted or ranked by (hundreds or even thousands) of others in the organisation. This enables a statistical analysis to quantitatively determine the most representative story. An evaluating stakeholder, Board or Executive experience the “closeness of qual with the confidence of quant”.
Adaptive Cultures
Adaptive Cultures has created ground-breaking, practical frameworks and methodologies for evolving organisational cultures. We have seen how effective these are for organisations dealing with the intense internal and external complexities of today's global environment. Their leading-edge Insights Culture Diagnostic is the most comprehensive, useful and practical way to measure an organisation’s adaptive capacity and cultural evolution. Adaptive Cultures share this wisdom through their Practitioner Development Programs – teaching people how to help organisations evolve culture at the individual, social and structural levels.
Adaptive Evaluation has many connections with Adaptive Cultures! Mark and Alex have completed the Adaptive Cultures’ Practitioner Development Program. Alex is a recent former Director with Adaptive Cultures, and still connects as one of the owner/partners. Now, Adaptive Cultures and Adaptive Evaluation partner and support each other to flourish. Our common passion is to share the Adaptive Cultures frameworks more broadly into the world.
Alison Cameron
Adaptive Evaluation has been collaborating with Alison Cameron since 2019, exploring ideas around measuring in complexity whether in culture, Agile at scale, or through a global Immunity to Change project. In 2024, as we work with Alison to create a post-conventional approach to culture transformation, we are seeing more clearly the intersection between measurement, learning and culture. In a recent proposal with Alison, we invited Qualie and our strategic measurement partner to help evolve a super-efficient, innovative way to deliver a culture transformation for one of Alison’s European clients.
We are excited to continue this work with Alison, who is a globally recognised practitioner known for her powerful approaches to culture and leadership. We have seen her work powerfully for the higher outcomes of the people and organisations she supports and the positive impact they can have on society and the environment. Whether as a strategic advisor to Boards, CEOs and Executive teams or as a collaborator with people like us, Alison is famous for her generosity, passion and ability to bring people together and unleash their collective intelligence. We draw extensively from her wisdom and experience of her work with various companies, in particular her work in finance and energy.