Stephanie, thank you for this deep reflection. Your comment that stays with me is that evaluation is often strongest at validating what has been delivered, but much weaker at assessing what will endure, and almost silent on what is about to fail.
I think this names one of the deepest professional discomforts in evaluation. We often treat uncertainty as a threat to rigour, when in complex climate, environmental, and circular economy systems, ignoring uncertainty may be the greater methodological weakness. A beautifully evidenced retrospective judgement can still be strategically useless if it cannot tell decision-makers where the system is becoming brittle.
Your framing of the mid-term review as “the last credible moment to change direction” is especially poignant. Too often, mid-term reviews become soft accountability exercises....adjust the ratings, tidy the logframe, recommend more coordination...but if we took them seriously as foresight moments, they could become strategic inflection points where programmes are stress-tested before failure becomes locked in.
I saw this very clearly in a recent UNICEF strategic foresight evaluation I conducted...where we had to stretch the OECD-DAC criteria beyond their usual retrospective orientation. Relevance became not only “is this aligned now?” but “will this remain relevant under plausible future conditions?” Coherence became about future institutional fit. Effectiveness had to consider adaptive capacity, not just achieved results. Sustainability became explicitly conditional, i.e., under what political, financial, organisational, and social conditions will this model hold?
For me, the provocation is that perhaps the most useful evaluation is not the one that gives the most confident judgement about the past, but the one that most honestly reveals where the future is likely to break the programme’s assumptions. In that sense, future-informed evaluation does not weaken evaluative judgement...it makes it braver (can we use braver evaluation?)
RE: From Hindsight to Foresight: How Evaluation Can Become Future-Informed
Kenya
Steven Lynn Lichty
Managing Partner
REAL Consulting Group
Posted on 29/04/2026
Stephanie, thank you for this deep reflection. Your comment that stays with me is that evaluation is often strongest at validating what has been delivered, but much weaker at assessing what will endure, and almost silent on what is about to fail.
I think this names one of the deepest professional discomforts in evaluation. We often treat uncertainty as a threat to rigour, when in complex climate, environmental, and circular economy systems, ignoring uncertainty may be the greater methodological weakness. A beautifully evidenced retrospective judgement can still be strategically useless if it cannot tell decision-makers where the system is becoming brittle.
Your framing of the mid-term review as “the last credible moment to change direction” is especially poignant. Too often, mid-term reviews become soft accountability exercises....adjust the ratings, tidy the logframe, recommend more coordination...but if we took them seriously as foresight moments, they could become strategic inflection points where programmes are stress-tested before failure becomes locked in.
I saw this very clearly in a recent UNICEF strategic foresight evaluation I conducted...where we had to stretch the OECD-DAC criteria beyond their usual retrospective orientation. Relevance became not only “is this aligned now?” but “will this remain relevant under plausible future conditions?” Coherence became about future institutional fit. Effectiveness had to consider adaptive capacity, not just achieved results. Sustainability became explicitly conditional, i.e., under what political, financial, organisational, and social conditions will this model hold?
For me, the provocation is that perhaps the most useful evaluation is not the one that gives the most confident judgement about the past, but the one that most honestly reveals where the future is likely to break the programme’s assumptions. In that sense, future-informed evaluation does not weaken evaluative judgement...it makes it braver (can we use braver evaluation?)