
Improving the probabilities that innovators embrace evaluation practices and findings is a constant challenge. One of the reasons for this is that many people rush to create and formalize ‘big’ evaluation designs and hope that decision-makers will embrace the evaluation findings when they eventually emerge down the road. This linear, big-design, process often fails because we don’t really know what will and will not work until we try things out in field conditions. Evaluators inspired by the field of design thinking are increasingly developing, testing and refining evaluation practices on a small scale before ‘betting big’ on larger designs.