Measuring the Intangible: Lessons from USAID Partners on how to Measure the impact of Organizational Learning and Adaptive Management

This paper explores lessons learned from a USAID-funded learning network of implementing partners, known as CLAIM, which developed innovative methods to measure the seemingly intangible contributions of collaborating, learning, and adapting (CLA) to organizational effectiveness and development outcomes. CLA is a USAID Framework and a set of practices that can be used to strengthen organizational learning and the conditions that enable it. CLA can be applied to USAID’s programming to improve organizational effectiveness and development outcomes. Learning network members developed and tested a range of methods and tools to measure the extent to which organizations and projects integrated CLA and whether that integration contributed to organizational or development outcomes.