The world today is increasingly volatile, politically sensitive, and uncertain. In this evolving context, shorter funding cycles, constrained resources, and fast‑moving multiple crises are compressing decision‑making timelines for social impact organisations and changemakers, just as the complexity of the work increases. What does it take for philanthropies and their partners to navigate these challenges?
These issues were at the heart of a recent Itad learning roundtable, which brought together philanthropic leaders to reflect on how evidence and learning can drive decision-making in complex systems. Several roundtable participants described operating in a moment of global ‘rupture’, where institutions, power structures, and shared assumptions are fragmenting, pushing organisations to move from control‑oriented approaches towards adaptation and real‑time sense‑making.
In this blog, we explore how these dynamics play out in complex systems, and what it takes to better connect different perspectives – across systems, and within organisations and networks – so that evidence and learning can support good judgement and effective action.
Different perspectives, one shared challenge
A recurring tension in organisations working in complex systems sits between strategic oversight and day‑to‑day realities. Boards and senior leaders, accountable for long‑term direction and organisational stewardship, understandably seek clarity, coherence, and momentum. Programme teams, operating much closer to the context, are navigating political shifts, operational constraints, and evolving risks in real time.
These perspectives are not in conflict. They reflect different vantage points on the same reality. Boards tend to operate at a distance, scanning for system‑level patterns and long‑term direction. Programme teams work closer to the ground, where progress is often uneven, fragile, and shaped by forces beyond organisational control.
In volatile environments, this difference in perspective becomes more difficult to manage. Insights from the ground can appear messy or inconclusive when reported upwards, while from the boardroom, progress can seem slow or ambiguous. The issue is rarely a lack of effort or ambition; more often, it is a misalignment in how progress, risk and learning are interpreted and discussed – with real consequences for decision‑making.
This tensions is not new – see our blog on the ‘missing middle’ between boards and delivery teams which explores how organisations often struggle to align strategic oversight with operational reality when pursuing systems change. Greater uncertainty and more constrained resources are making this misalignment more consequential than ever.
The roundtable reinforced that strategy still matters in these conditions – and in fact, perhaps matters more than ever – but as direction, not straightjacket. Strategy is best thought of as a tool for setting values, purpose, and boundaries, and guiding ongoing sensemaking and learning, while leaving space for teams to adapt as contexts shift. Speakers repeatedly highlighted leadership as critical in creating psychological safety to question and evolve strategy without this being interpreted as drift.
From proving progress to supporting judgement
Roundtable participants reflected that evidence rarely informs decisions in neat or linear ways. Rather than striving for ever more comprehensive or ‘gold‑standard’ evidence, there was strong support for prioritising information that is timely, good enough, and clearly aligned with the decisions leaders at different levels of philanthropic organisations face.
Seen in this light, evidence becomes less about proving success or failure. Instead, its primary function is to support learning and judgment in uncertain conditions. This means placing greater weight on context, people-centered insights, and ongoing processes of reflection dialogue as forms of evidence, alongside formal analysis.
Good evidence isn’t about delivering definitive answers – which are often impossible to discover in complex systems. Instead, good evidence helps staff and boards to explore, ‘What are we learning?’, and to use those insights to make more informed, adaptive decisions, time and again.
Making learning usable at the board table
A recurring theme was the importance of simplicity. Over‑engineered frameworks and too many indicators undermine agility at the very moments when boards need clarity most. Rather than trying to track everything, effective approaches focus attention on what matters most at specific decision points – on measuring better, not measuring more.
This often involves:
- distinguishing clearly between information needed for strategic oversight and information needed for adaptive management;
- creating shared reference points that allow different organisational perspectives to interpret complexity without flattening it;
- using evidence deliberately to surface uncertainty and trade‑offs, rather than to resolve them prematurely.
When used well, learning frameworks function as a translation layer between boards and programme teams. They support more open, productive conversations about what is changing, what is stalling, and what that means for future choices.
Speakers shared the various ways in which they have faced these challenges. In one case, a board was grappling with how to retain high ambition for systems‑level change while recognising that different parts of the strategy were moving at very different paces. By refreshing the theory of change and developing tailored results products, we helped distinguish the information needed for board‑level judgement from the information programme teams needed for learning and adaptation. This creates space for more productive strategic conversations, rather than binary judgements of success or failure.
In other high‑risk portfolios, similar approaches helped senior decision‑makers move away from ‘stay or stop’ decisions based on limited signals, towards more informed choices about when to adapt, when to accept risk, and when to exit.
Governance in uncertain environments
The roundtable agreed that accountability remains essential in complex settings, but must be understood differently – balancing formal oversight with real‑time learning, and recognising adaptation (and even failure) as legitimate outcomes of responsible decision‑making. Strong governance in complex settings does not mean demanding certainty where it cannot exist. Instead, it requires holding ambition alongside realism, accountability alongside openness, and committing to learning.
Boards and senior leaders play a crucial role in creating a culture capable of handling uncertainty: encouraging, rather than suppressing learning, treating adaptation as a function of strategic discipline, not deviation, and promoting the use of different types of evidence to inform strategic decisions.
Where organisations develop a shared language for discussing complexity, they are better able to maintain strategic intent while remaining responsive to changing conditions – and to make deliberate, transparent decisions about risk, adaptation and resource allocation.
Continuing the conversation
The reflections from this discussion point to a common conclusion: in this rupture moment, organisations need to let go of the illusion of control, simplify where possible, and govern through learning, adaptation, and judgement. There is value in investing not only in what is measured, but in how evidence is interpreted, debated and used. When done well, this can help boards and programme teams navigate complexity together to make stronger, more transparent decisions in uncertain times.
If you are reflecting on how your governance, learning or decision‑making processes could better support systems change, we would welcome the opportunity to continue the conversation. Get in touch to explore how we can support your organisation to govern for impact in complex and uncertain environments.
