How Do Organizations Learn? Findings and Implications for Evaluators

At some point in your evaluation career, you have likely had an experience where useful and relevant evaluation findings did not lead to meaningful change. How can we increase the likelihood that clients and stakeholders will use evaluation to strengthen their practices? This session will bring perspectives from evaluation users and market research to understand the individual and organizational factors that influence knowledge acquisition and use. We will add insights from the literature about cognitive biases and diffusion of innovation to inform a discussion about the strategies that evaluators can use to make evaluation findings more usable.