OL-ECB TIG Week: Prioritizing Organizational Learning in Evaluation Consulting Practice by Sarah Williams Leng

Date: Monday, April 14, 2025

Hi, I’m Sarah Williams Leng, an Independent Consultant specializing in strengthening measurement, learning systems and evaluations for community organizations and foundations.

Organizations typically seek support for program evaluation or Evaluation Capacity Building (ECB). While both are essential, strong evaluation practices alone aren’t enough. As Preskill and Boyle (2008) emphasize, evaluation efforts thrive when leadership values learning, fosters a culture of inquiry, and supports evaluation through systems, structures, and communication channels.

To drive meaningful change, organizations must invest in learning capacity. That’s why I integrate learning assessments and building into my evaluation work—because the real power of evaluation lies in how an organization learns and applies insights.

How I Prioritize Organizational Learning

My process begins with discovery conversations to assess evaluation and learning practices across the organization. Internal evaluation staff, program managers and executive leadership are key participants in this process.

• Hot Tip: Leadership buy-in is crucial. Without it, learning infrastructure lacks the necessary investment and support needed to thrive. To gauge an organization’s learning culture, I ask:
  • How do leaders use data insights for decision making?
  • How do they welcome feedback from diverse interest groups?
  • What opportunities do they create for participatory learning within the organization?
  • How are employees encouraged and rewarded for engaging in evaluation?

When Organizational Learning is effective, organizations create intentional space for reflection, engage in supportive critical peer review, and integrate evaluation into daily operations. Learning becomes an ongoing process rather than a one-time event.

Through discovery, we determine how learning can be supported throughout the evaluation. This has looked like:

• Participatory decision-making is a useful strategy that strengthens learning culture by ensuring staff, internal evaluators and beneficiaries contribute to decision-making processes.
• Evaluation should do more than fulfill reporting requirements- it should inform organizational strategy. I work with clients to apply findings beyond reports, embedding insights into planning sessions with multiple interest groups to shape programming and strategy.
  • Cool Trick: Incorporate regular sessions where staff review data insights, share experiences, and plan actions using “Plan-Do-Study-Act” cycles. This can be done during existing meetings by adjusting agendas to prioritize learning discussions.
• Clearly communicating evaluation and learning procedures cannot be taken for granted. They help maintain.

Lessons Learned

When funders prioritize learning and longer-term investment, Organizational Learning integration into evaluations becomes easier.  I’ve successfully built these practices into evaluations of place-based initiatives, community collaboratives, and multi-year grants that incorporate evaluation funding.

Investing in a learning culture allows organizations to go beyond conducting evaluations—they actively use insights to evolve and improve. By embedding organizational learning into evaluation, organizations ensure their efforts lead to sustainable, meaningful change.

Rad Resources

• The Facilitator’s Guide to Participatory Decision Making outlines the essentials to creating inclusive decision making processes.
• Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) & Workflows help clearly communicate evaluation and learning procedures and maintain institutional knowledge by preventing valuable insights from being lost due to staff turnover.

The American Evaluation Association is hosting Organizational Learning and Evaluation Capacity Building (OL-ECB) Topical Interest Group Week. The contributions all this week to AEA365 come from our OL-ECB TIG members. Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this AEA365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post on the AEA365 webpage so that we may enrich our community of practice. Would you like to submit an AEA365 Tip? Please send a note of interest to AEA365@eval.org. AEA365 is sponsored by the American Evaluation Association and provides a Tip-a-Day by and for evaluators. The views and opinions expressed on the AEA365 blog are solely those of the original authors and other contributors. These views and opinions do not necessarily represent those of the American Evaluation Association, and/or any/all contributors to this site.