The messy middle of Outcome Harvesting
I am Brilliant Bhebe, a monitoring, evaluation and learning consultant at Southern Hemisphere, based in South Africa. I was first introduced to Outcome Harvesting in 2020 and have since applied it in several complex evaluations, helping organisations refine outcome statements and make sense of change in complex and evolving contexts.
I often use Outcome Harvesting in evaluations of complex social change processes. One case that has stayed with me involved a study of the Innovating for Maternal and Child Health in Africa (IMCHA) initiative in Uganda and South Sudan. IMCHA was a health research initiative aimed at generating evidence to improve maternal and child health, while also encouraging engagement with policy and decision-making spaces. I used Outcome Harvesting to explore how influence was beginning to happen in a programme that was still unfolding. These reflections come from a time when I was still relatively new to the method, which may be one reason the experience stayed with me so strongly. It reminded me that while Outcome Harvesting is often presented as a series of neat steps, the real work often happens in the messy middle.
By “messy middle,” I mean the stage where outcome claims are still unclear, evidence is partial, timelines are not fully pinned down, and you are still trying to separate context from contribution. In presentations, Outcome Harvesting can look very orderly: define the questions, gather data, draft outcome statements, verify, substantiate, and analyse. In practice, I came to appreciate that Outcome Harvesting does not always unfold in a neat sequence. Iteration and revisiting earlier steps are part and parcel of the process. The document review generated a broad basket of possible outcomes. As we moved back and forth between documents and interviews, we refined and narrowed them down to two policy engagement outcomes.
Lessons learned This process has taught me that rough outcome statements are part of the work. I have come to understand that those rough notes were not evidence of poor practice. In fact, they were evidence that the outcome descriptions were being tested and refined rather than accepted too quickly.
A second lesson was that the messy middle is often where contribution first becomes visible through early outcomes. In this case, the policy outcomes were still emerging because the project had not yet been completed at the time of the evaluation. With more experience, I have come to appreciate that longer-term or higher-level outcomes often take time to emerge and may not yet be visible at the point of harvesting.
A third lesson was that iteration is part of rigour. In this case, outcome descriptions were informed by document review, qualitative interviews, substantiation via interviews and email, and even secondary materials. Substantiation helped test whether the outcomes had indeed occurred and the contribution pathway; while analysis helped us organise them in ways that could meaningfully answer the evaluation questions.
I also realised that the messy middle can be uncomfortable because it asks us not to tidy the story too soon. In Outcome Harvesting, especially in complex and still-evolving programmes, the discipline may lie in staying with the uncertainty a little longer. I came to see that precision is hard in the messy middle because we are often asking people to name change clearly at the very moment it is still emerging.
Final reflections Looking back, I can see that the messy middle is not a detour from Outcome Harvesting, rather it is the method in practice. I would be keen to hear how others in the OH community have navigated the messy middle of Outcome Harvesting. What helped you grow more comfortable with uncertainty?