Concurrent Iterative Action: What If You Don't Have to Choose?

by

Edward Addai

13 April 2026

Acting on incomplete evidence is not recklessness. Waiting for certainty is!

Picture a programme manager overseeing a nutrition programme across five rural districts. She has a plan, a budget, and a restless donor. She also has early signals, three months in, that the community mobilisation strategy is not reaching adolescent girls. She faces a dilemma no log frame prepared her for: does she pause, diagnose, and redesign? Or does she press on, risking entrenchment of a flawed approach? Neither option, chosen alone, is adequate.

What Concurrent Iterative Action Actually Means

Concurrent iterative action is the deliberate practice of implementing and adapting simultaneously, rather than sequentially. It treats each phase of delivery not as the execution of a fixed plan, but as a learning event whose findings shape the next cycle. Andrews, Pritchett and Woolcock (2017) ground this discipline in what they call Problem-Driven Iterative Adaptation: a structured rejection of transplanted best practices in favour of locally-driven cycles of action and reflection. The logic is simple. In complex environments, no plan survives reality unchanged. The question is whether the organisation is built to learn from that contact.

In Ethiopia, the national Health Extension Programme was not deployed as a finished architecture. It was refined continuously through community feedback, health worker experience, and supervisory learning loops even as it scaled to reach millions of households. The iteration was not a symptom of poor planning. It was, as Ramalingam (2013) argues, the mechanism of results in adaptive systems.

What This Reveals About Managing in Complexity

Snowden and Boone (2007) distinguish between complicated problems, where analysis precedes action, and complex ones, where action must precede full understanding. Social programmes in child protection, education, and health across Africa routinely inhabit the latter. A community-based child protection case management system, for instance, cannot be perfected in design and then implemented. It must be implemented in order to surface the design gaps. Community dynamics, informal power structures, and survivor trust are not visible from a planning matrix. They emerge through the work itself.

Patton (2011) argues that evaluation must run alongside innovation rather than after it. This is not methodological flexibility. It is an epistemological claim: in dynamic contexts, learning and doing are not sequential phases. They are concurrent disciplines. A school-based literacy programme in rural Kenya that waits for end-line data before adjusting its teacher coaching model will spend years implementing the wrong model with greater fidelity.

Both, Not Either: What Managers Must Do Differently

The both-and paradigm demands that managers cultivate two capabilities in parallel: delivery and inquiry. In practice, this means building rapid feedback loops into implementation cycles, protecting structured space for reflection without halting forward motion, and treating adaptation as evidence of learning rather than evidence of failure.

The manager who waits for certainty before acting will always be waiting. The one who acts without structures for learning will always be improvising. Between these two failures lies the discipline of concurrent iterative action: not a compromise between rigour and responsiveness, but a synthesis of both.

References

Andrews, M., Pritchett, L. and Woolcock, M. (2017) Building State Capability: Evidence, Analysis, Action. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Patton, M.Q. (2011) Developmental Evaluation: Applying Complexity Concepts to Enhance Innovation and Use. New York: Guilford Press.

Ramalingam, B. (2013) Aid on the Edge of Chaos: Rethinking International Cooperation in a Complex World. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Snowden, D.J. and Boone, M.E. (2007) ‘A leader’s framework for decision making’, Harvard Business Review, 85(11), pp. 68–76.

 

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