Adaptive Forest Management

Forest Service 'Transformation': Engaging Employees

US Forest Service Chief Gail Kimbell recently sent a letter to Forest Service leaders, daylighting a report [PDF, "discussion draft", 46 pp] from Dialogos International on FS culture, transformation efforts, safety and more.

The report and accompanying studies show how all improvement efforts are grounded in and guided by organization culture and culture improvement. The studies were begun with an eye toward safety, but it soon became clear that safety could only be dealt with as part of a much broader organzaional transformation.

Noteworthy, the report highlights what I'll call 'Forest Service cultural impediments' that limit success in the short- and longer-run. The report, a "discussion draft", argues, among other things, that these "impediments" are "critical 'high leverage' points that must be addressed and transformed." They include:

• Ceding Power — "[T]o the regions …[resulting in a] lack of a clear, central focus …"
• Mission Confusion — "… [C]ompeting stories about the right and central focus of the Agency"
• Family "Collusion" — "… [P]eople tend to use ["FS family"] as a defense, attributing that others do not understand as we do, and seeking to fend off positions of external stakeholders. …"
• Lack of Straight Talk — "… People often seem to be unwilling to speak out and name difficulties that they see, and attribute that to do so is to run serious risks. …"
• Capability Trap — "… [A] phenomenon where people are working increasing hard but where overall capability … is not improving and can in fact be deteriorating. …"
• Impaired Learning — "… Errors are not generally embraced as opportunities for improvement, particularly now, in a climate where people fear that the admission of error may lead [to retribution] …. Many suggested that the Agency has been poor at reflection on itself, and learning from reflection. … [A] proliferation of rules and requirements … tend[s] to have the effect of creating compliance, but not internally motivated commitment to change and learn."
• Physics of Accidents — "… Changing environmental settings … and budget pressures result in more demanding conditions that need to be faced with the same or fewer resources…. More intense circumstances, fewer people covering greater distances, simply icrease risks and chances for error.
• Initiative Proliferation — "… [Tending] toward a fragmentation of focus.

Here is Kimbell's letter, with highlights (in red) to denote the FS Chief's emphasis on employee engagement in "Transformation":

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Date: June 15, 2007
Subject: Safety Culture Report and Broader Implications
To: Regional Foresters, Station Directors, Area Director, IITF Director, Deputy Chiefs and WO Chief Staff Directors

Last year Chief Bosworth charged our national safety council with examining the ingrained habits, expectations, and "ways of doing business, or culture" that contribute to death and injury, despite visible commitment to the safety and health of Forest Service employees. Enclosed is a summary of the report called "Safety Culture for the 21st Century" that the consultant Dialogos International prepared in response to Chief Bosworth's charge. The report describes our safety challenges in terms of a much broader set of issues and dynamics.

After interviewing over 400 Forest Service employees at every level of the organization and analyzing what they learned, Dialogos determined that our safety record is not just about safety – it is about literally everything we do, and how we do it.

Our safety record and our operational challenges are embedded in how we:

• Contribute to mission confusion by not making hard strategic choices;
• Avoid or discourage straight talk, including reporting near misses;
• Divert energy from mission work, overtaxing people and diminishing our capacity;
• Skip time to detect, learn from, and act on our errors;
• Lose energy to a proliferation of piecemeal initiatives that come and go;
• Support a normalized attitude that it is okay to deviate from safety protocols.

This is not easy for most of us to hear. However, it is critical in this time when we are transforming and realigning our national and regional organizations. We need to ensure that we as core leaders are better aligned; provide more mission clarity; ensure better community and working relationships; and integrate our work and capabilities across boundaries. To ensure our success, we must continue to engage our employees in identifying things that drain energy away from our mission, and integrating what we learn in a single, unified effort to work well, safely, and consistently for the long run.

Our agency fatality rate (six or seven people a year "do not go home") is triple that of the National Park Service and more than four times that of the Bureau of Land Management. Clearly, it is not just that we are a natural resource agency in an intrinsically dangerous line of work.

Perhaps most painfully, our can-do mindset is diluting our effectiveness, overtaxing our workforce and resources, and contributing directly to fatalities and injuries. Every time we say "that rule does not apply to me," we are exacerbating operational challenges that put our coworkers and the Forest Service itself at risk. As Einstein once noted, "insanity is doing the same thing and expecting different results." Our culture creates the results we get; we cannot expect different results until we do the hard work to change it. The good news is that we now know we can turn this around.

I thank the hundreds of people who participated in the Safety Culture for the 21st Century project and contributed to the Dialogos report. No change effort, however important, has ever survived without deep commitment from the people charged with doing the work.

I ask you as senior leaders in the Forest Service to:

• Distribute this letter and enclosed summary of the report for further discussion;
• hold and promote regional change dialogues, and report results to me;

Stay tuned. We are in this together.

/s/ Abigail R. Kimbell
ABIGAIL R. KIMBELL
Chief

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On the heels of Chief Kimbell's letter, and the Dialogos "study", comes an 6/29/2007 email from a member of the Transformation Team (subject: UPDATE: WO/RO/Area Transformation; to: [distribution list] "wo change champion roster") saying, in essence that, henceforth, employee engagement will be strictly limited due to time constraints and managerial commitments:

… Employee Involvement: Early in this Transformation effort, I (and the Transformation Team) had high expectations for how employees would/could be involved in a very transparent collaborative process for this effort. Given the timing of and re-definition of the WO/RO/Area Transformation task, the direction from leadership, and the extremely short timeframes assigned to this effort, it is not going to be feasible to engage employees in the early design to the extent I/we had originally envisioned. There will still be opportunities, albeit limited. As a result, it may look and feel like a top-down effort. For this, I am sorry. It does not reflect my personal desires or values. However, it is the nature of the task the Transformation Team has been handed. We'll do the best we can with the time we have. Please call me if you'd like to discuss this further. …

Let's hope that the Transformation Team "Update" is simply a missstep, and that Chief Kimbell's stated desires prevail. Let's keep pitching for deployment of both blogs and wikis to engage Forest Service employees and others in much-need "Transformation" dialogue. We will "stay tuned".

Note: 6/19/2007 I gleaned the Chief's letter from:
"They Said It," Archives, June 2007, June 19: "Safety Culture Report'
Home of the Wildland Firefighter

Forest Service Decentralization Myths, and a Few 'Transformation' Suggestions

Here are thoughts from a colleague. We begin with the ever-present management conundrum of centralization v. decentralization, and how the Forest Service has worked it into a Catch 22. Then we move to a few suggestions to get out of organizational traps we've fallen into:

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THE CIRCULAR MYTH OF FOREST SERVICE DECENTRALIZATION

The Forest Service is organized as a decentralized agency in order to allow field managers the flexibility to make decisions that are responsive to local conditions and needs;

BUT, the Forest Service maintains a voluminous system of Manuals, Handbooks, Directives, Desk Guides, publications, and direction letters which govern the minutia of virtually every decision a Forest Service officer must make, not to mention the micromanagement of its daily affairs by political appointees;

BUT, in meetings, training, and other communications, the Forest Service reiterates the folklore of decentralization, fostering an institutional culture that believes the Forest Service is a decentralized organization, which leads to disregard of the centralized direction;

BUT, woe to the Forest Service officer who gets caught deviating from the centralized direction under the mistaken belief that the decentralized organization allows the flexibility to make local decisions based on local considerations;

BUT, afterhours and water cooler discussions laud the ingenuity of the Forest Service officer who disregards the centralized directives and regulations in order to get good things done on the ground, contributing to the culture that wants to believe the Forest Service is a decentralized organization;

BUT, if a Forest Service officer makes a decision that the central authorities do not like, the response is to create more centralized direction in an attempt to insure it never happens again;

BUT, if a Forest Service officer fails to make a decision the central authorities want to see made because the officer believes he or she is precluded from doing so by the centralized direction, the officer is reprimanded by the central authorities for failing to be creative in interpreting the central direction;

BUT, the institutions which hold the Forest Service accountable for its actions, the courts, Congress, Office of the Inspector General, and the Government Accountability Office, measure the agency's performance by its adherence to its centralized standards;

BUT, the state congressional delegations which hold great sway with the Forest Service locally decisions impugn those officers who adhere to the centralized direction if doing so does not achieve the results the delegations want;

BUT, when displeased with a decision, the public at large views failure to follow the centralized direction as evidence of agency corruption;

BUT, when pleased with a local decision the public at large couldn't care less about the central direction;

BUT, the central direction nonetheless grows exponentially, along with internal conflicts and inconsistencies, such that keeping up with and deciphering the central direction becomes nearly impossible and it is increasingly ignored or disregarded;

BUT, once created, central direction almost never goes away. Much of it is antiquated, out of date, self contradictory, redundant or simply wrong. Nonetheless, when central direction is updated, it almost always increases in volume, complexity, and indecipherability;

BUT, as volume increases and direction is restated, the potential for internal inconsistency and inconsistencies between laws, regulations, manuals, handbooks, desk guides, instruction letters, and supervisory instructions increases, and the ability to find useful information declines further;

BUT, the intent of this internal direction is to make employees more effective at their jobs;

BUT, the central directives are used by employees in rote decision making exercises rather than true deliberation, and are used in lieu of training and career development that would actually make employees more effective at their job of making decisions that are responsive to local conditions and needs;

BUT, "staff specialists" become so caught up in the rote exercise of following the centralized direction that adhering to the direction becomes the end rather than the means of accomplishing real work;

BUT, the Forest Service is organized as a decentralized agency in order to allow field managers the flexibility to make decisions that are responsive to local conditions and needs.

(RETURN TO BEGINNING OF DOCUMENT)

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SO, WHAT TO DO TO GET OUT OF THIS LOOP?

1. Admit that the organization is not entirely decentralized. The Forest Service is a government agency (not the Nature Conservancy, Weyerhauser, or the Boy Scouts) which is governed by one set of laws. Since the Constitutional authority over the National Forests resides with Congress, the role of the Forest Service is to "faithfully execute" those laws, on the entire National Forest System.
   
   
2. These laws need to be consistently interpreted and applied by the Forest Service across the country. Since the laws are not comprehensive or without room for interpretation, clear, concise regulations are needed to fill in the gaps and insure that the laws are consistently applied.
   
   
3. Existing regulations are not clear, concise, or succinct.
   
   
4. The existing mechanisms for drafting regulations are not adequate. Drafting good regulatory language is an art form. There should be a small, permanent staff of professionals to draft regulatory language. Since regulations are promulgated by the Secretary, and not the Forest Service, this staff should work for the Under Secretary's office. This is not to suggest that Forest Service technical professionals and OGC should not have input into rule making, but the drafting of rules should be by qualified professionals, not technocrats on detail.
   
   
5. Burn the Directives system. Some very small portions of the system should be made into rules, but the vast majority of the system should go away.
   
   
6. Replace the Directives system with weblogs (i.e. blogs) and wiki systems for assisting employees in doing their work. These systems are evolving, self-correcting information tools that allow technical professionals to share experiences, approaches to problem solving, and to evaluate and critique what others are doing. Instead of the rigid, top-down, cookbook approach to problem solving that is present in the existing directives system, this is a dynamic, evolutionary to help competent professionals do their jobs, and for the agency to monitor how work is being done, and make corrections as needed.
   
   
7. Develop a workforce of competent, independent, thinking, accountable professionals. The current work force is not educated, trained, equipped, organized, or motivated to do the job they are supposed to be doing, which is to administer the National Forest System. While there are some subject matter areas of expertise that are capable of performing components of this overall job, (e.g. fire suppression, timber management, road engineering) the agency as a whole is not equipped to accomplish its overall mission.
   
   
8. Skill sets for accomplishing this mission need to be reevaluated, and there must be a commitment to professional development toward these skill sets. Currently, employees come from a pool of seasonal and temporary employees educated natural resource, engineering, and other applied sciences who stumble their way through years of initiation rites into career paths that are available and convenient. Needed skill sets should be identified and employees brought in on pre-identified career paths based on education, interests and skills, and then cultivated through training and job assignments to do those jobs.
   
   
9. There is nothing in particular that qualifies natural resource and other technical professionals to perform in the Regional Forester, Forest Supervisor, and District Ranger line positions. These jobs primarily require management, diplomacy, and public administration skills that have no correlation to the education and aptitudes of the traditional natural resources professional, but in many ways are antithetical to those technical skills. These line offers function more like governors and mayors over large land areas than natural resource managers. Qualifications for these jobs need to be completely rethought.
   
   
10. Once the agency is reorganized along these lines, employees need to be given freedom to use these tools and skills to make decisions that are responsive to local conditions and needs, bounded by clear statutory and regulatory sideboards. Employees should be accountable for mistakes and unacceptable deviations from these limited standards, but in a way that primarily allows for learning and correction, not discipline and reprimand, except in extreme or repetitive cases.

Effective Organizations

As I was looking at Toni Stafford's Transforming the Forest Service blog, I decided it time to take another look at both the bright and the dark side of organization. On the bright side, I updated my "Effective Organizations" outline. In Effective Organizations I attempt to interrelate:

• W. Edwards Deming's 14 Points and Seven Deadly Diseases
• Peter Block's Stewardship
• Ronald Heifetz's Leadership
• Karl Weick's Mindfulness
• Donald Schön's Reflection
• Peter Senge's Systems Thinking
• Chris Argyris' Overcoming Organizational Defenses
• Margaret Wheatley's A Simpler Way
• Gifford and Elizabeth Pinchot's Rights and Responsibilities
• and more, including Dialogue, Collaboration and Learning

What have I missed?

The task of moving from an 'oppressive bureaucracy' to an 'empowered collaborative' is huge. But the payoff is massive. Moving from a fear-based hierarchy/patriarchy to a self-organizing, federation is a journey none of us ought to pass up willingly.

As the journey is begun (or not, as the case may be) we ought not to forget the dark side, as I have noted before:

• US Forest Service Deeply Flawed Planning Culture, 2004
• Five Habits of Highly Defective Organizations, and Five Leadership/Management Needs, 2003
• The Forest Service as a Learning Challenged Organization, 1999

Blogs and Wikis: Learning from the CIA

Late in 2005, the US Central Intelligence Ageny began to explore new and innovative ways to adapt to a new world. No longer could the agency continue its top down, hierarchical approach to management and information gathering, intelligence gleaning, etc. Change was suggested to break the agency out of gridlock. The change was patterned after changes already underway in many parts of the US Defense Department. Interestingly, the changes recommended are the stuff we have been working on here for the last couple of years.

According to Federal Computer Week, in April 2006 the CIA had over 1,000 internal blogs. See also Webcontent.Gov on blogs.

I wonder when or even if the US Forest Service will wake up? Amid a blizzard of conference calls and in-person meetings, almost no one is advocating for and/or using blogs and wikis. Below find excerpts from two discussion paper/policy recommendations looked at by the CIA. No telling (at least by me) what changes have been acted upon by the secretive CIA. Read the linked papers for the rest of the connections to complexity theory in this realm. Here are a few highlights:

How the Web Can Relieve Our Information Glut and Get Us Talking to Each Other: Connecting the Virtual Dots
Matthew S. Burton

… A blog lets ordinary computer users with average technical knowledge instantly publish on the Web. Since blogs came along two years ago, 9 million people have started their own, many of them at no cost. Most authors are just looking to keep friends and family updated without overloading their inboxes.

This nonintrusive publication method lets writers say what they really think. We all have that uncle who forwards every terrible joke he finds online. We usually groan when it shows up in our inbox. How dare he waste my time and hard-disk space with this? We victims of poor e-mail etiquette don't want to be seen as the annoying uncle, so before we send e-mails, we self censor, taking into account our addressee's possible reaction: "Will he think I'm stupid? Will he delete this in disgust? Maybe I should remove this sentence."

A blog is different. It's our own space. Readers have the option of viewing it every day or completely ignoring it, but whatever they do, we’re not necessarily liable for their reaction. We're not telling them that they have to read it, so if they don't like it, we aren't to blame. This gives us freedom to speak our minds. …

Broadcasting a blog has another big advantage over a point-to-point e-mail conversation: It lets previously unknown people participate in the dialogue. …

And visitors to our blogs wouldn't just read. Blogs allow readers to contribute to the discussion by adding their own comments to a writer's posts. Do you have a question to which someone out there is bound to know the answer? Blog the question and wait for someone to come across it and post an answer. Do you have thoughts on an intelligence product? Write them down and let the rest of your community know what you think; then watch as your counterparts contribute their own opinions.

If the IC [Intelligence Community] used blogs, analysts, collectors, and customers could hold impromptu discussions at any time, instead of having to schedule meetings weeks in advance. And when the time came for such meetings, those present would already have a solid foundation for discussion instead of having to spend time learning the names, roles, and interests of those involved. Intelink has the potential to be a place where groups of intelligence officers from around the world can speak freely and substantively on a daily basis. Such continuous, candid dialogue is the only way to forge relationships of trust in an industry where people are trained to be distrustful. …

Rebuilding Public Trust

Over the past several years it has become increasingly clear to me that we need to rethink many things in American society and culture. It seems to me that we no longer have what we might call "public trust." Maybe we never had all that much of it, but it appears to be slipping away on all fronts.

We seem to have no clear visions of public and private purposes, and no clear demarcations between the two. We seem to have very few well-functioning institutions (any?) and organizations in either the public or the private arena. Remember the Jack Abramoff scandal, amid many other political scandals? Congressional and/or Executive Branch approval ratings? Judicial Activism? Media spin? And so on. Remember Enron? Acounting frim scandals? Government agency bureaucratic incompetence and/or corruption? And so on.

Many things will have to be rethought. In particular we need to rethink, 'public discourse and deliberative democracy,' 'public decision-building,' 'public and private organizational administration and management,' 'ethics,' …. Here are a few ideas:

Public Discourse and Deliberative Democracy

Roles and responsibilities for various institutions, e.g. government, media, corporations, NGOs, individuals etc. have to be rethought. On one aspect, leadership, see, e.g. Margaret Wheatley's It's Just our Turn to Help the World. And whatever happened to Joe Jaworski's American Leadership Forum? Are they working on public as well as private leadership issues? What else are they up to? I must remember to take a closer look at what has happened since Jaworski wrote Synchronicity: The Inner Path of Leadership. And how does the American Leadership Forum interrelate with the National Outdoor Leadership School and other endeavors. Who/What else is out there trying to make a 'leadership difference.' I've bee too long captured by the inner workings of bureaucracies… Time to invest a bit of time/energy on something bigger.

Public Decision-Building

Time to resurrect this old idea that a few of us tried to work up years ago…
See, e.g. here, here, here, here.

Public Lands Project (another idea: plp.org ??)

As a specific, first project we might reevaluate and recast roles, responsibilities practices for government agencies, focusing on, perchance, one I am very familiar with, the US Forest Service. Lessons learned would translate easily to other land management agencies and also to a large extent to military departments, e.g. Army, Navy, Marines, Air Force, as well as to other government entities that "do," in addition to what they require of others in their "regulatory" capacity.

It would then be easy to envision, say, a another little project that we might call Military Organizations Project, except that the acronym "mop" might not work too well. :)

Another possibility, with a potentially large payoff is to rethink the missions and practices of the Federal Reserve System and the Treaury. I've been trying to make sense of these, particularly The FED and other central banks relative to geopolitics and international finance on my Econ Dreams—Nightmares blog

Effective Organizations

Here is a little compendium I'm working on: "Effective Organizations".

Maybe someday we will begin to respect government enough to require better governmental practices, and better govermental performance. If so maybe "Effective Organizations", as made better through time, can serve as a touchstone.

{Note to all: This post may be the seed for a new blog, or if I get really ambitious maybe even a new organization: something like 'rpt.org'

Obsessed with Best Management Practice

Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds." If so, says Harvard's Robert Behn, then "best practice is the refuge of unimaginative ones." Behn continues, "Unfortunately, public managers everywhere are on a manic search for "best practice." Take a look at Behn's On why so many Public Managers are: Obsessed with "Best Practice" [PDF]

After exploring the pitfalls inherent in endless, and too-often mindless searches for best management practices, Behn challenges managers to ask two questions relative to BMPs, Why? and How?

Why? — Why this practice?

What vital (or merely helpful) purposes will we achieve by implementing this practice? What will the practice accomplish? … Implementing any managerial practice—good, better, or best—makes sense only if the practice will, somehow, help resolve one or more of the problems that prevent our organization from achieving our mission.

How? — How will this specific practice help resolve particular problems?

What is our cause-and-effect theory? How does this practice work in general—in the ideal case? And how must this practice be adapted to work in our particularly circumstances to help our agency accomplish it public purposes?

Behn concludes with, "For too many public managers, the search for 'best practice' has become a substitute for thinking."

Karl Weick has been thinking/writing on the subject for many years too. In Managing the Unexpected: Assuring High Performance in the Age of Complexity, Weick and co-author Kathleen Sutcliffe help managers sort out what is to be reduced to "standard" and what ought not to be. Like Behn, Weick and Sutcliffe want people in organizations to make sense of their lives and work by applying standards only where they make the most sense. In other cases, experimentation and "gut" are more the order of the day. Even in cases where practice is reduced to "standard," the standard must be revisited frequently to see if it still makes sense.

In all cases we must be very careful not to stifle innovation and ingenuity in our organizations. The last thing we need is to reduce ourselves to "gobots" or "robots" for bureaucracies that have standardized too many processes, sapping the lifeblood of their people.

Looking for Love Organizational Change in All the Wrong Places

The other day I saw a paper from last December's Forest Service National Leadership Team meeting, titled "Barriers to Practicing Adaptive management on National Forests and Grasslands."

The paper begins,

Of all the barriers to practicing adaptive management, one stands out above all the rest. The Forest Service lacks a consistent, credible, and affordable way to monitor current and changing conditions on national forests and grasslands.

Huh? The barrier that stands out above the rest in my mind is a maladaptive Forest Service culture.

I noticed that a colleague had a copy of Chris Argyris' Knowledge for Action on his shelf, so I "borrowed" it yesterday afternoon. The subtitle is, "A Guide to Overcoming Barriers to Organizational Change," The book is only one of several Argyris has written that should be studied along with books by other organizational psychologists like Donald Schon, Karl Weick, Robert Kegan …. Mostly I wondered who in the Forest Service might have studied it, recognizing that "book learning" is not a strong suit of the agency.

Still, the subtitle got me thinking as to the main problem of our maladaptive agency: the inability to overcome barriers to organizational change or adaptive management. Often people don’t even recognize the connection between brittle organizations and maladaptive behavioral routines. So they leap to the conclusion that if they treat symptoms the underlying problems will go away, else if they treat a small problem it will open doors that will afford opportunities to treat bigger problems later.

I would love to see the Forest Service take a serious look at another of Chris Argyris' books : Overcoming Organizational Defenses: Facilitating Organizational Learning. But I am not holding my breath. It is much easier to look for quick fixes than to address problems at their root. Or maybe I'm just way off base, and these allegations are just Iversonian pipe-dreams.

Cross-posted at Forest Policy - Forest Practice

Blogging in Government: Catch the Wave

Andy Budd is a blogger in the UK. He recently shared his "take" on Blogging in Government (Dec. 8, 2005). Here are Budd's key findings:

• …weblogs were great for internal communication and a way of cutting down the huge weight of email most large companies are drowning in.
  
• …weblogs were essentially free (or very cheap), lightweight and disposable content management systems.
  
• …blogs could be used for internal knowledge management, by encouraging key staff to blog their collective knowledge rather than keeping it locked up.
  
• …benefits of blogging to management ... how staff blogs could help managers know what was going on in their organisation. Conversely, it would also let staff know what their manager was doing.
  
• …governments could use external blogs to connect with the people they served. An external blog could really help demystify the workings of government, while at the same time creating a sense of empathy and trust.

Read "the rest of the story" for Budd's advice on prudent use and managment of blogs and bloggers:

How to Fix a Maladaptive Agency

Yesterday I had a chance to visit with graduate students at Utah State University about adaptive ecosystem management. After I'd given them my spiel about adaptive management and our Forest Service seemingly endless stuckness on the wrong side of adaptive ecosystem management, one of them asked me what I'd do to fix the mess if I had a chance to make it better. Tall order!

So I began to list off a few items as starters, like

• Throw Forest Service Manuals and Handbooks in the Potomac (currently about 21 feet of shelf space)
• Revamp budget and performance accountability systems to get rid of targets
• Instill 'servant leadership' to replace career-ladder climbing
• Learn and apply Ronald Heifetz' leadership methods
  
• Learn and apply W. Edwards Deming's management methods
• Make sure that people challenge each other all the time in Fierce Conversations.

In truth I don't quite know what might work. No one else seems to either. But I'd be interested to see what might happen if we began to act on these recommendations. Or perchance others have a few suggestions to offer up?

Bringing Adaptive Management to Life

A couple of weeks ago the Nature Conservancy shared their approach to Adaptive Management and Organizational Learning with Forest Service Regional Planners and others. TNC has worked with others at Foundations for Success to develop thoughtful and useful approaches.

Among handouts was a very good overview titled Adaptive Management: A Tool for Conservation Practitioners [pdf, 1.8 mb] by Nick Salafsky, Richard Margoluis, and Kent Redford. 2001 Biodiversity Support Program, Washington, D.C. Also available in html.

I recommended to the group that we, the Forest Service, embrace this approach and adopt the overview as our guidebook. Nowhere have I seen such a tightly interwoven marriage of organizational learning and adaptive management. As anyone who has studied adaptive management knows, the marriage between the two is essential. Here are links to more of their approach:

Adaptive Management link
Monitoring and Evaluation
Collaborative Learning