oh, so many things to consider!
Even if you are an organisation willing to try out things and say from the start “let’s test this and see how it goes before we assume our method can’t fail”, well that’s not something funders would fund often. And this is not just specific to development: because donors everywhere are accountable at other levels too, it seems they have a hard time upselling a “tryout” phase, then re-assess, then fund a bigger chunk of work. What’s more, this makes it dangerous for your organisation too, starting something and then not knowing for sure you will be able to continue good work just when results start to show.
With Edgeryders we are learning from this and it’s one of the reasons we began to question the effectiveness of short term community building processes in under-/less developed areas. @Matthias’s reflections after doing work in post-earthquake Nepal are superb and disheartening at the same time, but made a real impact in how we will approach such projects. So this would be internalizing in a way. You could say this is a public stance too since we often talk here on an open forum, but we are far from metric based assessment per se.