Our Story
Researcher gone rogue
“A leader is anyone who takes responsibility for finding the potential in people and processes, and who has the courage to develop that potential.”
–Brene Brown, Dare to Lead
A decade ago, our founder and CEO Michelle Derr summoned the courage to tackle the disconnect between researchers and practitioners. In her words, she went rogue. From her vantage point, as a researcher, she was grappling with the arms-distance approach to practitioners in the name of objectivity. She experienced how practitioners were reluctant to engage with researchers because they found their work cumbersome, difficult to understand, and unresponsive to their needs. She knew we could do better. Before she knew the term, “adjacent possible,” she began practicing it, experimenting with opportunities to move beyond the status quo, pushing the boundaries toward evidence-informed change. Now, at The Adjacent Possible, she brings researchers and practitioners together with great success, to use data and analytic methods to build evidence for practice. The Adjacent Possible’s work is fuelled by the power of co-creative, synergistic partnerships that equip leaders to make evidence-driven decisions to solve every day, and also not so every day, problems.
What we do
The Adjacent Possible currently leads ground-breaking work across the country that is transforming programs and lives, including Learn, Innovate, Improve (see LI2), goal achievement and coaching strategies (see Goal4 It!™), behavioral nudges, and full-family service approaches, among others. We draw on evidence to design these models and test them to build knowledge for the field. Bringing this innovative mindset to traditional research, we are also advancing work in implementation science; formative evaluation; and strategies for replicating, scaling, and sustaining evidence-driven models.
Where Michelle’s been
Michelle’s practice is grounded in discipline, strong technical skills, standards for exceptional quality, and decades of research experience.
During her 22-year career at Mathematica, one of the top policy research firms in the nation, Michelle specialized in improving programs and public policies to advance the economic circumstances and career mobility of people with low incomes. She has served as a project director or principal investigator for more than a dozen studies, including large randomized control trial evaluations. Michelle earned a national reputation for her work and achieved the rank of Senior Fellow at Mathematica. Michelle is frequently asked to share her expertise at national conferences and in technical workgroups across the country.
The Adjacent Possible is the next step for Michelle to continue innovating in both research and practice. As a seasoned researcher, she sees, through a series of adjacencies, the opportunity to, together, create better solutions and build evidence that improves lives.