The conference provided an opportunity to share and strategize for people working on transformative development, and who are trying to reconcile their understanding of messy, unpredictable and risky pathways of societal transformation with bureaucracy driven protocols. The conference distinguished between the big ‘E’ (evidence of what works or not) and small ‘e’ (evidence about performance) and the interaction between these. The conference focused on participants’ own cases – based on artefacts (the protocols, processes, mechanisms and tools) used by organisations to assess results and generate and use evidence.