Eleanor Bedford is an organization development specialist, adaptive management evangelist, and certified leadership coach with 33 years of experience working in the humanitarian-development-peace-nexus for NGOs, bilateral, and multilateral organizations including MSF, USAID, and UNHCR.

She joined Acute Incite as Vice President in March 2023 after serving as Chief of Programming and Training at Peace Corps. She led adaptive management processes for USAID’s Office of Transition Initiatives (OTI) for over a decade, co-creating OTI’s action learning model based on a structured, iterative process of analysis to manage complexity and reduce risk over through continual context analysis (rolling assessments) and regular strategic review sessions (pause and reflects). While at USAID, Ms. Bedford designed, managed and evaluated development programs in Africa, Asia, Europe and the Middle East, served as COR on multiple contracts and cooperative agreements, created new teams, tools, and trainings to support adaptive management, and served on numerous technical evaluation committees ranging from Personnel Services Contracts to a $4.4 billion Indefinite Delivery, Indefinite Quantity contract.

She later taught as adjunct faculty at American University’s School of International Service and simultaneously founded a small business that delivered leadership coaching, large-scale system facilitation, dynamic strategic planning, team building and training for adaptive management and organization development across 5 continents for 5 years.

During this time, she led project design and proposal teams that resulted in more than $500 million in USAID contracts for her clients. She is a graduate of the University of Virginia and Johns Hopkins University.