Institutional learning is often hampered by loss of objective that may have various reasons, ranging from organisational commitment to individual staff capacities. This was also a case with an IDP profiling exercise that one INGO conducted together with the Joint IDP Profiling Services (JIPS) and which one of the YTL founders was asked to evaluate. The management has changed in both the INGO and JIPS and was left with a flaky relationship between the two agencies, a dataset that had not been properly cleaned and a broad disagreement as to whether to shelve the exercise altogether or still try to extract valuable learning from it. As the YTL consultant role was to evaluate the profiling exercise, review the data and extract learning, the first order of business was trying to trace the original objective of the exercise, validate it and adjust, as per new realities ca. 18 months after the profiling had been set in motion. Very quickly the evaluation had to be shifted from a content-based to process-based with only a superfluous application of the DAC evaluation criteria and a focus on lessons learnt from the process itself – without attributing any blame to anyone for the profiling having effectively led to a blind alley. The key issue was that the organisational history of the original evaluation objective was very vague, even among the previous managers who launched the process, while the dataset setup did not provide further clues towards a clear understand as to what end the project had been undertaken. Beyond the two agencies aiming to profile themselves as being good profilers. Working backwards, the available data and the setup of the exercise were used to deduce the most likely original intent, which was updated through FGDs and KIIs towards a useful and manageable new objective. The consultancy then extracted and validated valuable learning from the data itself, parts of which was later highlighted in the report submitted by the UN SG’s High Level Panel on Internal Displacement while the INGO, initially highly sceptical about the value of their own work, decided to replicate the exercise based on the learning obtained through the evaluation.