Adaptive mutations can have negative fitness effects as well as positive fitness effects for which they are selected. To avoid loss and to spread through populations under selection, globally the benefits must outweigh the costs. How are the negative effects mitigated during the early stages of adaptive evolution? We have written extensively on this topic, for example focusing on the role that plasticity in social behaviour can play in buffering negative effects, developing theory incorporating indirect genetic effects to model the role of social environments in evolution, and studying it empirically in the field cricket system. Behavioural work in the latter has shown how pre-existing flexibility of behaviour compensates negative effects of male silence. And genomic approaches have revealed genome-wide signatures of compensatory evolution brought about by the invasion and spread of the flatwing mutation.