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The concept of Theory of Change is meant to provide program planners and evaluators with guidance on how to make sense of the mechanisms that guide how something transforms. Theory of Change as a technique is usually visual, participatory and consultative in nature, and is something that is developed alongside the program itself. What is given less attention are the change theories that underpin a Theory of Change.

Confused? You’re not alone.

Clarifying this is critical if your Theory of Change is to have any meaning.

Change Theories & Theory of Change

Change theories are based (largely) on psychological and sociological evidence applied to human behaviour at different levels. These levels include:

• Individuals
• Groups (e.g., teams, families)
• Organizations
• Communities
• Societies & Systems

Some change theories will apply at all of these levels, while some are designed more specifically for a specific level. For example, Kotter’s 8-step model for leading change is primarily an organizational change theory.

Change theories are meant to describe what is to change and explain how change is to come about. These serve as the bedrock for what a Theory of Change is meant to convey. A Theory of Change links the structures and resources tied to a specific program, unit, or process with various change theories to explain why it should facilitate transformation.

Design Considerations

While we might have a viable change theory, we might not have a strong design. We often see organizations that seek to make changes that their programs or policies were not designed to accomplish. For example, cognitive rational change theories are built upon the basic assumption that knowledge informs attitudes and beliefs which influence behaviour.

If your program or service doesn’t have a design that facilitates information accessibility that allows your end user (those who are the focus of your service) to understand and use that information, it’s unlikely we will see change. Just-in-time knowledge delivery (e.g., doing a Google search) implies that people have the means (e.g., tools and technology), the literacy, the skills, and the opportunity to access and use that knowledge, otherwise it’s not likely to facilitate change.

Being able to locate a family doctor isn’t useful if you can only do it at a time and place when such a professional isn’t needed.

Theories of Change can help us plan our programs and service offerings and plot the points of impact, but without good change theories and design considerations it’s quite possible we won’t achieve what we set out to do.

Want to learn more about how to develop Theories of Change and what an understanding of social and behavioural science and design can do to help you learn and create impactful programs? Contact us. We’d love to connect.

In five years, what did we get wrong?

This simple question can be a powerful vehicle for understanding the way in which things in the future might — and might not — unfold. Foresight is a complicated process as we are asking to see into a horizon that hasn’t yet taken place. Rather than predict the future, strategic foresight is about anticipating possible futures.

What this means is that it is possible — indeed, quite likely — that what we think will happen won’t come to pass as we thought. However, we might also foresee certain things that allow us to prepare. For example, we might be correct to see the growing trend toward working remotely while being incorrect about the reasons that drive it and the timing (e.g., pandemic).

All of these are based on assumptions about what we anticipate happening.

Asking the question about “what didn’t go right” or “what did we miss?” begins the process of allowing us to ask more detailed questions about our assumptions. It can allow us to identify where the areas of friction might be, the critical and less critical uncertainties about our models of the world lie, and what might have been missed as we envisioned the connection between now and the future.

Asking what we might achieve is useful. Asking what might go wrong is prudent. Ask them both.

Change is everywhere it seems and while it can be said it is the only constant what we are seeing is an increase of change on a massive scale.

However, as the protesters across the United States, Canada and beyond are making clear: there is a big difference between talk of change, the process of change, and the outcome of change efforts. Evaluation can be a powerful tool to help us distinguish these things together as they can be conflated too easily.

Here are three things to consider when seeking to make these distinctions that can be applied anytime, but become more salient when focused on large-scale change efforts where much is happening simultaneously.

Document your baseline

A baseline is a starting point and while it would be great to have data from yesterday, if we are seeking to gather change-related data today that means this is your baseline. Too often baselines are forgotten because any effort to measure or track change needs to answer the question: change in relation to what?

How? Pick the most convenient, proximate moment to gather data. Aim to capture descriptive data of what is happening, time data (see below), and also any numerical aspects of the phenomenon you can. These can be such things as cases of something, number of participants involved, descriptions of the current situation. From this, you can later build a backstory that can help lead to the present moment.

For example, George Floyd was arrested and killed by a police officer on May 25, 2020. It is possible to use that as a baseline for what came next and later build the backstory by showing the many different incidents of a similar nature that may have happened locally, nationally, and beyond to illustrate historical patterns of things like police behaviour, protests, violence, racism or otherwise depending on what changes one seeks to make.

Gather real-time data whenever possible

It’s tempting to gather data after an event (e.g., protest, policy decision, etc.) has taken place (and sometimes that’s unavoidable), however, there is much evidence that we lose perspective and critical information in our post-event reflections that often fail to capture critical details of what actually happens.

How? During the COVID-19 pandemic we have seen many examples of this with live reports from doctors, nurses, and other caregivers working the front-lines of healthcare responses. We’ve seen infectious disease specialists giving interviews on television, exchanging data and opinion via email and Twitter, and through first-hand accounts of citizens dealing with the various policy decisions made. These micro-narratives can make for a strong experiential case for what is happening and what effects the event is having. Reviewing social media posts, proposing online diaries (e.g., selfie video testimonials) or using ‘speakers corner‘ sites or physical booths to allow people to document what they feel, think, say, and do in real-time will provide a more accurate and adaptive means of understanding what is happening as it happens, rather than just retrospectively.

Timestamp your data

Time is a critical contextual factor that can help us understand what happens, why it happens when it does, and to better make sense of the outcomes. The Greeks classified two types of time: Chronos (‘clock time’) and Kairos (‘relative’ time) . Determining what time (as in hour, date etc..) can help you to organize things in chronological order and see relationships between change-making efforts. Relative time — proximity — helps us see the effect of certain activities in relation to others.

How? Modern recording tools often have this built into them, but for the evaluator it is important to record when things happen and document the sequencing of things. Big events like the two we’ve used — the race riots and pandemic — have so many moving parts that it quickly gets difficult to remember retrospectively what happened in what order. This is critical if we want to develop a theory of change or explain what happened as part of the change process.

These three things are all simple and can be done with tools like phone cameras and gathering things in a spreadsheet. More sophisticated ways are available as well and, ideally, there is a method and plan prior to a change initiative taking place. But as we’ve seen, sometimes change just happens. If it does, you’ll be ready to capture it and learn from it before it comes to pass and be able to tell if it doesn’t.

Stay and be safe.

If change is something you need help understanding and documenting, don’t hesitate to reach out and contact us. Evaluating, supporting, and guiding change efforts is what we do.

Photo by mana5280 on Unsplash

With so many people working from home and using their communication devices to do many of the tasks we once did in other ways or are now doing much more often or differently it’s tempting to think: it’s a perfect time to reach people for my research project.

That might be true, but it’s also fraught with problems. Before you set out on your ethnographic journey through the lives of your stakeholders or prep Surveymonkey for its journey through the jungles of the Internet we suggest you take a pause and consider the following before venturing forward.

1. Context counts. Every time we engage in social research we must account for context. In the current situation with a global pandemic, we don’t know what the context is. The epidemiological, social policy, economic, and communications landscape is changing day-to-day and is influenced on a global level. With so many areas changing at once, the ability to gauge or even state the context becomes nearly impossible without resorting to over-generalized or vague statements like “complex” or “uncertain”.
2. ” Seeing is not the same as looking”. Physician and economist Anupam Jena provides a great example of how we can miss the forest for the trees without examining some of the things that are hidden in plain sight. In times of profound transformation, we might need to re-think what it is we see as that will shape what questions we ask, what data we gather, and what answers we discover.
3. User-experience. What is the state of mind of those who are answering your survey or responding to your interview? You might be speaking to someone who hasn’t left their house in three weeks. They might have people nearby all the time. This will determine the willingness or ability to respond, the kind of answers that are provided, and the openness of the response (for example, people might not want to share highly personal data on a shared computer or where people might see them entering or speaking about it).
4. Sensemaking. When we don’t understand the context or its entirely new we look for what we know. The challenge right now is that we don’t know what it is that we’re looking at. Unless our research or evaluation work is focused on the now and understanding how and what we are doing at this moment, about this moment, and for this moment we risk developing data that is examined through the lens of history (what we’ve done before), which will be another context altogether. We’ll be making sense of the past through the lens of today.
5. Attention. Are we paying attention? When so much of what we are exposed to now is coming through screens — big and small — there is a likelihood that we are reading things quickly. Electronic reading is not the same as reading paper-based text and tends to encourage skimming. When what we have read is — save for the back of the cereal box at breakfast — almost entirely digital (for many of us) the likelihood of instructions being skimmed might be higher. Proceed with caution.
6. Health. Lastly, how well are we? When the effects of being inside, isolated, and perhaps exposed to a virus are real, present and pervasive, your audience might not be in the state where the depth and quality of thought are what we need to get the responses we want. Many of us are not our usual selves these days and our responses will reflect that.

See differently, think differently and that goes for how we assess and do our social research.

Photo by Stanislav Kondratiev on Unsplash

The complexities and complications of circumstances tied to the COVID-19 pandemic represent a hyper-exaggerated version of situations organizations find themselves in moments of disruption due to economic, social, and technological shifts. It is a moment of innovation.

What makes the current situation distinct is that the issues are global. Usually we have safe refuge in a new market, region, or setting, but now we don’t. How can we develop or implement strategy when things are continually changing for us and our partners, suppliers, and customers or clients?

Smallest Visible Systems (SVS)

Systems thinking helps us to understand how things are connected and structured, while complexity science can help us appreciate the challenges associated with how to understand the nature of the problems that present themselves. What both can teach us is that in times that are truly unprecedented in their complexity and scope it can be difficult to know what to do and how to act.

The temptation with systems approaches to strategy is to look at the whole system, but that is dependent upon whether we can see the boundaries of the system to help us understand the range of activities we need to consider in developing a model to guide us.

1. Coherence is what we are seeking. In order to achieve coherence, we need to take some kind of action (often called a probe) and then see what that does. This helps us to examine how the system is behaving and how an action generates reactions and where (or whether) coherence forms. Coherence is basically a way of saying that things go together with some manner of alignment where
2. Seeing or creating coherence is about meaning and meaning is context-dependent. What is meaningful for us depends on our circumstances, but it also provides us with a means to focus our attention amid the various signals we’re getting. Various patterns, relationships, interconnections and signals that we see that align together and create something meaningful are coherent.
3. Coherence also provides us with a language to communicate. When you observe coherence it begins to create a language you can use to communicate to others about what you’re seeing. When we look at what is happening at a societal level, its difficult to find what coherent narratives are actionable. At a smaller level, we might find them and this allows us to communicate more fully with others and this will allow us to scale and grow our learning.

This is the smallest visible system (SVS) in which you can make a difference. Once you can act wisely on this system, you can expand the boundaries and scope to work larger.

Acting on Systems

What this means for action is this:

1. Pay attention to what is going on around you. Ask yourself: what is important and meaningful to me?
2. Be systematic, but not rigid, in how you pay attention. This could mean looking at sales numbers, social trends, meeting minutes and observations from everyday life. If you’re working in teams, ask people about what they are paying attention to and what has meaning for them. What things are they organizing their work or life around? Reflective journaling can help, too. This is data.
3. Gather the meaning. Bring together those things that offer some coherence to see how they make sense for what you are doing, seeking to become, or what you wish to accomplish. This is a social process called sensemaking. By guiding yourself through the data it’s possible to see patterns and what is called emergent properties — new forms of order arising from what might seem unordered.
4. Start to act on this new coherence narrative and then repeat the cycle from step 1.

This will help you to determine what is useful and not useful for you in whatever context you are operating in. It’s a simple, but powerful means to start the journey toward a greater understanding of your present situation and help you see how and where you can act, whether that is in a time of massive upheaval or something merely disruptive.

Keep safe and know there’s more that you can do than you realise.

If you need help in setting this process up, implementing it, and making sense of it all, reach out. This is what we do.