Monthly Archives: January 2016

Adjusting a Theory of Change midway

I got a very good feedback on my blog post last week on complexity informed Theories of Change, it was shared widely on Twitter. But I also got some questions. One person pointed out the fact that the method I described in that post was mainly focusing on new programmes that are developing their first Theory of Change. But what about programmes that are in the middle of implementation? Programmes where the programme team sense that things are not going the way they are supposed to according to their Theory of Change, Logframe or project plan. Should the managers of such programmes just stop operations and go back to the drawing board to develop a complexity aware Theory of Change? This is in most cases not possible, unless things are really going badly. How can these programmes incorporate some of the ideas of complexity informed Theories of Change?
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Complexity informed Theory of Change

results chainWe know that current development challenges are complex. But not all elements of a development programme are necessarily complex. How does a theory of change look like that shows us which aspects of a programme are complex and which aren’t? How does this help managers to develop appropriate strategies for interventions and focus their attention?

I have been thinking quite a bit about monitoring and how to find a monitoring framework that works in programmes that are facing the complexities of the real world (and I blogged about it before here and here). More and more monitoring guides speak about the complexities programme managers and staff face ‘out there’ and some guides even venture as far as to say that change in the real world is not linear or predictable. The new BEAM Monitoring guidance, which I co-authored, for example, states that ‘a market systems programme is unlikely to achieve its goals in a simple, linear way. It may be difficult to fully understand (at least in advance) how causes and effects will work at a system-wide level. There may therefore be significant uncertainties about how the overall market system may be re-oriented to serve poor people better.’ Continue reading