Any shared vision requires us to collectively understand how we create change…
I’ve often written about the many and varied insights that charities can draw from the world of business, and indeed about the practices and principles that charities can, and should, be teaching and exporting the other way, (the book is still available by the way if you’re looking for late Christmas presents), but I love it when the ideas come full circle.
A little while ago I spent time with the Head of Strategy for one of the UK’s largest retailers. We were talking about the marketing strategies they’d been trying to develop to influence customer behaviour, and the conversations they’d been having started to sound very familiar.
“Have you ever heard the term: Theory of Change?” I asked. He hadn’t, so I explained the approach.
He wrote to me effusively just a couple of weeks later outlining how the team had latched onto the concept, immediately developed their own theory of change, and that it was already being used to work out the design and the measures for their first set of marketing trials.
I’m not ashamed to admit that it was a lovely moment, and a little puff of pride swelled in my chest.
In the note, he wrote this: “It’s helped us clarify the difference between what we think we know and what we actually know about how we influence customer behaviour, and it’s shown us where we need to close the gap. Just having a common language and framework has been a step-change in understanding how we create change.”
Marketing is about putting things into people’s environments that will change their minds and behaviours, and it doesn’t matter whether that’s in retail, or in charity work, or internal communications or wherever – the aim is the same.
You may have a group of supporters who don’t volunteer and a group of ones who do. And there will be some who volunteer now, who didn’t in the past. Something changed their minds; some sequence or simultaneity of events will have triggered them into a new behaviour.
If we want more people to make that change, we need to unpick those examples so we can build up our hypotheses about how we create change. In this case, what we could insert into their environments, to help trigger that same change in others. This is our theory of change.
It’s true that in the non-profit sector, theory of change has become a bit of an arcane and specialist industry, and there are models and frameworks and big charts with columns of inputs and outcomes and boxes and lines. And at some point, and in some circumstances, some of that may be useful for you.
But at its heart, which is where we all need to start, a theory is simply a description of the outcome we’d like, and the pre-conditions or the series of events that, the evidence suggests, is how we create change.
That’s all it is.
For every change you’d like to make, somewhere in your head you’ll be developing a theory of how it might be brought about. A theory based on beliefs, assumptions, ideas, and connections, any or all of which could be as bone-headed as they could be brilliant.
So, the single most useful thing you can do, is to draw it out and try to explain it to someone else.
Ask them to critique it, and the first thing you’ll find is a whole bunch of areas that you don’t really understand; and a whole bunch of others that you think you understand but can’t evidence, and probably need to test out.
Get the right people around the table, and everything you need to do, to explore and find ways to achieve whatever change you’re aiming to create, can flow from there.
It can be a powerful tool for all kinds of decisions, and to capture all kinds of learning, whether the outcome you want is for a policy to change or a child to live independently, to recruit a thousand motivated volunteers, or develop a vast pipeline of new customers, for the simple reason that it helps you share and shape, and test and improve not just your ideas and plans, but all of those hidden assumptions and beliefs that sit behind them.
I won’t assume, though it would be nice to believe, that you’ll give it a try.