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Theory of Change is more than just a tool or instrument. It is a mindset! A mindset to optimise impact management. As the cornerstone of impact management it is indispensable to any purpose-driven organisation targeting social or environmental value creation. It offers you the cornerstone of a learning approach toward change and impact. A way to build a mindset and organisational culture of critical reflection, co-creation with stakeholders and constant analysis of what works, why, for whom...
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The United Kingdom Research and Innovation (UKRI) Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF) aimed to address global challenges to achieve the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals through 12 interdisciplinary research hubs. This research documents key lessons learned around working with Theory of Change (ToC) to guide Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning (MEL) within these complex research for development hubs. Interviews and document reviews were conducted in ten of the research...
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This Green Paper intends to review key elements of the problem that Development actors will confront as a new decade opens up ahead of us. It will articulate a solution that we believe should become an inherent feature of Development programs and initiatives. This is the outcome of an intense period of experiences and reflections in the Development space across different geographies and institutional mandates and activities, during which the Foundation has collaborated with institutions such...
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Considering Systems Thinking (ST) as a cognitive skill can create greater acceptability of and openness to the discipline from practitioners and researchers outside operations research and management science. Rather than associating ST with frameworks and methodologies, ST as a cognitive skill can help popularize and democratize the discipline. This paper highlights how the conceptual lens of Holistic Flexibility can help practitioners deploy ST as a cognitive skill without the application...
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The Covid-19 Responses for Equity (CORE) programme was a three-year initiative funded by the Canadian International Development Research Centre (IDRC) that brought together 20 projects from across the global South to understand the socioeconomic impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic, improve existing responses, and generate better policy options for recovery. The research covered 42 countries across Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East to understand the ways in which the pandemic...
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The Two Loop model is a nonlinear theory of change based upon the ideas of living systems created by Margaret Wheatley & Deborah Frieze. It provides us with insight into the simultaneous growth and decline process that are underway within a system during a transition period. In this way, it provides a heuristic for us to better try and recognize and connect the past to the future during a change process. It likewise gives us the possibility to try and come to some consensus about where we...
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So you have just hear about systems thinking and systems innovation and are keen to know more, Ok sparky let's get started.We have structured all the content into four main areas that we think you ...
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How can donors and grantees work together to create effective monitoring, evaluation, and learning (MEL) practices that drive field-wide transformation? The Open Society Foundation’s Fiscal Governance Program found success by focusing on six key approaches, including empowering grantees and relinquishing power. In 2021, an external close-out evaluation by Intention to Impact of the program (which ran for 7 years and gave over $150 million in grants) revealed something pretty remarkable—the...
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Participatory action research (PAR) is an approach to research that prioritizes the value of experiential knowledge for tackling problems caused by unequal and harmful social systems, and for envisioning and implementing alternatives. PAR involves the participation and leadership of those people experiencing issues, who take action to produce emancipatory social change, through conducting systematic research to generate new knowledge. This Primer sets out key considerations for the design of...
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Scholarly attention in innovation in the public sector is growing rapidly, provoking analytical complexity. We developed a systematic literature review about Public Sector Innovation (PSI), analysing 169 articles published between 2001 and 2021, using PRISMA. We present a comprehensive approach to PSI testing and empirically develop an analytical framework based on the most common combinations of the studied dimensions. Additionally, we propose three main research avenues for the future of...
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The idea that technologies can change moral beliefs and practices is an old one. But how, exactly, does this happen? This paper builds on an emerging field of inquiry by developing a synoptic taxonomy of the mechanisms of techno-moral change. It argues that technology affects moral beliefs and practices in three main domains: decisional (how we make morally loaded decisions), relational (how we relate to others) and perceptual (how we perceive situations). It argues that across these three...
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ParEvo is a method of exploring alternative futures or histories, using a participatory evolutionary process (hence ParEvo). The process is designed to be used by multiple people, to produce a branching structure of storylines about what did, or could, happen. Participants are anonymous and can choose the extent to which they collaborate with others. Participants are also able to tag, comment on, and evaluate the storylines that are generated. Completed exercises can be analysed using...
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Technologies are intrinsically social. They reflect human values and affect human behavior. The social dynamics of technology materialize through design features that shape how a technology functions and to what effect. The shaping effects of technology are represented in scholarly fields by the concept of “affordances.” Affordances are the ways design features enable and constrain user engagement and social action. This has been a central construct for designers and technology theorists...
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Sensemaking and Participatory Narrative Inquiry (PNI) are similar approaches, based on collecting stories about a real life experience from a large number of stakeholders on a topic of interest to the evaluation, and giving the storytellers themselves the responsibility for analyzing and making sense of the stories. Because a large number of stories are collected and self-interpreted, it is possible to conduct quantitative analysis of recurrent themes, perspectives and feelings emerging in...
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This case study is an example of a phased transfer of ownership and responsibility from INGO Nuru International to Nuru Kenya, including the exit of all international staff. Post-transition, Nuru Kenya is managed entirely by Kenyan staff, although it continues to receive financial support from Nuru International. A lot of the elements described are aligned with Adaptive Management ways of working.
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This learning paper provides guidance to humanitarian innovators on how to use evidence to enable and drive adoption of innovation. Innovation literature and practice show time and time again that it is difficult to scale innovations. Even when an innovation is demonstrably impactful, better than the existing solution and good value for money, it does not automatically get adopted or used in mainstream humanitarian programming. Why do evidence-based innovations face difficulties in scaling...
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Internal and external stakeholders have different information needs over a project’s life, for purposes that include adaptive management, accountability, compliance, reporting and learning. A project’s monitoring, evaluation, accountability and learning, or MEAL, system should provide the information needed by these stakeholders at the level of statistical reliability, detail and timing appropriate to inform data use. In emergency contexts where the situation is still fluid, ‘informal...
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The Cynefin Centre’s Citizen Engagement & Democratic Innovation programme provides tools for collective sense-making in the areas of community development and youth work; civic engagement and democratic innovation; collaborative service/policy design and evaluation; housing/tenant engagement; futures and planning; shared learning and peer to peer knowledge exchange.
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The Method Positive Deviance (PD) is based on the observation that in every community or organization, there are a few individuals who achieve significantly better outcomes than their peers, despite having similar challenges and resources. These individuals are referred to as positive deviants, and adopting their solutions is what is referred to as the PD approach¹. The method described in this Handbook follows the same logic as the PD approach but uses pre-existing, non-traditional data...
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