What is the Theory of Change? Definition & Examples

What is the theory of change? Learn the meaning and how you can formulate a theory of change that will help you achieve long-term goals and ultimate impact as a group.

In the modern dynamic world, change is constant. Change is inevitable, and as they say, ‘if you don’t change, change will change you.’ There is a need to embrace change more than anything to remain on track in the long run. This piece elaborates on how developing a theory of change will make you thrive in whatever you do.

Formulating a theory of change is vital whether you’re a company, philanthropist, government agency, or not-for-profit organization that desires to achieve social, political, or business change.

But how do you start? First, let’s understand what the theory of change is.

What is the Theory of Change (ToC)?

The theory of change describes and explains intervention activities that an organization undertakes that contribute to a chain of outcomes. These activities can either be policy creation, starting a program, or a project that has an impact.

The ToC framework helps illustrate why a specific way of doing things will be effective and the changes that will happen in the short, medium, and long term. ToC is represented in a flow chart, diagram, or pictorial graphic showing why the intervention activities (initiatives) you participate in will bring about the change you want to see.

ToC identifies the following:

• Resources needed
• The main activities you’ll need to get involved in
• The end products/services or outputs that you’ll need to deliver.
• All the step changes or, rather, outcomes needed to occur to achieve your long-term mission or goal.

What is the Paradoxical Theory of Change?

This theory suggests that change occurs when a person becomes aware of who they are, and the natural outcome is change and growth in an organic, orderly, and meaningful way.

Such contact and genuine self-knowledge occur when a person becomes what they are and not when they try to be what they aren’t.

What is the Theory of Social Change?

For most societies, change is inevitable, but the reason it occurs isn’t obvious. In most cases, the change is not instantaneous and is often gradual.

Most societies go through various kinds of change at some point. Looking at the current society, you’ll realize it looks nothing close to what it was hundreds of years ago.

For decades, sociologists have grappled with different models and ideas. They define change as a transformation of institutions, functions, and cultures.

There are numerous forces and parts at work, most of which resist change and want to remain in their status quo. When looking at the types of change, the social theory of change comprises three distinct theories – evolutionary, conflict, and functionalist.

What is the Difference Between the Theory of Change and the Logic Model?

Theory of Change vs Logic Model

There is a thin line between the theory of change and logic models. While both fulfill similar purposes and have similar benefits, ToC goes deeper and creates extra benefits that the logic model can’t.

A logic model is a graphical representation of how an intervention activity creates outcomes. While this is the same as the theory of change, the logic model only explains what will happen, not why it will happen. The logic model has different designs and terms.

Both models identify activities, inputs, enablers, outcomes, and impact. However, the ToC model creates causal pathways to establish causes of change.

Theory of Change Model

What is the theory of change model?

The theory of change explains the change process by highlighting the causal linkages in an initiative. It outlines what will happen in the short, intermediate, and long-term outcomes. You map the changes you’ve come up with as the ‘outcomes pathway’, giving each outcome a logical relationship to all the others in their chronological flow.

These ‘outcomes pathways’ are diagrammatically represented to show the logical relationship between one outcome and another. These associations between outcomes are described by ‘rationales’ or statements showing why a particular outcome is considered a precondition of another.

In other words, a theory of change is a macro that means, ‘If this is done, then these are the expected results. ‘ Therefore, early outcomes must come before intermediate outcomes are achieved. Then, intermediate outcomes must be in place for the long-term outcomes to occur, and so on.

Therefore, an outcome’s pathway represents the change logic about its underlying set of assumptions, clearly spelled out in the statements/ rationales specified for why there’s a connection between outcomes and the TOC narrative.

How do You Develop a Theory of Change?

Applying the TOC Model

Developing a theory of change involves planning, implementation, and evaluation of input, output, and outcome. In simple terms, the five main stages of change theory include:

Stage 1: Identify a goal (long, medium, and short)

This step involves discussing, agreeing on, and getting specific about the goals that you want to achieve. When putting together a ToC, you must clearly define what you desire to achieve.

You can have one or more than one goal. At this point, reaching an agreement or consensus with all the stakeholders is essential. Having clear goals helps you be explicit about the kinds of change you believe in or hope to achieve.

Stage 2: Perform Backward Mapping to identify the Preconditions Essential to Achieve the Goal(s)

Once you identify the goal, the next step is identifying the preconditions necessary to achieve that goal. This can be achieved through backward mapping to identify the necessary prerequisites.

Stage 3: Identify the Interventions

This step involves devising intervention activities that will help bring about the desired changes. If it’s a business, the stakeholders identify their actions to achieve their desired goal.

Stage 4: Develop Indicators for each outcome and preconditions

At this point, there is a need to evaluate the implementation and effectiveness of your initiative.

Stage 5: Write the Narrative

The final step of TOC is putting it in text and visual representations. Therefore, you describe the programs and summarize the initiative story from the beginning with the background and goals. Explain why these are crucial and how the initiative activities will help achieve those goals.

What are the Components of a ToC Narrative?

1. Background – This is the explanation of the context and the need
2. Long-term Goal(s)- These represent the outcome that you desire to achieve
3. Outcomes/ Preconditions – These include descriptions of goals and how they are essential for themselves and the ultimate goal
4. Interventions – They include the initiatives, programs, and activities
5. Assumptions and Justifications – The reasons or facts behind an initiative features
6. Indicators – This represents the description of how each outcome will be measured
7. Program Logic – The understanding that guides each initiative step.

Theory of Change in Process and Action

• Measuring Change

How do you measure change? To determine a ToC model’s success, you must demonstrate the progress that will help achieve outcomes. Proof of success confirms the ToC and shows the initiative’s effectiveness.

Therefore, to measure the outcomes in a ToC model, you need indicators. At least one indicator should be present for every initiative’s outcome.

These indicators help operationalize the outcomes. In other words, they help make the outcomes understandable, observable, and concrete. To clarify the indicator’s relationship to the outcome, you can say, “I’ll know what I have achieved when I see this.”

A theory of change example is, “I’ll prove that teenage moms in our program clearly understand the prenatal nutrition and health guiding principles when I see that they can identify the foods rich in nutrients.”

Resource unavailability sometimes makes it hard to determine the indicators. Thus, most groups want to label priority outcomes that they know will need to be measured if the ToC will hold.

See Related: What is Shared Governance?

• Monitoring and Evaluation

ToC remains a valuable method of conducting evaluations of different project types and organizations.

Monitoring questions help focus your evaluation efforts on critical concerns by helping you choose the most helpful indicators.

An example of a monitoring question is, “What must we know to manage grant-making focused on the specific outcome achievement?”

Success should be understood beyond the point of knowing ‘what works.’

If you scale an intervention blindly, it will backfire. Therefore, monitoring and evaluation help collect sufficient understanding and knowledge to predict with confidence how a particular initiative will work in different situations or if it needs to be adjusted to achieve similar or better results.

Also, that information needs to be combined with evidence from studies and reports to build a stronger case for what’s happening, how it’s happening, and how the context influences the initiative.

A ToC-based monitoring and evaluation system should be designed in a participatory manner, just like the development of ToC. For instance, grant managers can select the outcomes that interest them the most in their decision-making.

Similarly, other participants on the ground can have input into the indicators to use and ways to operationalize them, the choice of data collection methods and instruments, and which existing data sources may come in handy in tracking indicators.

The ToC innovation lies in the following:

1. Establishing the difference between the desired and actual outcomes
2. I call on the stakeholders to model their desired outcomes prior to deciding the forms of intervention needed to attain those outcomes.

• Quality Control Criteria

Anne Kubisch, a thought leader in the theory of change, identified three quality control criteria:

1. Plausibility

This refers to the credibility or the logic of the ‘outcomes pathway’. So, the questions to ask include, ‘Does the ToC model make sense?’ ‘Are the outcomes in the right order?’ Are each pre-conditions necessary, and are they collectively enough to attain long-term outcomes and make an impact? Or Are there gaps in the logic?

2. Feasibility

This refers to the initiative’s practicability and whether it can realistically attain its long-term impact or outcomes. Does the group have sufficient resources? Does it need help or partnerships? Does the expectation, scope, or timeline of the ToC require adjustment?

3. Testability

This simply refers to indicators. Are these indicators measurable and solid? Will they provide enough information to evaluate the initiative’s success clearly? And are they convincing enough to the right audience?

See Related: What is Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG)?

What are the Benefits of the Theory of Change?

The main benefit of a TOC is that it explicitly expresses different views and assumptions regarding the change process. With a perfect TOC, you can specify how to create a wide variety of conditions to help programs deliver the desired outcome.

That includes coming up with the right kind of alliances, specific technical assistance, forum types, tools, and processes that help people collaborate and be result-focused. This helps all the key stakeholders debate and enrich the alliances to strengthen project design and implementation.

ToC helps emphasize the need for dialogue with participants, recognizing different viewpoints and acknowledging power relations as well as social, political, and environmental realities in the context.

When you have a complete ToC, you’ll have a:

• Graphical representation of the change you want to see in your society or company and how you anticipate it.
• A testable and clear hypothesis of the change process allows you to be accountable and solidifies your results since they were forecasted to occur in a given way.
• An evaluation blueprint with measurable indicators of success recognized.
• A potent communication tool to detail your initiative’s complexity
• Participants or stakeholders agree about what defines success and everything it takes to achieve it.

According to Turner, the benefits of ToC include:

• Being able to explain and precisely predict phenomena
• Help explain actions and decisions to others
• Compare and contrast varying experiences
• Help acknowledge, understand, and describe new situations
• Help pinpoint gaps in our research and knowledge.

See Related: What are Core ESG Principles?

What are the Potential Limitations of ToC?

According to different schools of thought, the Toc is associated with several potential challenges. Opponents suggest that:

• A theoretical perspective that can be dogmatic in certain situations. There are no uniform methods and approaches necessary to implement it effectively.
• A specific client becomes a fascinating subject for study
• It makes you lose sight of the importance of the client’s self-determination
• It makes you see different experiences through the lens of a single theoretical perspective
• The potential social and political attributes related to specific theoretical perspectives.

What are the Uses of ToC?

The ToC model is used as a:

• As a framework to help stay on course and check milestones
• To keep the evaluation and implementation process transparent so that all participants know and understand what is happening as well as why
• To document all the lessons learned about what occurs
• As a basis for reporting to donors, boards, and policymakers.

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