Customizing a Theory of Change for your Network (Part 1)
Introduction
As network guides, we often hear from network leaders how difficult it is to communicate a collaborative approach to shaping change. As more networks form to tackle complex systemic challenges, how do we describe relational approaches to fostering change?
Impact networks bring people together to intentionally foster positive change. To do so, impact networks convene people around a shared purpose, cultivating trust and opportunities for learning and sharing among participants, paving the way for a collaborative approach to fostering systems change. Once everyone’s gathered around a common purpose, how do we go about moving toward systems change?
In this two-part article, our intention is to illuminate the what, why, and how of developing a theory of change for your network. A theory of change is a useful way to address critical questions that often arise when participants join a network and want to understand how the network approach offers a path through complexity to shaping the wicked problems networks form to address.
In the first part, we begin by zooming out to look at the challenge of describing how change happens in living systems. We then touch on networks as a strategy for shaping change and zoom in to pivotal factors at play in shaping systemic change. In part two, we continue the story of one network’s journey to develop a narrative explaining how they create impact in their field. We also share a process design and templates you can use with your network or team to create a compelling theory of change narrative.
The key questions we explore in developing a network-specific theory of change are:
- How is your network intentionally organizing its activities to foster change?
- What attitudes, contextual elements, and ways of being create conditions for change to emerge?
Throughout the article we’ll consider how the process of developing a ToC supports those engaged to surface their assumptions about how change happens. We’ll also speak to how many intentional actions can synergize to create a context in which desired outcomes are likely to emerge.
Our hope is to spark ideas for better describing how your network activities contribute to the change you are working towards. By clarifying how change happens, you make it possible for network members to confidently coordinate their actions while avoiding the pitfalls of linear thinking that can limit network effects. As a result, it becomes easier to engage the many diverse people and contributions needed to create broad systemic impacts.
Over the course of this article you might find yourself relating to this quote from a network coordinator we partnered with, “I haven’t thought it through to this level.” This is a common experience as we shift to engaging with living systems as holistic, multidimensional processes. And, as a complex being yourself, rest assured, your body knows the territory.
Struggling to Tell a Cohesive Story
Alliances for Action is a project through the United Nations International Trade Center. Their founder approached Converge for support in accelerating their program’s collaborative approach to mindful and responsible trade. Alliances for Action (A4A) invites actors throughout supply chains to partner in ways that foster growth and living incomes for farmers and small and medium enterprises. They believe that relationships sustained over time, beyond temporary projects, are key to stewarding ethical, climate-smart, sustainable and resilient agri-value chains.
As our effort launched, Alliances for Action was operating close to 20 projects in Africa, Latin America, and the Pacific Islands and pursuing Sustainable Development Goals through agricultural trade in coffee, coconuts and cacao. Their stakeholders include many smallholder farmers, processors, distributors , multinational organizations and government ministries.
“Our teams are not able to accurately describe the work they are doing and the change that they hope to create in a way that is consistent, clear and meaningful to all of our audiences.” ~Alliances for Action team member
Alliances for Action team members struggled to communicate how their approach to engaging stakeholders creates positive change. The intersecting dynamics of climate change, sustainable agriculture, national trade policies, and global supply chains are inherently complex. Speaking about strategies that raise the living incomes of smallholder farmers is nuanced — as a result, people from different projects were telling very different stories. The team didn’t feel cohesive. They wanted a way to confidently and consistently communicate to engage more partners in their compelling work.
Zooming Out to See the Challenge
Complexity makes it difficult for people to explain root causes and to describe how diverse actions accumulate to impact systems. Because systemic issues arise from intersecting contextual elements such as place, history, culture, relationships and power dynamics, they can’t be pared down to soundbites with an eye-catching statistic offered out of context.
And yet, we often resort to short and simple explanations because simplicity saves time and helps us sound confident. We tell one part of a story, leaving many other pieces out. The pieces we leave out are invariably part of someone’s experience. We become blind to the system itself, including who benefits and who bears burdens. Without a holistic story, we not only limit people’s ability to develop a shared understanding of a situation and what’s possible, we risk excluding those who are essential for creating change. Systems need cohesive, inclusive narratives to invite people to take action together.
Soundbite culture neglects the nuance and complexity of context. As Mohammed el-Nawawy, chair of communications at Queens University of Charlotte, shares in his books,”Shallow coverage fails to dissect root causes of problems, limiting the public’s ability to reflect on and make meaning of the events unfolding in our world.”
“Nuance is vital to our collective progress” ~Khalid Albaih
As cartoonist and journalist Khalid Albaih shares in his conversation on Inspiring Change, “Our world is becoming saturated with 3-second messages, oversimplifying complex issues.” Comprehending the underlying context is crucial for a nuanced understanding that sees the world in its multifaceted reality. Nuance acts as a bridge that links disparate views, fostering understanding and dialogue. It is vital to our collective progress.
This tendency to oversimplify and overlook context is particularly prevalent in business where linear, left brain thinking and mental models of the world functioning as a machine are the norm. However, working in the agricultural sector, Alliances for Action can’t turn away from the complexity of engaging with living systems and the interconnected social issues that directly affect the farmers producing crops sourcing our global food chains. Some of these intersectional challenges include climate effects, people’s traditional relationships to land, land ownership, local and national trade policies, and the profit-seeking obligations of multinational corporations.
The challenge of complexity also applies to communicating opportunity. Describing how your network participants engage systemic issues to co-create positive change can be difficult because many people expect singular solutions to wicked problems. Those less familiar with complexity and the strategic advantages of a network approach may be looking for linear strategies and engineered outcomes. They also tend to aim for optimal, best case actions that we “should” do to create change.
On the contrary, complex systems evolve through interactions. Changes are the result of emergent processes that unfold as participants act, learn, and adapt in relationship with each other and their context. Rather than imagining an assembly line, creating change in living systems is akin to a gardener nurturing soil, watering seeds, and tending mutually supportive companion plants to flourish. And similar to how the gardener works with weather that is given, working with complexity emphasizes windows of opportunity for people to act, contributing what they can from where they are situated within the system.
Zooming In to See Process and Context
Two things are important when networks consider how to shape change in complex systems: process and context. A theory of change not only makes the process of change explicit by describing the relationships and intentional choices that are essential to realize the network’s purpose. Most importantly, the theory of change foregrounds the context necessary to create the types of interactions that will lead to the network’s desired impact. By highlighting specific ways of being and conditions within the ecosystem, the theory of change points to the circumstances that encourage just and life affirming outcomes throughout a system.
By explicitly describing the process and context needed to create the transformation at the heart of a network’s purpose, the theory of change guides the thinking and action of participants collaborating from many locations within a system they seek to influence. It’s a narrative tool that helps network members hold a shared understanding of how they are shaping change in ways that are differentiated and linked by common purpose.
To understand the interplay between process and context it may be helpful to use a familiar example from nature. Reflecting on how a caterpillar becomes a butterfly, we can draw some parallels that help us become effective at stewarding social change together.
First, there are developmental stages in the process — everything doesn’t happen all at once. The stages of change follow a progression from caterpillar to pupa in chrysalis to butterfly emerging and taking flight. Moving through stages takes time and usually involves completing actions or acquiring capacities. When we recognize the stages of transformation we can provide support appropriate to each stage.
Second, context influences progression through the stages. Successfully transforming depends upon critical factors and surrounding conditions. The caterpillar must have food, a place to cocoon away from harsh weather, and an environment free from predators. The presence or absence of critical factors in the context affects how transformation happens — or if it happens at all.
Taking this example back to our networks, awareness of process and context helps us work together to shape the changes we want to see. When network participants understand how to foster transformation, they can make conscious choices to tend the process and amplify the conditions that support change. Without this awareness of process and context, existing patterns of interaction continue to shape the spaces where we live, work, and play. The result is that we unconsciously reproduce the outcomes we are hoping to shift.
To stay aligned while engaging in distributed actions in their ecosystem, participants need shared awareness of how change happens. Networks provide a very effective way for information to flow and collective awareness to form.
With a common understanding of the context that supports change, diverse participants can look out upon the landscape of the complex system and make sense of similar signs and signals in the parts of the ecosystem in which their organization, institution or community engages. With similar interpretations of what to focus on to foster change, network members can make strategic decisions about how to best leverage energy and resources to achieve outcomes.
This distributed approach to taking aligned actions from a variety of touch points is what shapes change over time in complex systems. The better we are at describing what’s possible and inviting people to do what they can, with what they have, from where they are, the more effective we can be in moving together into a better world for all.
This is the end of part one — the first of two articles on creating narratives describing how networks take a collective approach to engaging complex systemic challenges. Part two tells the story of one network’s journey to clearly explain how they coordinate action to create impact in their field. Read on to see the process, template, and examples that you can use with your network.
Written by Carri Munn in close collaboration with Elsa Henderson.
Many appreciations for the contributions of Amelia Pape, Gwen Beeman, and Claudia Piacenza.
References
- The News Media and Its Soundbite Culture, Mohammed el-Nawawy, New York Times, September 19, 2012.
- Organize for Complexity, Neils Pflaeging BetaCodex Publishing, 2018, p. 59.
