I looked into this today because I believe that potentially (1) the ability to construct theories of change is a key bottleneck of the EA community, e.g. if everyone were twice as good, the impact of the EA community was much higher.
Given this, I aim to become better at constructing theories of change myself. Moreover, I am interested in how to make this teachable (shout out to Michael Aird’s work) or to set up better deliberate practice exercises.
I was less excited about the existing/older theory of change literature than I thought I would be. Probably the best way to become good at this is just to try and get feedback from really good people.
It seems very important to construct and look at ToC in such a way to efficiently improve one’s ability to construct ToC, e.g. (1) set up mechanisms to review ToC you wrote in the past and (2) the outcomes one would like to track are not simply the ones which are most important for the impact of that project but the ones you assume you will reuse the most in future ToC of other projects and project areas.
Open Questions:
When should you go backwards in your theory of change? #backchaining
When is it okay/recommendable to go forward in your theory of change?
For all that I’ve read and done with ToCs and critical path analysis, the first thing that comes to my mind is still ‘avoiding this’:
(I genuinely find thinking ‘make sure you don’t do this’ at all stages is more effective than any theory I’ve read.)
Also, anything that has 2-3 paths to a potential goal that are at least partially independent will usually leave you in a better place than one linear path. Then it’s not so much ‘backchaining’ as switching emphasis (‘lobbying seems to have stalled, so let’s try publicity/behaviour change… then who knows, lobbying might be back on again’).
Here is a Collection of Resources/Reading about (Constructing) Theories of Change—I provide a summary for all resources (except one) in the Google doc.
The overview of the collection/summary document is:
Theory of Change (Aaron Swartz’s Raw Thought)
“Backchaining” in Strategy—LessWrong
Michael Aird: “theory of change in Research” workshop
What is a Theory of Change?
Hivos ToC Guidelines: Theory of Change Thinking in Practice
Key Tools, Resources and Materials
Charlotte’s Main Take-aways
Other resources I did not read:
Motivation and Takeaways:
I looked into this today because I believe that potentially (1) the ability to construct theories of change is a key bottleneck of the EA community, e.g. if everyone were twice as good, the impact of the EA community was much higher.
Given this, I aim to become better at constructing theories of change myself. Moreover, I am interested in how to make this teachable (shout out to Michael Aird’s work) or to set up better deliberate practice exercises.
I was less excited about the existing/older theory of change literature than I thought I would be. Probably the best way to become good at this is just to try and get feedback from really good people.
It seems very important to construct and look at ToC in such a way to efficiently improve one’s ability to construct ToC, e.g. (1) set up mechanisms to review ToC you wrote in the past and (2) the outcomes one would like to track are not simply the ones which are most important for the impact of that project but the ones you assume you will reuse the most in future ToC of other projects and project areas.
Open Questions:
When should you go backwards in your theory of change? #backchaining
When is it okay/recommendable to go forward in your theory of change?
For all that I’ve read and done with ToCs and critical path analysis, the first thing that comes to my mind is still ‘avoiding this’:
(I genuinely find thinking ‘make sure you don’t do this’ at all stages is more effective than any theory I’ve read.)
Also, anything that has 2-3 paths to a potential goal that are at least partially independent will usually leave you in a better place than one linear path. Then it’s not so much ‘backchaining’ as switching emphasis (‘lobbying seems to have stalled, so let’s try publicity/behaviour change… then who knows, lobbying might be back on again’).