MichaelA🔸 comments on Do research organisations make theory of change diagrams? Should they?

[MichaelA🔸]

On the same post, Ozzie Gooen (Nuno’s colleague at QURI) wrote:

I looked over an earlier version of this, just wanted to post my takes publicly.[1]

I like making diagrams of impact, and these seem like the right things to model. Going through them, many of the pieces seem generally right to me. I agree with many of the details, and I think this process was useful for getting us (QURI, which is just the two of us now) on the same page.

At the same time though, I think it’s surprisingly difficult to make these diagrams to be understandable for many people.

Things get messy quickly. The alternatives are to make them much simpler, and/​or to try to style them better.

I think these could have been organized much neater, for example, by:

• Having the flow always go left-to-right.

• Using a different diagram editor that looks neater.

• Reducing the number of nodes by maybe 30% or so.

• Maybe neater arrow structures (having 90% lines, rather than diagonal lines) or something.

That said, this would have been a lot of work to do (required deciding on and using different software), and there’s a lot of stuff to do, so this is more “stuff to keep in mind for the future, particularly if we want to share these with many more people.” (Nuno and I discussed this earlier)

One challenge is that some of the decisions on the particularities of the causal paths feel fairly ad-hoc, even though they make sense in isolation. I think they’re useful for a few people to get a grasp on the main factors, but they’re difficult to use for getting broad buy-in.

If you take a quick glance and just think, “This looks really messy, I’m not going to bother”, I don’t particularly blame you (I’ve made very similar things that people have glanced over).

But the information is interesting, if you ever consider it worth your time/​effort!

So, TLDR:

• Impact diagrams are really hard. At these levels of details, much more so.

• This is a useful exercise, and it’s good to get the information out there.

• I imagine some viewers will be intimidated by the diagrams.

• I’m a fan of experimenting with things like this and trying out new software, so that was neat.

[1] I think it’s good to share these publicly for transparency + understanding.