How realistic do you think your initial expectations of the work and policymaker reception to it were? That’s a vague question, but I’m wondering if an expectations-reality mismatch made it harder to maintain motivation.
On my (mostly uninformed) reading of your postmortem, you achieved significantly better than I would have predicted on some important domains (e.g., gaining access to important decisionmakers). Unfortunately, it seems like the theory of change required strong showings in a number of different domains (e.g., political strategy/savvy), and a middling showing on any of those domains would be fatal to the project. My guess is that it would be very rare for a two-person team to have strengths in all the needed domains.
Finally, although you speak of having “failed,” the potential downstream effects of the conversations you had are unknown and unknowable. That measurable outcomes were in short supply doesn’t mean that your advocacy didn’t have a counterfactual effect on any of the policymakers. That you concluded that didn’t make sense to continue is might be as much about your awareness of the strong alternative uses of your donors’ money as it is about your execution and results.
Thank you for trying this, even if it didn’t pan out as you had hoped.
How realistic do you think your initial expectations of the work and policymaker reception to it were? That’s a vague question, but I’m wondering if an expectations-reality mismatch made it harder to maintain motivation.
On my (mostly uninformed) reading of your postmortem, you achieved significantly better than I would have predicted on some important domains (e.g., gaining access to important decisionmakers). Unfortunately, it seems like the theory of change required strong showings in a number of different domains (e.g., political strategy/savvy), and a middling showing on any of those domains would be fatal to the project. My guess is that it would be very rare for a two-person team to have strengths in all the needed domains.
Finally, although you speak of having “failed,” the potential downstream effects of the conversations you had are unknown and unknowable. That measurable outcomes were in short supply doesn’t mean that your advocacy didn’t have a counterfactual effect on any of the policymakers. That you concluded that didn’t make sense to continue is might be as much about your awareness of the strong alternative uses of your donors’ money as it is about your execution and results.
Thank you for trying this, even if it didn’t pan out as you had hoped.