Imagine you want to decrease the size of the defense budget. The typical way you might approach this is to look around at the things you know how to do and do them on the issue of decreasing the defense budget. So, if you have a blog, you might write a blog post about why the defense budget should be decreased and tell your friends about it on Facebook and Twitter. If you’re a professional writer, you might write a book on the subject. If you’re an academic, you might publish some papers. Let’s call this strategy a “theory of action”: you work forwards from what you know how to do to try to find things you can do that will accomplish your goal.
A theory of change is the opposite of a theory of action — it works backwards from the goal, in concrete steps, to figure out what you can do to achieve it. To develop a theory of change, you need to start at the end and repeatedly ask yourself, “Concretely, how does one achieve that?” A decrease in the defense budget: how does one achieve that? Yes, you.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Congress passes a new budget with a smaller authorization for defense next year. [...] you get a majority of the House and Senate to vote for it and the President to sign it.
Great, great — so how do you get them to do that? Now we have to think about what motivates politicians to support something. [...] if you have a politician with a given set of beliefs, how do you convince them that cutting the defense budget advances those beliefs? [...] you need to find people the politicians trust and get them to convince the politicians. [...] we can continue down this road for a while — figuring out who politicians trust, figuring out how to persuade them, figuring out how to get them to, in turn, persuade the politicians, etc. [...] You can see that this can take quite a while.
It’s not easy. It could take a while before you get to a concrete action that you can take. But do you see how this is entirely crucial if you want to be effective? Now maybe if you’re only writing a blog post, it’s not worth it. Not everything we do has to be maximally effective. But DC is filled with organizations that spend millions of dollars each year and have hardly even begun to think about these questions. I’m not saying their money is totally wasted — it certainly has some positive impacts — but it could do so much more if the people in charge thought, concretely, about how it was supposed to accomplish their goals.
That’s a great post! Five-paragraph summary: