Last week I was in Myanmar working with a market
systems development programme. The main task of this trip is to work on the project’s monitoring framework. To set the stage for that, we are working on revising the project’s theory of change (ToC).

A messy theory of change

Theory of Change is a bit of a contentious beast in my set of tools. As I am thinking and writing a lot on complexity and complex systems, I am aware that causality in complex systems can hardly ever be reduced to a straight line between two boxes and it is even more difficult to predict in advance how change will look like. It is not just that causalities are difficult to disentangle or predict in advance (it’s easier using hindsight), but that because of emergence there are other causalities at work than the linear material – billard-ball like – causality we are used to. But this is the topic of another blog post. So for me, Theory of Change is not an instrument to predict what change will happen but to create a coherent picture that explains why the project is doing what it is doing. Continue reading →