The Four Fundamentals

Foster Constituency Voice

There are three core constituents to any developmental intervention or process: those who provide resources, those who design and implement the intervention, and those who are most affected – usually those intended to benefit most. The questions are: Who defines success? How it is measured?

Constituency Voice comes about when all constituents, especially those most affected, participate meaningfully in defining success, planning activities toward outcomes, and evaluating and learning from results. Simple and practical stakeholder dialogue builds the confidence and trust that underwrites success. Most important, it need not be onerous.

As strategies are developed and implemented, constituents learn together through ongoing monitoring of performance against agreed process and impact indicators. These describe specific short and medium term changes that make ultimate success possible. What can sensibly be quantified is quantified, but many of the more complex, intangible changes can only be understood using innovative approaches to learning such as ‘change journals’, story-based techniques and regular dialogue.

Map Pathways to Outcomes

Tools and methodologies designed to manage projects are not appropriate for organizations working on long term processes of social change. Most traditional logic models assume that clearly defined results flow logically from pre-planned activities and outputs in restricted (usually short term) time frames.

In most social change work, the problems are complex and not well defined. Solutions involve changing attitudes, relationships, capabilities, conditions and behaviours, and need to be worked out over time, with constituents, and often in collaboration with other organizations.

Processes like these are best managed within the framework of a shared theory of change that guides planning, acting, reflecting and learning. Constituents first clarify a shared vision of success (or impact). Then they try to identify what change processes are already happening and how they work. Finally, they map pathways to outcomes – all the changes that they believe must take place in their context to achieve lasting success. These are observable changes, however small, in the conditions, behaviours, capabilities, attitudes, and relationships and conditions that are considered essential for long term success.

This framework makes it possible to plan activities and reflect on performance using easy-to-collect data on short-term and intermediate process outcomes – changes that the organization can influence on its own or with others, that contribute to ultimate success. A good theory of change makes complexity manageable without oversimplification.

Think and act from an ecosystem perspective

Development is usually a long term, complex process involving many actors and interdependent processes. A single organization working on its own can seldom achieve all the changes required by its theory of change. In current practice, many civil society organizations work in isolation in their specific locality or on their particular aspect of a problem. But when different agencies align their work towards a shared outcome or vision of success the power of an entire ecosystem is unleashed.

When organizations, including donors, begin to think of themselves as working in an ecology of actors towards shared outcomes, they can plan and act collaboratively without losing their individual focus or identity. Such an ecological approach preserves the individual creativity and responsiveness of diverse actors while enabling effective synergies leading to social learning and more effective solutions.

Publish your learning

Current reporting practice is often little more than marketing or simple management accounting to donors (what we say we did with your money). It actively undermines honest, inclusive reflection and learning.

When reporting is an open, public reflection of the emerging understanding among constituents of the difference the organization is making, it becomes an integral part of learning and improving. Formats will vary, but public reports should boldly address the questions: What did we want to achieve? What did we actually achieve? What caused or hindered our success? What’s working well? What do we need to change and why? And this discussion must reflect what our constituents said on all material issues – however divergent these views might be.

Transparent public reporting that reflects constituency voice enables accountability and societal learning. Publishing something puts it into the public domain where it can be debated, verified, or refuted. This kind of reporting assures the integrity of claimed achievements, enhances legitimacy, and wins new support. Organizations use this approach to reporting to generate new commitments, creativity and investment.

Organizations can learn from each other and benchmark themselves. Real challenges are surfaced, best practices shared, and sustainable solutions emerge. Far from being threatening, this kind of public reporting is respectful of the difficulties and challenges that organizations face. There is no place for unrealistic expectations or questionable claims of ‘easy victories’. Instead, there emerges a shared and realistic sense of what is needed from all parties, donors included, to make things work.