Towards the idea that complexity IS a theory of change
Complexity, Design, Emergence, Evaluation, Featured, Learning
In the world of non-profits, social change, and philanthropy it seems essential that change agents provide funders with a theory of change. This is nominally a way for funders to see how an organization intends to make change in their work. Often on application forms, funders provide guidance, asking that a grantee provide an articulation of their theory of change and a logic model to show how, step by step, their program will help transform something, address an issue or solve a problem.
In my experience, most of the time “theory of change” is really just another word for “strategic plan” in which an end point is specified, and steps are articulated backwards from that end point, with outcomes identified along the way. Here’s an example. While that is helpful for situations in which you have a high degree of control and influence, and in which the nature of the problem is well ordered and predictable, these are not useful with complex emergent problems. Most importantly they are not theories of change, but descriptors of activities.
For me a theory of change is critical. Looking at the problem you are facing, ask yourself how do these kinds of problems change? If, for example, we are trying to work on a specific change to an education policy, the theory of change needs to be based on the reality of how policy change actually happens. For example, to change policy you need to be influential enough with the government in power to be able to design and enact your desired changes with politicians and policy makers. How does policy change? Through lobbying, a groundswell of support, pressure during elections, participation in consultation processes and so on. From there you can design a campaign – a strategic plan – to see if you can get the policy changed.
Complex problems are a different beast altogether. They are non-linear, unpredictable and emergent. Traffic safety is an example. A theory of change for these kind of problems looks much more like the dynamics of flocking behaviour. The problem changes through many many small interactions and butterfly effects. A road safety program might work for a while until new factors come into play, such as distractions or raised speed limits, or increased use of particular sections of road. Suddenly the problem changes in a complex and adaptive way. It is not logical or rational and one certainly can’t predict the outcome of actions.
In my perfect world I wish it would be perfectly acceptable for grantees to say that “Our theory of change is complexity.” Complexity, to quote Michael Quinn Patton, IS a theory of change. Understanding that reality has radical implications for doing change work. This is why I am so passionate about teaching complexity to organizations and especially to funders. If funders believe that all problems can be solved with predictive planning and a logic model adhered to with accountability structures, then they will constrain grantees in ways that prevent grantees from actually addressing the nature of complex phenomena. Working with foundations to change their grant forms is hugely rewarding, but it needs to be supported with change theory literacy at the more powerful levels of the organization and with those who are making granting decisions.
So what does it look like?
I’m trying these days to be very practical in describing how to address complex problems in the world of social change. For me it comes down to these basic activities:
Describe the current state of the system. This is a process of describing what is happening. It can be through a combination of looking at data, conducting narrative research and indeed, sitting in groups full of diversity and different lived experience and talking about what’s going on. If we are looking at road safety we could say “there are 70 accidents here this year” or “I don’t feel safe crossing the road at this intersection.” Collecting data about the current state of things is essential, because no change initiative starts from scratch.
Ask what patterns are occurring the system. Gathering scads of data will reveal patterns that are repeating and reoccurring in the system, Being able to name these patterns is essential. It often looks as simple as “hey, do you notice that there are way more accidents at night concentrated on this stretch of road?” Pattern logic, a process used in the Human Systems Dynamics community, is one way that we make sense of what is happening. It is an essential step because in complexity we cannot simply solve problems but instead we seek to shift patterns.
Ask yourself what might be holding these patterns in place. Recently I have been doing this by asking groups to look at the patterns they have identified and answer this question. “If this pattern was the result of set of principles and advice that we have been following, what would those principles be?” This helps you to see the structures that keep problems in place, and that is an essential intelligence for strategic change work. This is one adaptation of part of the process called TRIZ which seeks to uncover principles and patterns. So in our road safety example we might say, “make sure you drive too fast in the evening on this stretch of road” is a principle that, if followed, would increase danger at this intersection. Ask what principles would give you the behaviours that you are seeing? You are trying to find principles that are hypotheses, things you can test and learn more about. Those principles are what you are aiming to change, to therefore shift behaviour. A key piece of complexity as a theory of change is that constraints influence behaviour. These are sometimes called “simple rules” but I’m going to refer to them as principles, because it will later dovetail better with a particular evaluation method.
Determine a direction of travel towards “better.” As opposed to starting with an end point in sight, in complexity you get to determine which direction you want to head towards, and you get to do it with others. “Better” is a set of choices you get to make, and they can be socially constructed and socially contested. “Better” is not inevitable and it cannot be predictive but choosing an indicator like “fewer accidents everywhere and a feeling of safety amongst pedestrians” will help guide your decisions. In a road safety initiative this will direct you towards a monitoring strategy and towards context specific actions for certain places that are more unsafe than others. Note that “eliminating accidents” isn’t possible, because the work you are trying to do is dynamic and adaptive, and changes over time. The only way to eliminate accidents is to ban cars. That may be one strategy, and in certain places that might be how you do it. It will of course generate other problems, and you have to be aware and monitor for those as well. In this work we are looking for what is called an “adjacent possible” state for the system. What can we possibly change to take us towards a better state? What is the system inclined to do? Banning cars might not be that adjacent possible.
Choose principles that will help guide you away from the current state towards “better.” It’s a key piece of complexity as a theory of change that constraints in a system cause emergent actions. One of my favourite writers on constraints is Mark O Sullivan, a soccer coach with AIK in Sweden. He pioneers and research constraint based learning for children at the AIK academy. Rather than teach children strategy, he creates the conditions so that they can discover it for themselves. He gives children simple rules to follow in constrained game simulated situations and lets them explore and experiment with solutions to problems in a dynamic context. In this presentation he shows a video of kids practicing simple rules like “move away from the ball” and “pass” and watches as they discover ways to create and use space, which is an essential tactical skill for players, but which cannot be taught abstractly and which must be learned in application. Principles aimed at changing the constraints will help design interventions to shift patterns.
Design actions aimed at shifting constraints and monitor them closely. Using these simple rules (principles) and a direction of travel, you can begin to design and try actions that give you a sense of what works and what doesn’t. These are called safe to fail probes. In the road safety example, probes might include placing temporary speed bumps on the road, installing reflective tape or silhouettes on posts at pedestrian crossings, placing a large object on the road to constrain the driving lanes and cause drivers to slow down. All of these probes will give you information about how to shift the patterns in the system, and some might produce results that will inspire you to make them more permanent. But in addition to monitoring for success, you have to also monitor for emergent side effects. Slowing traffic down might increase delays for drivers, meaning that they drive with more frustration, meaning more fender benders elsewhere in the system. Complex adaptive systems produce emergent outcomes. You have to watch for them.
Evaluate the effectiveness of your principles in changing the constraints in the system. Evaluation in complex systems is about monitoring and watching what develops as you work. It is not about measuring the results of your work, doing a gap analysis and making recommendations. There are many, many approaches to evaluation, and you have to be smart in using the methods that work for the nature of the problem you are facing. In my opinion we all need become much more literate in evaluation theory, because done poorly, evaluation can have the effect of constraining change work into a few easily observed outcomes. One form of evaluation that is getting my attention is principles-based evaluation, which helps you to look at the effectiveness of the principles you are using to guide action. This is why using principles as a framework helps to plan, act and evaluate.
Monitor and repeat. Working on complex problems has no end. A traffic safety initiative will change over time due to factors well outside the control of an organization to respond to it. And so there never can be an end point to the work. Strategies will have an effect and then you need to look at the current state again and repeat the process. Embedding this cycle in daily practice is actually good capacity building and teams and organizations that can do this become more responsive and strategic over time.
Complexity IS indeed a theory of change. I feel like I’m on a mission to help organizations, social change workers and funders get a sense of how and why adopting to that reality is beneficial all round.
How are you working with complexity as a theory of change?
Hi Chris. Thanks for this very clear discussion of working with change in complex situations. I use very similar ideas but am always looking for different ways to describe them. I like your idea of identifying the principles / simple rules that promote undesirable behaviours and using TRIZ as model for changing the underlying patterns.
Hi Chris, thanks for writing this. It is clear that you are coming from a funders/do-ers perspective and not so much from other perspectives such as organisational change, innovation, strategy, anticipation, etc. That is fine, apart from that your thesis that Complexity is a theory of change would be further fleshed out when these domains of application where covered too.
Having said that there are two comments I think are worth mentioning:
1) In the “Describe the current state of the system.” activity my experience is that only participatory narrative methods of inquiry can bring a sufficient diversity of perspectives to the table. Sometimes 10 is the best one can do, 80 are usually better, 200-300 are sufficient unless the diversity of contents mandates a few thousand self-interpreted narratives.
2) The idea that challenges are complex is incomplete. There are complex aspects to challenges. And complicated and organisational and chaotic and autonomous and identity related, etc. Each of them has/needs a theory of change.
We are working on translating our website, so I hope you can understand (or Google translate) https://storyconnect.nl/sensecanvas/ which includes more organisational perspectives than f.e. Cynefin and has a less “brainy” approach than the KiF sensemaking tool. The SenseCanvas (a.k.a. Hexagon Sensemaking Canvas has show to perform well for sensemaking situations where inside-out and outside-in pattern changes occur. I.e. it helps to handle co-evolution much better than Cynefin. And when one needs more flexibility and/or needs to give more attention to the nature of the connections that connect the dots into pattern Cynthia Kurtz’ Confluence Sensemaking Framework is the best tool I’m aware of.
Thanks. Yes this post is written from that context of funders and grantees, which is the locus for a ton of social change work. And I’m quite interested in social change.
As for methods and approaches, it’s really context dependant. No map is complete, no tool is perfect and so those that serve the need of the client within the constraints of good theory will typically do the job.
Hi Chris, another excellent and thought-provoking post. I wanted to mention to you and all the readers that in my view the Solution-Focused approach, taken from therapy and applied to organisational and community change over the past couple of decades, is a good candidate for a practical approach which very positively embraces the ‘complexity’ paradigm. One of the ideas that ‘every case is different’ helps to keep the focus on the situation and context rather than the model. Another element of SF is to seek to reinforce/amplify useful patterns first, which can lead to an appreciative context for the work. And as you say above, there are potentially many ways to work with complexity.
Hi Chris!
I love that you engage in your blogs with the complexities of projects and evaluation, and the ways in which they interact.
A main thought here, you seem to use speak of theory of change but given the ridigity comments it sounds like you are speaking about logic models, not theories of change. Theories of change are exactly that, theories of how change occurs, so they don’t have to be linear, unless the conceiver is bound to them being linear. Also, logic models can be non-linear too, though they take some creativity to generate. I have a non-linear theory of change I did for a process client some years ago, can share, if you’re curious!
Thanks. As always you’re ahead of the curve of most of the folks I work with. In practice, as I look around ToCs and logic models get used very badly A LOT of the time. Just Google the terms. Could you share your no. Linear examples in a way that I could link to, and I’ll edit the blog post to add those examples?
Great idea!
I’ll write a blog on it and then you can link your blog to it!
Rita
I like this: “Ask yourself what might be holding these patterns in place.”
Not always easy to know what they are, but I think this may be where the necessary work lies.
…and why collective sensemaking helps, because although we can never fully know – I’m thinking of your work on the benefits of restraint here – we can nevertheless be inspired enough by what we discover to elaborate and develop different responses. Complex problems as art objects/experience? I’ve been thinking about what I learned from you all the time since we were in Whistler in June.
Thoughtful post, thanks Chris. However I agree with an earlier commenter that writing off theories of change weakens the post as a whole. Grantees saying “my theory of change is complexity” is akin to a rocket scientist saying “my plan to get to mars is math.” The goal of a theory of change is to convince others that you have explored the space with rigor and discipline, and that these are your conclusions. That they’re perceived as predictive, linear, logic models is just a fault of how poorly they’ve been done in the past.
Yes. I’m not arguing for getting rid of theories of change. I’m arguing for producing actual theories for how change happens in the context of the problems being addressed rather than relabeling a strategic plan as a theory of change. I’m with you.
AND complexity IS a theory of change. And it can be articulated in such a way to demonstrate that linear predictive planning won’t do the job.
> In my perfect world I wish it would be perfectly acceptable for grantees to say that “Our theory of change is complexity.”
As a grantor my reaction to that would be “Yes, I’d hope so. Now what’s your real theory of change?”
Complexity is a means to a theory of change, and a theory of change may be complex. Perhaps I’m missing the nuance here, but I don’t think the idea that complexity IS a theory of change carries much weight for others.
I do like the process you’ve outlined here for addressing complex issues though.
I think that’s because the word complexity gets used colloquially. If I’m working on opioid deaths for example I have to start by identifying how this particular issue changes. We know the crisis is emergent, non-linear and exhibits evolutionary patterns of behaviour. It is a complex adaptive system. That is a theory of how it changes and that body of theory is complexity. If we are to address this crisis we need to address it by working in a non linear fashion, introducing small probes to stimulate alternative adaptation and evolution of the system towards a direction of more safety.
If you then say, great but what’s your real theirybof change and then ask me for outcomes and back casted planning steps to get us there, I will respond by saying that you don’t understand the nature of the crisis.
On this particular topic there are in fact funders taking a complexity informed approach to addressing it. And there are also others who are stuck in the ontologically incorrect theory of change that says “we will find solutions and evaluate effectiveness and publish best practices.”
Complexity is indeed a theory about change. So too is linear causality. And THAT theory of change is useful for building medical detox centres, for example. They are both valid theories of change because the are coherent with the nature of the problem.
If I apply complexity theory to building a medical detox centre we are not going to get very far. Everyone would agree with that, I hope. Such centres do not simply “emerge”
And so I’m questioning why some funders insist on predictive planning as a model for addressing the adaptive complexity of opioid use. It’s a clash of theory and ontology – the nature of the kind of problem we are working with – and it locks money up in projects and approaches that can lead to getting it tragically wrong.
Really interesting blog and discussion . I totally agree about the preponderance of awful logic models and as a company specialising in meaningful outcome evaluation we spend lots of time working with organisations to unravel the problems caused by over simplistic outcome based working. We have our own non linear and complexity informed approach to planning and evaluation, see http://www.matter-of-focus.com . Key to successful work with organisations is including in our outcome maps the things people need to do to work effectively in complexity, ie the appropriately different thing every time.
Happy to share more, but meantime a question. We find that a focus on outcomes is a really helpful tool for managing in complexity, as it helps keep a shared focus on what matters in an ever shifting context. However this isn’t discussed in the complexity literature. Why is this, or have I missed something?
It’s because you can’t predict outcomes in a complex system. Instead we focus on vectors – directions of travel, moving towards good. Michael Quinn Patton’s evaluation literature talks about this and Dave Snowden’s work discusses this at length and explicitly. But that’s perhaps why it’s missing from the literature.
Just after I first saw your post, Chris, on complexity, I went to my local UC Berkeley art museum. I was early for the Bergman film series I’ve been attending and went through a newly opened exhibit that takes a look at how emergent scientific theories influenced, and interconnected?, with art. A good show. Here is a quote writte, I have to assume for the show did not give attribution, briefly outlining Einstein’s theory of relativity and Heisenberg’s quantum mechanics struck me, last Wed, as relevant to complex approaches to the complexity of systems change. Or something. I had not captured the whole quote so when I went to the same museum today, I took down the quote more attentively:
“Einstein’s theory of relativity promoted the concept of universal order. Quantum theory offered an opposing idea, introducing the importance of uncertainty at the smallest leels in science: subatomic particles and forces. Werner Heisenberg’s 1927 uncertainty principle states that whenever momentum and position are measured, the process of observation includes the effect of light hitting the electron–in other words, the ac tg of observing a phenomenon changes that phenomenon. as a result, as we measure onr property with increased accuracy, our measurement of the other property becomes less accurate. By stating that momentum and position could not be measured simultaneously with precision, quantum mechanics challenges the very notion of causality.”
Quantum theory is also compatible with Goethe’s phenomenological approach to observing science, for Goethe said, if I understood him, that when beings observe any phenomenon, the phenomenon changes. I don’t think there is any reason to decide that what happens in human systems, organizations, do not change by being observed. Goethe was as much scientist as poet, although he was not very recognized for his physics insights. He was a contemporary of Newton and if the world of science had been built on Goethe’s theories instead of Newton’s, I believe everything would be very different. I don’t know how things would be different, only that Goethe proved the theories that most made Newton famous to be wrong. He proved them with years of scientific study but by then, Newton was the supernova that started modern science and Goethe was dissed as a poet.
Can you see how the ideas I have shared here are about how complexity can behave in systems? or see anything in what I have shared?
Yes. This is great. Of course Newton’s physics are perfectly adequate mechanics at the scales at which they work. They drive our mechanical world. But as a metaphor they have always been problematic when their application has intruded on the world of social complexity and culture. In these worlds the metaphors we derive from quantum mechanics and ecological complexity are illuminating and help us think better about ways of working and acting in these kinds of systems.
(I’m being careful here to use these sciences as inspirational metaphors and not a misapplication of research and theory from one realm to another. And yes everything is connected, etc.)
I’ll look at some more of Goethe’s writing on science. Thanks for that.
Thanks for a great piece, Chris. I believe that the long-term vision can still be there but more as a “vector” as you said multiple times and not as a pre-defined goal. I checked the resource you shared on “how to build a theory of change” and it’s so fascinating how the linear assumptions in place make it look as if change could be engineered, which could happen to a limited extent as you said only in well-ordered domains AND/OR when you have such an overwhelming influence on key variables.
What I find so fascinating in the “how to build a ToC” link is that they seem to ignore how step #6 (clarify your assumptions) can completely overrun everything else, because if some core assumptions are incorrect the entire house of cards collapses. It is more useful to approach with epistemic humility in complexity and say “we don’t know how causality is at play here, to be honest. Let’s try to poke the system a bit and see how it responds”.
I think there are some definitional issues here. I am writing from Scotland where we do think of outcomes as long term visions, as opposed to ‘results’ or goals. Particularly when it comes to practice (www.personaloutcomecollaboration.org). Great to see that our meanings are the same, even if the words are different – and vector is a new one to me!
I agree. Terms like “complexity” “outputs” and “results” are hugely context dependant. While I advocate for good theory under lying practice I also ask people to tell me what they mean when they use planning language. I often ask ya to talk about outcomes without using the word. This helps us be clear about what we’re doing and see what makes it coherent with good theory and where we might need to explore things a bit more.