It all started back in 2007 when I was working on a project for an organization called Search for Common Ground. I was helping design, monitor, and evaluate their peace-building programs when I happened upon a paper written by Reina Neufeldt. The paper, entitled “Frameworkers and Circlers: Exploring Assumptions in Peace and Conflict Impact Assessment,” presented, in fact, two opposing world views of how change happens. One based on “frameworks”, or linear, cause and effect model in which programs or projects are explicitly laid out to achieve preset outcomes, and the other akin to “circles”, which “uses a more elliptical method, focusing on relationships, […] organic processes […] responsive to each situation.”
I found the article fascinating, and felt that social change programs were far too complex to fit into one mold or the other – they required both some structure, which frameworks offer, and the flexibility that circles offer.
A few months later, at the AEA Annual Meeting in Baltimore, Michael Quinn-Patton electrified his peers with his Developmental Evaluation idea! He called for evaluators of social innovations to work in partnership with program decision makers to ensure their interventions stay fit-for-purpose and make evidence-based adaptions to respond to changing environments. In other words, it called for both frameworks and circles.
At the time, M&E processes for peace-building projects were simply too standardized and rigid. In my work, I struggled to engage with my circler colleagues who found the M&E lingo too opaque, the processes too rigid and irrelevant. It didn’t take long for me to connect the dots between Neufeldt’s paper and Quinn-Patton’s approach. They both recognized the complex nature of social change and the need for program adaptations and creativity in the evaluation process.
I credit these moments for planting the seed that led me to establish The ToC Creative. I set out to create frameworks for circlers.
What’s a Theory of Change?
Pronounced [Tee-oh-see], the ToC in our name stands for theory of change. A theory of change is a comprehensive description of how a particular intervention will bring about change. Articulating a ToC requires that teams have conversations to unpack the assumptions, implicit and explicit, of how the expected change will happen. Unfortunately, operational procedures and unrealistic project design timelines often prevent practitioners from carving out the time to reflect on the why, the what, the how and the so what of their projects.
It has become more important than ever to devise solutions that match the complex issues we face as change-makers. We need thinking-kits that break away from linear processes and allow us to collectively see the dots and how they connect. We need methods of communication that don’t keep looping back to the same questions and answers.
In short, we need creative approaches to tease out and harness the many perspectives on change and pathways that lead to it. That’s what The ToC Creative is all about.
Frameworks for circlers
Our solutions are catalysts for reflective practice. They tease out tacit knowledge and help teams get to the heart of projects at all stages of the project cycle; planning, implementation and evaluation.
ReThink Social Change Cards and InSight Story Dice for Results provide a framework around which change-makers can have dynamic conversations. The randomness of the card draw or dice roll provide the circles, the ever changing topics around which we build our interventions, campaigns and programs.
Discover the solutions and learn how I can help you design better projects and learn from their implementation.
Cheers,
Ratiba