On building strategies and theories of change
Future oriented efforts to position organizations and institutions for ongoing growth and development are interactions with many tributaries. An ecosystem’s guidance and feedback are critical gifts offered to support an organization/institution’s ongoing development. The process of listening by engaging with data acquired from interactions with an organization’s ecosystem creates the possibility for organizational learning, adaptation, evolution, innovations development, relevance and long term survival.
This process of listening leads to the practice of reflection. Often, reflection is seen as a willful and optional activity that can be conflated with images of engaging in meditation practice. Many of us understand this process to be passive.
However, reflection is a deeply active engagement in the process of discerning patterns, testing out scenarios and possibilities, exploring implications and teasing out nuance from a set of data. Reflection also is assessment of organizational capabilities, gifts, challenges, adaptive and technical capacities, etc.
Theory of change and strategy development model
Reflection leads to a process of sense making through deliberation, discussion, exploration, debate and other forms of exchange that seek to create shared consciousness, language, values, analysis, theories of change and of how to embody philosophies of change. The result of deliberation is a comprehensive theory of change that reflects for the organization what it believes is a method through which to create the changes it is, in turn, meant to create. Embodying an organizational theory of change requires a clear understanding of organizational values and ethics.
Organizational strategies emerging from an organizational theory of change often end up producing a direct reflection of the how of implementation.
Therefore, embodying the philosophies of change that are the underpinning of a theory of change is as critical as the theory of change itself. When philosophies of change are embodied, strategies implemented as an effort to apply a theory of change result in the creation of new learning; primary, secondary and unforeseen outcomes; a strengthened organizational ethical backbone; and in the creation of new leadership talent and collaboration.
