Continuing with the sneak peeks of my new book, Don’t Screw Up Your Program, which will be coming out this fall.
The debacle of a program that triggered me to write this book demonstrated that when you make faulty assumptions about your program’s recipients and partners, you create a mess that only compounds over time. The mistake that they made - and they’re not the only ones to do it, they just went particularly big at it - was that they probably didn’t think through the chain of their assumptions. And they definitely didn’t interrogate the assumptions that they had made.
Owen Raisch, my business partner at Econogy, invented this framework back several years ago. I’ve modifed it slightly to fit this context. I love it, because it helps to prevent you from making the kind of leaps of assumption that well-intentioned people can do so easily. Instead of saying, “We will give them X, and then ***magic will happen!*** and then Z will result!!” this structure forces your to examine the behavior that you are looking to change. When you make yourself look at that, you make yourself question whether your assumptions are right in the first place.
And that might make you squirm a little, but it will save you - and everyone else - a mountain of grief down the road.
Don’t Screw Up Your Program will be out in September. Make sure you’re getting updates and pre-order discounts by signing up here.
Access, Behavior, and Change
Once you know who you are designing your project for, you need to create a model of the kind of change you're hoping that your program will accomplish.
Programs often ask applicants to articulate their "theory of change," but if you don't know what your theory of change looks like, then all they can do is fling their ideas in your general direction. That’s what happened in the program I told you about. If you've at least given them your hypotheses, then they can gauge where to point their efforts - or use their expertise to show you an alternative.
There are dozens of formalized Theory of Change structures and systems, and some fields turn up their collective noses at anything outside of their preferred version. I find a lot of them too abstract, too cumbersome and too onerous, which is why the only people who do them are organizations that have to apply for programs that don’t give them a choice.
Añd that's probably why so few program-makers do a decent job of articulating their own theory of change. We ain't got time to read the textbook.
Given that, here's a simpler approach:
When you create a program, you want to create some kind of change.
To make that change, some group of people will have to do a particular behavior. A lot of times, what we're really seeking is a change in some group of people's behavior - we want them to drive differently, eat differently, play differently, something.
The change we are seeking won't happen unless and until behavior changes.
That seems totally self-evident when you write it out that way. But as we'll see in the next section, Behavior is a key locus for the assumptions that screw up programs.
And there's still one more piece that has be in place before change can happen:
People behave the way they do for some reason that makes sense in their immediate current context. How they drive is heavily influenced by what the roads are like, what cars are like, what driver's education is like, what they hear and see about driving from everything around them. People eat the way they do because of history, cultural identity, biology, what they have access to, what they know how to do, and more.
Changing behavior, therefore, requires changing some element of their context - changing what they have access to. Information, incentives, penalties, structures, infrastructure, peer pressure, marketing messages... altering what people have access to is a precondition for facilitating different behavior, which is the ultimate cause of the change our program is trying to affect.
If we misunderstand
what they need access to,
or what behavior is desired,
or we don’t clearly identify the change the program is seeking,
we won’t have a successful program.
We’ll have a mess.
The worksheet on the next page will help you identify these three elements of your program -- the change you are seeking, the behavior that you believe will lead to that change, and the access that the target audience needs to make all of that happen.
Note that the last paragraph said that you believe. As we said before, the other major derailer of well-intentioned projects are those pesky assumptions. We'll get to those next.
Image is from CommunicationStyles.org, https://communicationstyles.org/the-circle-of-assumptions/