The Space In-Between: Why Do Our Best Plans Fail?

by

Edward Addai

28 March 2026



You have a plan. It is logical, evidence-based, and meticulously budgeted. Yet, six months into implementation, the results are nowhere to be found. The community isn’t cooperating, the political winds have shifted, and a parallel initiative is undermining your impact. What went wrong?

Beyond the Project: Seeing the Three Stages

The answer often lies in what I call the “interconnected theatres” or the “space in between”. This is the recognition that social change is not a single project to be managed, but a dynamic drama playing out across three interconnected stages simultaneously: the theatre of technical delivery (your programs and services), the theatre of partnerships and political economy (the interests, power structures, and incentives of partners, local elites and institutions), and the theatre of social norms (the deep-seated beliefs, behaviors, and informal rules within communities). To manage for results is to conduct this orchestra, not just to perfect a single instrument.

When a Well Is More Than a Well: Lessons from Bangladesh

Consider a water sanitation project in rural Bangladesh. A well is dug (technical theatre) with proper filtration. Yet, six months later, it is contaminated. Why? Because the political economy theatre dictated that the well was placed on the land of a local elite who resents the loss of his water selling monopoly, so he discourages its use. Simultaneously, in the social norms theatre, the community’s traditional hierarchy dictates that lower caste families use a separate downstream source, making the new “shared” well socially unacceptable (Andrews et al., 2017). The technical solution failed because it ignored the power dynamics and cultural codes running concurrently on the other stages.

Textbooks Alone Do Not a Classroom Make: Insights from Kenya

In Kenya, attempts to improve public education through textbook provision (technical) often failed to improve learning outcomes. The missing piece was the political economy theatre, where teacher absenteeism was a tacitly accepted norm due to union influence and local patronage networks (Pritchett, 2015). Delivering inputs without altering the accountability relationships on the other stage yielded no results.

Results-Based Management Falls Short Without Systems Thinking

For the social sector manager, this brings attention to an essential understanding about managing for results: linear logic models do not fully capture how change actually happens. Moving from inputs to impact involves engaging with deeper adaptive challenges, particularly those related to power dynamics, social norms and organizational culture.

From Insight to Action: How to Lead Across Theatres

So, how do you act on this in practice?

1.       Map the Actors Before You Map the Activities. Before you finalize your log frame, conduct a power analysis. Who wins? Who loses? Who has the informal authority to block this? (Rodrik, 2008).

2.       Design for Feedback Loops, Not Just Milestones. Create mechanisms such as community scorecards that bring the political and social theatres into the technical one. If implementation is causing a backlash in the power structure, your monitoring system must flag that as urgently as a budget overrun.

3.       Manage Adaptively. Results are achieved not by rigid adherence to a plan, but by a disciplined ability to pivot. If the social norm is resisting your intervention, your “result” may not be a new school, but a new coalition of voices willing to challenge that norm.

Ignoring these interconnected theatres is not just a strategic error; it is a failure of leadership. Our role is to be not just project managers, but systems stewards, navigating the space between technical plans, political realities, and human beliefs.

References

Andrews, M., Pritchett, L., and Woolcock, M., 2017. Building State Capability: Evidence, Analysis, Action. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Pritchett, L., 2015. The Risks of Ignoring Implementation. Center for Global Development Working Paper No. 391. Washington, D.C.: Center for Global Development.

Rodrik, D., 2008. One Economics, Many Recipes: Globalization, Institutions, and Economic Growth. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

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