Your Theory of Change is a Hypotheses not a Promise
by
Edward
Addai
28
April 2026
Every programme officer has drawn it. Every proposal has
demanded it. A box on the left representing the problem. Arrows move rightward
through inputs, activities, outputs, outcomes, and impact. The theory of
change: social sector requirement, donor expectation, and strategic centerpiece
of a programme all in one tidy diagram. But what if the diagram is lying to
you?
Not lying in the way of deliberate deception, but in the
quieter, more dangerous way that comfortable fictions lie by offering the
reassurance of a map in terrain that does not hold still. What if theories of
change, as we currently produce and deploy them, systematically misrepresent
how change comes about, flatten the pathways through which it travels, and
equip social sector managers with false confidence precisely when they need
rigorous humility?
This is not an argument against strategic thinking. It is
an argument for a more honest reckoning with what theories of change can and
cannot tell us, and what managing for results demands of us in their place.
A Useful Tool That Became a Ritual
What has happened in practice is rather different.
Theories of change have become planning instruments, accountability tools, and
contractual commitments. They are drawn before programmes begin, submitted
alongside proposals, and measured at programme close. In the process, the
hypothesis has become a promise, and the map has been mistaken for the
territory.
The structural problems are threefold. First, theories of
change are not operational. They describe a logic of change at an abstract
level but rarely specify the mechanisms through which change is activated including
who does what, under what conditions, in what sequence, and when. They tell you
that increased community awareness leads to improved health-seeking behaviour,
but not how awareness spreads through a specific community's social fabric, or
whose authority carries enough weight to shift it. Isabel Vogel's review for
the UK Department for International Development found that theories of change
in international development consistently failed to specify how or why intended
changes would occur, leaving programme teams navigating implementation without
a functioning compass (Vogel, 2012).
Second, theories of change do not capture how change is
activated. Complex social change rarely proceeds linearly. It moves through
tipping points, amplifies through feedback loops, reverses under political
pressure, and accelerates through catalytic events that no planning document
predicted. Ben Ramalingam's analysis of aid and complexity describes the
development sector's persistent tendency to model complex, adaptive systems as
if they were complicated, linear ones, applying engineering logic to what are,
in essence, ecological dynamics (Ramalingam, 2013). A theory of change drawn as
a chain of cause-and-effect cannot accommodate the feedback, emergence, and
non-linearity through which real change propagates.
Third, and most consequentially, theories of change offer
a false sense of certainty in profoundly uncertain environments. When a theory
of change is submitted as part of a funding proposal and then treated as a
contractual road map, the social sector manager is placed in an impossible
position: accountable to a plan that the realities of implementation will
inevitably contradict. Patricia Rogers, writing on programme theory in complex
interventions, argues that linear theories of change are structurally inadequate
for contexts where emergent outcomes, multiple causality, and non-linear
pathways define the change process (Rogers, 2008).
How the ToC Diagram Fails Programmes
Consider the sprawling landscape of community health
worker programmes across sub-Saharan Africa. Dozens of these programmes were
built on theories of change in which trained community health workers, equipped
with protocols and supplies, would increase uptake of child health services in
underserved communities. The logic was coherent. The arrows moved plausibly
from left to right. Yet evaluation after evaluation found that outcomes
diverged sharply across communities that appeared, on paper, to share the same
conditions. In Ghana, ethnographic studies of similar programmes found that the
social positioning of community health workers within local power structures, whether
they were trusted, marginalised, or co-opted by traditional authorities, determined
uptake far more decisively than the training protocols the theory of change had
specified (Agyepong and Adjei, 2008). The theory had mapped the highway; it had
not mapped the gatekeepers.
In education reform, the pattern recurs with striking
regularity. Rwanda's post-genocide education transformation was not simply a
product of a coherent theory of change. It was a product of political will,
institutional sequencing, and a particular configuration of state capacity and
social cohesion that could not have been predicted in advance and cannot be
easily replicated elsewhere (Uvin, 1998). Theories of change that treat context
as a background condition rather than an active variable in the change process
are precisely those that travel poorly.
A theory of change is a hypothesis, not a promise. When
we mistake the map for the territory, we do not manage for results; we manage
for appearances.
What This Teaches Us About Managing for
Results
The lesson is not that theories of change are worthless.
It is that they are worth far less than we have assigned them, and that the gap
between what they promise and what they deliver is precisely where results
management must operate.
Michael Quinn Patton's developmental evaluation framework
offers one reorientation: treat theories of change as dynamic hypotheses to be
tested and revised in real time, not as frameworks to be protected from
falsification (Patton, 2011). This requires a fundamentally different
relationship between planning, learning, and accountability; one in which the
manager's task is not to execute a theory but to navigate an adaptive pathway,
remaining alert to feedback signals and willing to revise the theory when evidence
demands it.
John Mayne's work on contribution analysis offers another
lever: rather than asking whether a programme delivered the outcomes it
predicted, ask what role the intervention played in a change process that it
did not, and could not, control entirely (Mayne, 2015). This is a more honest
and more useful question for most social sector contexts.
Managing for results, properly understood, is not
managing for predetermined outcomes. It is managing for the quality of learning
and adaptation that keeps a programme responsive to a changing reality. A
programme that holds rigidly to a theory of change in the face of contradicting
evidence is not managing for results. It is managing for the appearance of
results.
What the Honest Manager Must Now Do
None of this is merely theoretical. It translates into
specific shifts in how social sector managers commission, use, and review
theories of change.
From planning ritual to living hypothesis: Three practice
shifts
·
Treat your theory of change as the first
draft of an explanation, not the final word. At every programme
review, ask explicitly: which of our causal assumptions has the evidence
challenged? What do we now believe differently? Revision is not failure; it is
intelligence.
·
Name the mechanisms, not just the
milestones. Supplement your theory of change with a mechanism map:
who are the key actors whose behaviour must shift, what will move them to shift
it, and what do we know about the conditions under which that movement is
possible? If you cannot answer these questions, your theory is incomplete.
·
Hold uncertainty as a management
variable. Build adaptive management protocols into programme
design. This includes regular reflection points, pre-agreed decision rules for
course correction, and documentation of learning that feeds back into programme
logic. Do not wait for the endline evaluation to discover that the arrows were
pointing in the wrong direction.
In an uncertain world, the most dangerous thing you can
carry is a plan you believe in too completely. The box-and-arrow diagram on the
conference room wall is not wrong. It is incomplete. And in the social sector,
the distance between incomplete and wrong is measured in children who did not
receive services, communities that did not change, and results that did not
materialise. The managers who will close that distance are not those with the
most confident theories of change. They are those with the most rigorous
relationship with their own uncertainty.
References
Agyepong,
I.A. and Adjei, S. (2008) 'Public social policy development and implementation:
a case study of the Ghana National Health Insurance scheme', Health Policy and
Planning, 23(2), pp. 150-160.
Mayne,
J. (2015) 'Useful theory of change models', Canadian Journal of Program
Evaluation, 30(2), pp. 119-142.
Patton,
M.Q. (2011) Developmental Evaluation: Applying Complexity Concepts to Enhance
Innovation and Use. New York: Guilford Press.
Ramalingam,
B. (2013) Aid on the Edge of Chaos: Rethinking International Cooperation in a
Complex World. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Rogers,
P. (2008) 'Using programme theory to evaluate complicated and complex aspects
of interventions', Evaluation, 14(1), pp. 29-48.
Uvin,
P. (1998) Aiding Violence: The Development Enterprise in Rwanda. West Hartford:
Kumarian Press.
Vogel,
I. (2012) Review of the Use of 'Theory of Change' in International Development.
London: UK Department for International Development.
Weiss,
C.H. (1995) 'Nothing as practical as good theory: exploring theory-based
evaluation for comprehensive community initiatives with children and families',
in Connell, J.P. et al. (eds) New Approaches to Evaluating Community
Initiatives. Washington DC: Aspen Institute, pp. 65-92.
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