
Your theory of change (ToC) explains how and why you think your strategies will achieve its intended outcomes. Theories of change are an important ingredient for strategy development and are an essential ingredient in developing measures to assess the effectiveness of the actions you take to implement your strategy. It is the process for developing a ToC, as much as the final product, which is beneficial for developing robust outcomes and promoting a common understanding about a strategy’s impact. A ToC should clarify what changes are needed in norms and other factors in order to achieve your ultimate aim and to pursue the most efficient path to get there. Developing a ToC helps to identify potential roadblocks, leaps of logic in your thinking, assumptions to monitor, and risks to success. It also ensures that everyone on the team is operating under the same set of assumptions and can see how their actions connect to critical intermediate results and the ultimate outcome. (adapted from Evans, et al., 2005)