Theory of change

How are you all doing? All right.

Welcome to another live recording of the Theory of Change podcast.

This is a DevEx podcast where I get to have in-depth conversations with leaders in global development.

And this week, we are coming to you live from the UN General Assembly.

It's something concrete that you can test your ideas off of and try to think about what are the criteria against which you are evaluating if an idea might make a difference or not.

So these tools are the AAAQ Checklist and the Theory of Change.

And I'm going to walk you through them one by one.

And then I would like to challenge you when this module is over All right, so let's get nerdy.

Okay, so that was the AAAQ checklist.

It's just a set of screening criteria that can help strengthen your ideas and avoid unintended consequences.

Now let's talk about the theory of change.

So I mentioned there are two frameworks I use as tools to test ideas, and the second one is theory of change.

And so let's look at our next question here.

Someone had asked who should be involved in the theory of change process.

So in our recent webinar, we talked about impact measurement being a very robust, important section for a strategic plan.

with that we talked about logic models and theory of change i like to start with a logic model first then move into theory of change when it comes to impact measurement what metrics are we going to measure and so if you're starting with a logic model process if you're starting really trying to figure out what metrics matter most for our programs how are we going to effectively measure impact from a strategic planning standpoint We're going to set a one-year or a two-year or a three-year plan to really start to measure impact.

By impact, I mean true meaningful change.

I would strongly encourage that programs, teams or programs, staff members, depending on how large or small your organization is, definitely get them involved in the process, right? When we're talking about impact measurement, nine times out of 10, we're really talking about the change happening mostly for the people you serve, not exclusively.

You can measure change in a volunteer's life.

You can measure change in a donor's life or other stakeholder groups, but definitely have your program's team involved.

With each passing crisis, the stakes would rise and so too would the number of people in non-AI fields who took an interest in AI, and things would compound from there.

This was my theory of change as a writer.

So with all this in mind conceptualized my audience and job as a writer as such.

1.

With each passing crisis, the stakes would rise and so too would the number of people in non-AI fields who took an interest in AI and things would compound from there.

This was my theory of change as a writer.

So with all this in mind conceptualized my audience and job as a writer as such.

One, write with the AI labs and broader community itself as my primary audience and exercise in intra-elite opinion shaping.