Program Planning

Good program plans don’t spring fully formed from the minds of executives in ivory towers. Effective social change strategies begin not as detailed blueprints, but as rough sketches that take on greater definition and precision as learning accumulates. We see program planning as an iterative and collaborative process in which key stakeholders work together to elaborate, reassess, and revise a strategy as implementation proceeds.

We urge our clients to begin a planning process by imagining a desired future, a rich scenario with various factors working in concert to create change for the better. Once that shared image is fleshed out, clients can move on to imagining the causal processes needed to bring that future to reality and the actions needed to set those processes in motion.

We view program planning and program evaluation as complementary phases in an ongoing learning cycle. Planning creates mental models to guide actions. Evaluation holds those models up to scrutiny and tests them empirically, thus setting the stage for a new round planning.