Our Design Approach

 

 

Home

The Program

Rainer Arnhold

Our Design Approach

Selection of Fellows

The Fellows

Log In

Contact Us

 



The Fellows program teaches a specific, systematic approach to overall project design. We wanted a way to give a running start to those with good ideas, to amplify and leverage their efforts at change. The Program?s approach to design is intended to help project designers to:

  1. Clarify and understand the change they want to see
  2. Zero in on a specific idea about that change
  3. Think about scaling-up throughout the design process
  4. Rationally evolve the project over time
  5. Access the broad lessons of successful efforts at change.
This design approach is based on two ideas: first, that efforts that create broad change can be described in terms of a common pathway, and second, that the characteristics shared by many successful projects can be systematically applied to that pathway. These two ideas can be integrated in a practical way to design and evaluate projects that can lead to lasting, large-scale change.

Posed as a framework for systematic design, the elements of this common pathway are:


Goal: the change that is to happen


Theory of Change: the idea; a specific notion of how to make that change happen


Model design: how the theory is applied as an adaptive process



Implementation: the delivery of design



Results: the objective proof of change, the impacts of the project



Design for scale: the plan to take the change to scale



Scaling-up: delivery of the design for scale



Results at Scale: the extent, trajectory, and quality of change over time



With the work formatted, one can step back to create a gestalt strategy, an overarching pathway from here and now to eventual results at scale. At any point in time, the strategy and overall design together suggest a Plan for Action, what needs to happen right now to move the project forward.

As a tool for change, this format gives designers a common pathway to unique results in different settings. It gets them to imagine going to scale from project inception, meaning that the initial steps are shaped to generate something that is able and likely to do just that. A formatted design fosters collaboration and becomes a vehicle to take the initial project planning and design through a coherent process of adaptive learning and evolution.

It can't be stressed enough that this is an iterative tool. Our Fellows re-examine their designs every four months: the format allows the experience of the interim period to inform a refinement where, say, the process of implementation serves to modify design and perhaps overall strategy. This tool encourages course changes, but makes them rational and intentional. To fill in this format for the first time, and as part of a continual process of evolution, we have found four questions particularly useful to jumpstart the design process, namely:

  1. What, precisely, is the change you want to see (conservation of biodiversity, a healthier populace, increased incomes for farmers, etc.)?
  2. Who wants the change (the potential energy for change)?
  3. Whose behavior must change (for that change to happen)?
  4. What incentives -- existing or created -- can shape and maintain those necessary changes in behavior?
A good idea (i.e. theory of change) integrates and aligns the answers to those four questions into a proactive statement that drives design. A good idea, as we think of it, is one that takes the energy for change through a process that channels and leverages it into lasting outcomes in the real world.

With a good idea and a common framework for design, we can apply proven best practices and the broad lessons of success to the overall design of a specific project. These broad lessons apply to virtually every step of the overall design; the cardinal lessons we use are:

  1. Design and build from success?base initial design on successful efforts and continually expand from your own successes. Don't reinvent; don't start over; don't focus on failure.
  2. Tap self-interest as the driver for all necessary behaviors and resource flows.
  3. Integrate top-down, bottom- up, and outside-in action.
  4. Use objective data to make decisions by all actors.
  5. Pay careful attention to incentives for all significant actors.
  6. Create mechanisms for effective, self-reliant action by those whose behavior drives the change.
  7. Ensure that all important transactions and relationships are non-zero-sum: win-win or at least win-neutral.
The program makes use of many other lessons of success, but these are the common principles to be woven into all aspects of design. As the project evolves, each iteration serves to apply these lessons more fully.

These, then, are the major elements of our approach to project design: a common framework to serve as a framework for design and a vehicle for evolution; a set of questions to serve as an idea generator; and a set of principle of success to serve as stimulus and criteria for good design. It is our belief that the systematic application of these tools in an overall, coherent way can amplify the efforts of smart, committed people toward lasting change that will go to scale.