Personal 'Theory of Change' workshop
The aim of the two workshops will be to end the process with a diagram that describes your own personal 'Theory of Change'. You may want a diagram for your own personal evaluation of your work, or you may want to share it with prospects or colleagues in the future.
For me, I want to build my own diagram and theory of change in order to:
- Solidify what the overall impact I'm aiming for is, so I can clearly see how the things I work on are aligned.
- Spot opportunities among the different projects and organisations I'm working on for efficiencies – how I can make more impact with less work.
- See what I need to say 'no' to, and what makes sense to say 'yes' to.
- To understand how I can get the most 'bang for buck' out of my skills, knowledge and relationships, and 'live in my zone of genius'.
- To see how I can fit in restful and playful work and periods of time.
- To see how I can fit impact around and with making money, so I can make money that I can use to have impact in other ways.
I can imagine creating two diagrams for myself – one for the outside world, to publish on my website and to use in presentations, and one for my own decision making and planning.
You can see some examples of diagrams for organisational 'Theory of Change' below for inspiration, but I expect we'll be doing things a bit differently because we are thinking about ourselves personally rather than as an organisation.
Format
I've yet to fully design the workshops, but we'll be using Miro and Google Meet – I hope that works for all (if not, let me know). We'll do a mix of group discussion, pair work and solo work.
At the moment I'm thinking that in session one we'll cover vision/impact, resources, audiences, outputs and outcomes – the basics. In session two we'll get into knottier questions like how you'll make and spend money and how you'll incorporate rest, play and family.
Prep for the workshop
Here are some questions and prompts to think about or journal about before we meet on Wednesday:
- Why do you want to build your own personal Theory of Change? Who do you want to build it for?
- What is/are the ultimate impact/s you want to work towards with your life, or your career? How have these changed over time, if at all?
- What skills, knowledge, values or relationships do you have that make you uniquely placed to contribute towards this/these impacts?
- What have you worked on in the past, or are working on now, that fits within that ultimate impact or impacts?
- What evidence or feedback do you have that your work has moved or is moving the needle? If you don't have evidence or feedback, how might you get it?
Diagram examples
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