Go find out why

This post was written with the brilliant Jake Lomax.

My previous blog set out the mechanics of monitoring and suggested that when things don't go as expected, we need to jump in a car and investigate. This is nearly always about understanding behaviour change and its consequences; is it happening? How come? This is monitoring so need to keep things pacy; no formal survey or evaluation, just a short and focused piece of fieldwork.

Sometimes it's helpful to have a bit of structure so, here's a good one:

Before you go

The first task is to choose one or more related behaviour changes you want to better understand. You need to define each precisely. Vague framing produces vague fieldwork. “The Ministry improves engagement with farms” tells you almost nothing about what to look for. “The Ministry reduces arbitrary inspections and defends farmers against local government levies” tells you exactly what to ask about.

The next step is to decide who you’ll speak with. Primarily, you’ll need to speak to actors whose behaviour is under investigation (obviously). Beyond them, include people who can help triangulate; other actors in the chain, or anyone with a different vantage point on the same behaviour change. Leave time for snowballing: unexpected leads you find along the way.

The number of interviews will depend on the behaviour change you're exploring. Sometimes you're exploring change within one actor (a direct partner perhaps). Where there are many adopters or potential adopters (farmers, schools, companies, customers), ten to fifteen conversations are usually enough. Secondary data - meeting minutes, commercial records - can supplement but conversations are the primary tool.

The framework

To understand why a behaviour is or isn’t changing, you need a model of what drives and constrains it. The Building Blocks framework (Lomax and Shah, 2020) provides one. It holds that behaviour change depends on three things.

Rationale: Whether the change is genuinely in the actor’s interest, given real costs and returns. Without adequate rationale, actors won’t change even when every other obstacle is removed. Rationale is an analytical judgment, not just what actors tell you. A genuine rationale may exist that actors haven’t recognised. That said, speaking to those who have changed is an opportunity to understand the costs and benefits in practice.

Blockers: What prevents change despite adequate rationale? Four types: capacity constraints (lacking skills or systems), resource constraints (lacking finance or inputs), information constraints (not knowing how to change), and regulatory constraints (rules that prevent it). Identifying which blockers are present matters, because different blockers require different responses.

Enablers: What has helped actors overcome blockers. These can come from the programme, other development actors, government, the private sector, or the actors themselves.

In the field

Every interview begins with the same question: has this person made the change, or haven’t they? The answer creates a fork. Adopters and non-adopters are genuinely different cases that they tell you different things. An adopter who changed six months ago, can tell you what shifted and what enabled it. A non-adopter tells you what’s still in the way.

To give a sense of how the framework plays out in practice, here are some example questions to ask on each side of the fork. Don't follow a fixed script of questions. If you memorise the framework, and the kind of questions you ask under each component, you’ll have a more natural conversation.

First, are you talking to an adopter?

• Behaviour change: Walk me through how your work has changed over the past [timeframe] - can you give me specific examples? What do you do differently now, compared to [before date]. Where there's been a change, probe for specifics.

Then, for non-adopters (actors who haven't made the change)

• Rationale: What makes your current approach work well enough? What would the real costs and risks of changing be?
• Blockers: What’s stopping you? What do you need as the risks?
• Enablers: What’s already been tried to help you change? Why hasn’t it been enough? (Avoid asking what would help as it invites a wish list rather than honest analysis.)

Or for adopters (actors who have made the change)

• Rationale: What actually changed in your performance since you made the change? Is it delivering what you expected? Was it worth it?
• Blockers: What was stopping you before? What needed to shift first?
• Enablers: What made change possible? Where did the new skills, information or resources come from?

When you get back

The fieldwork gives you a set of individual accounts. The job now is to turn them into a diagnosis, and to write it up. The four framework components can provide a helpful structure. For each, set out what you found (“what’s so?”) and go further to suggest implications (“so what?”).

Many implications will relate to scale and sustainability. For example, under rationale, what are the costs and risks? Is it worth it and what does this suggest about scale and sustainability? Under enablers, what enabled actors to overcome the blockers and who provided it? What does this say about scale and sustainability?

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So, next time things feel off, jump in the car and go find out why. And if you test the framework, we would genuinely love to hear how you get on.