You’re busy. But is it working?
Every movement I work with is active with events, campaigns, actions, projects. There’s never a shortage of things happening.
But when I sit down with a director or a founding team and ask what has actually moved your mission forward this year, the room goes quiet. People look at each other. Someone mentions an event that went well. Someone else brings up a campaign that got picked up by the press. And then the conversation slows down, because the honest answer is: we’re not entirely sure.
That’s not a failure. It’s one of the most common and most expensive problems in the sector.
Busy and effective are not the same thing
There’s a version of this that’s easy to spot from the outside. An organisation running a food bank to address poverty, while the actual problem is a broken benefits system that leaves people with nothing for weeks at a time. The food bank is real. The people it helps are real. But it’s treating the symptom, not the cause. No matter how well it runs, it won’t change the underlying problem.
Most organisations aren’t that far off course. But the same dynamic shows up in subtler ways.
A movement that believes its mission is to change policy, but spends most of its energy organising community events because that’s what it’s good at. A campaign that raises awareness about an issue where awareness was never the barrier, people already know, they just don’t have access, or power, or both. An NGO with a solid theory of change on paper, and a programme portfolio that was mostly built on what funding was available, not on what the theory said should happen.
None of these are careless organisations. They’re organisations where the connection between activity and impact has quietly come loose, and nobody has stopped long enough to notice.
The theory of change problem
A theory of change is supposed to answer one question: if we do X, then Y will happen, and that will lead to Z. It’s the causal logic that connects your activities to the change you’re trying to make in the world.
When it works, it gives everyone in the organisation a filter. Should we run this event? Does it fit the theory? Will it actually move the needle, or will it just keep us busy?
When it doesn’t work or when it exists on paper but nobody uses it day to day, activities start to happen for other reasons. Because a funder asked for it or it worked last year. It’s what the organisation knows how to do or because someone had the energy to make it happen and nobody said no.
The result is an organisation that’s genuinely active, genuinely committed, and genuinely unsure whether any of it is working.
The honest question
I’m not saying stop running events. Events matter. Visibility and momentum matters.
But there’s a question worth sitting with, and it’s worth asking honestly.
If you look at everything your organisation did in the last twelve months, the events, the campaigns, the projects, the meetings, the content, how much of it actually moved the mission forward? Not in the sense of keeping people busy or maintaining relationships or ticking boxes for funders. In the sense of actually changing something, or building something, or bringing you meaningfully closer to the world you’re trying to create.
And do you know? Not as a feeling, but as something you can point to?
Sometimes you don’t know, and that’s okay
It happens that you don’t know. If you are working on problems that are genuinely new, or in environments that change faster than any strategy can keep up with.
In some cases the problem itself is still poorly understood or the context shifts so fast that what worked three or six months ago doesn’t work now. Or you’re doing something nobody has tried before, in a space where the evidence doesn’t exist yet.
In those situations, the answer isn’t to analyse and plan for years or to stop acting until you have certainty. It’s to act like you’re running an experiment, which means being honest about what you’re testing, what you’re looking for, and what you’ll do with what you find out.
That’s different from just doing things and hoping. It means building in moments to stop and ask: what did we learn? What did we expect to happen, and what actually happened? What does that tell us about what to do next?
Some of the most effective movements I’ve seen weren’t the ones with the most rigorous theory of change. They were the ones that were genuinely curious about whether their work was working and willing to change course when the answer wasn’t what they hoped.
The problem isn’t uncertainty. The problem is when organisations stop asking the reflective questions altogether.
Where to start
If the answer to the honest question is uncertain, that’s not a reason to panic. It’s a reason to stop and look at the theory of change and what the activities are actually designed to do.
That’s where the work usually is. Not in doing more, but in making what you’re already doing actually count.
