Principle to Practice

Context + Intervention = Impact

Users of Do No Harm say that we cannot figure out impact without knowing something about both the context and the intervention. If we don’t know what the context is, we cannot understand, trace, or measure our impacts on it. If we do not understand our intervention, we cannot understand, trace, or measure how we are having an impact.

What do you need to know about interventions in order to identify their impact? The key elements of any intervention are its details. Critical Detail Mapping highlights those details that we need to focus on in order to identify, understand, and control our impacts.

Any intervention, no matter what kind, embodies a series of decisions answering a fundamental set of questions. Why have we chosen this activity with these resources in this place with these people? How did we select these people, these resources, and these staff? Who made these decisions and how?

Every organization has a planning process that outlines how such decisions are to be made. However, these processes often leave the reasons behind the choices unspoken or implicit. Because each of these choices potentially has an impact on the social dynamics, it is necessary to make these decisions explicit and transparent.

Two ways to map critical details, and mapping constraints

• Six Critical Details
• The Seven Elements of Circumstance
• The Constraints Box

Do No Harm is an exercise in prediction and in tracking impacts.

Knowing the context and outlining the details of programming that will interact with that context (specifically with Dividers and Connectors) allows users of Do No Harm to predict how these details of their programming will affect Dividers and Connectors. This allows users to track the actual impacts on Dividers and Connectors so that they may build on their successes in reducing dividers and strengthening connectors. Tracking also enables users to change their programming details when they discover that they worsen Dividers or weaken Connectors.

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Related Topics
Two Methods of Critical Detail Mapping
What do we do when we are having Negative Impacts?
Using the Six Critical Details
Critical Detail Mapping with the Seven Elements of Circumstance
Lesson 5: The details of interventions matter