Do No Harm can capture the decision making process of an intervention through seven basic questions. It is not enough, when analyzing an intervention, to ask these questions once. It is necessary to ask them again and again, until the whole structure of the intervention has been made explicit and clear.[1]

Why?

  • What are the needs we perceive that lead us to plan an intervention in the first place?
  • Do people in the community agree with us that the need we perceive is a real need?
  • What do we hope to change through our intervention? What do we hope to stop through our intervention?
  • Why us? What is the value our organization brings to addressing this situation in this place? Are we the right people?

Where?

  • Why did we choose this location? What criteria did we use?
    • “Why these villages and not those?”
    • “Why this province and not that one?”
    • “Why on this side of the front lines and not that one? Why not both?”
  • Who did we leave out and why?
  • What other locations are involved in our work? Will these locations have an impact? Why did we choose these and not others?
    • “Why did we rent these buildings? From who?”
    • “Why do we drive this route?”
    • “Why do we buy these resources here, from this person?”

When?

  • Why have we chosen this time to bring in our intervention? What is it about the current situation that makes now the right time for our intervention?
    • Is the situation post-conflict, pre-conflict, or is the conflict still “hot”?
    • Why us, now?
  • How long is our project going to last?
    • How will we know when our project is finished? What criteria need to be met for us to know that we are done? Have we communicated this to the community?
    • What will have changed and how will we know?
    • Do we have an exit strategy?
    • Do we have an evacuation strategy? What criteria do we use to trigger it? Has this been communicated to the community?

What?

  • The specific content of the resources can have an impact on the context.
    • Are we bringing in food, shelter, money, training, experts, vehicles, radios, tools, etc?
    • Be specific: what kind of food? What kind of shelter?
    • Be even broader: how many types of vehicle? how many types of pipe fitting or lumber?
  • What types of resources are appropriate to this circumstance?
  • Where did we source the resources from?

With Whom?

  • How did we choose the recipients? What was the criteria for choosing some people over others?
  • Who did we leave out and why?
  • Who else benefits from our presence?
    • Landlords? Drivers? Stevedores? Farmers? Hotels?

By Whom?

  • Who are our staff? Are they local or expatriate? How were they selected? What were the criteria for hiring these people and are these criteria different in different places?
    • Is there an educational or skill component to our criteria? Who has access to the necessary education or skill training?
  • Who do the criteria leave out and why?

How?

  • What is the mechanism of the delivery of the intervention?
    • Food-for-work or cash? Is training through lectures by outsiders or through participatory methods? Advisory or active or advocacy?
  • How exactly do we do our work?
  • How exactly do we act?

Previous Page Critical Detail: How to intervene
Next Page Mapping with the Constraints Box

Related Topics
Criteria Matter
Critical Detail Mapping with the Six Critical Details
Critical Detail Mapping
The Relationship Framework
Lesson 5: The details of interventions matter

[1] “It is necessary to ask them again and again, until the whole structure of the intervention has been made explicit and clear.”
 
See also the “5 Whys” technique, developed by Sakichi Toyoda. Critical Detail Mapping and 5 Whys can be used together very effectively.
 
For more on the 5 Whys, see Toyota Production System by Taiichi Ohno and The Toyota Way: 14 Management Principles from the World’s Greatest Manufacturer by Jeffrey Liker.

Why “seven elements of circumstance” for these classic questions?
 
Hermagoras of Temnos, writing in the 1st Century BCE about rhetoric, defined seven “elements of circumstance”: Quis, quid, quando, ubi, cur, quem ad modum, quibus adminiculis (Who, what, when, where, why, in what way, by what means).
 
In our era, these questions are often referred to as the “Kipling Method”, after Rudyard Kipling’s poem:
 
I keep six honest serving men
(They taught me all I knew);
Their names are What and Why and When
And How and Where and Who.
 
I prefer the classical designation, rather than naming an ancient method after a modern person.