Use Results Chain to Make an Impact
Making an impact is crucial for me. But how can you ensure that you will do your work and ideally, serve something good?
Write it down in a structured way. Results Chain is a tool that helps me to frame my ideas to concrete goals. It’s framework that often complements the Theory of Change which is more narrative and broader in its scope. Theory of Change is often used by NGOs to break problems into smaller steps and start with intervention.
By making your Results Chain, you can easily capture your action items, goals, and long-term vision within one simple “piece of paper”, which will help you to tell what’s the next step you need to take.
Looking at the past, big thanks to Jan Veselý, who introduced me to this way of thinking very first.
Because examples work always better, let’s make a Resulsts Chain for this newsletter. I’m not sure if it’s a good idea to make it public. But, nothing worse than embarrassment and falling into oblivion can happen, right?
Let's start at the end of the visualisation and write down your impact first. Then go to outcomes, outputs, activities…etc. to define all the steps that lead to your desired impact.
Impact - what is the long-term desired impact of my activities?
Contributing to accessible knowledge sharing and networking about user research, service design, and impact evaluation for anyone, regardless the language, location, or social status.
Outcomes - what are the goals I hope to achieve by doing this?
platform, where people can learn about user research, service design, and impact evaluation
creating a networking community of people who are interested in the topics I write about
more people are aware of user research, service design and impact evaluation best practises thanks to this newsletter
Outputs - what are the direct results of your activities?
people read my newsletter
people share my newsletter with their friends, colleagues and peers
increasing the number of subscribers
Activities - what activities have you been conducting?
regular writing articles on Substack in English
writing a short promo post on LinkedIn
conducting research for content inspiration
kick off a podcast with hosts (optional)
Inputs - what resources do you need (people, money, tools?)
my time
consistency in writing
Substack
analytics
LinkedIn
laptop
own domain
stronger product name
And that’s it! I recommend this framework not only to define your business but also for your personal and life projects. And last - don’t be afraid to fail. I feel this is going to fail tremendously, I’ll probably pivot this Results Chain many times. But, as I once read on Sketchplanations (great blog!) - “your first draft is always perfect”. Try to remember that.
Sources to learn more
The results chain: a beginner's guide - Dr. Thomas Winderl
Results Management in Norwegian Development Cooperation : A practical guide (norad.no)
A Theory of Change – Evaluation Hub (education.govt.nz)
The Results Chain: A logical model to achieve results | PPT (slideshare.net)