7.5 Checking your assumptions

Senior Innovation Officer in Public Health Promotion and Community Engagement, Iffat Tahmid Fatema talks about community consultation tools for WASH infrastructure in Kutapalong Balukali camp in Bangladesh.

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Iffat Tahmid Fatema writes with felt tip on a flip chart.

Senior Innovation Officer in Public Health Promotion and Community Engagement, Iffat Tahmid Fatema talks about community consultation ...

It is important to identify what assumptions you are making about how to achieve change and why you think the tactic or activity you are choosing will work.

An assumption is something that you believe to be true without evidence or proof. As a changemaker you will decide what the best tactics that will likely lead to a change are. However, your assumptions will be heavily influenced by your own beliefs, attitudes, life experiences, sense of agency, power, privilege and your prejudices about how you think change could happen. It is helpful to identify clearly what assumptions you have about a change process and test them out as you go.

For instance, an assumption that providing good evidence and research to back up your arguments for change will persuade a particular audience to take action might not necessarily be true. Why might this be the case? It might be that their values or ideological positioning is at odds with the change you are proposing so no amount of evidence will persuade them otherwise. Or that there are powerful vested interests lobbying the decision maker to block the change.

You might believe that raising the public’s awareness of an issue will lead to the public putting more pressure on politicians and policy-makers to act. This might or might not be true in any particular context.

Or you might think that providing people with information about the harms caused by certain behaviours will stop them doing them. But the behaviours may be influenced by a range of other factors other than awareness or information. For example, people won’t necessarily stop smoking just because they know of the severe risks.

So, when you are deciding on which tactics and activities you will use it is good practice to identify your assumptions and test them as you undertake your change activities so you can check if they are working. If not, you’ll need to review and consider alternative approaches.

It’s all about being reflective, responsive and agile, i.e., ‘dancing with the system’.