What’s Your Theory of Change?
Using Emotional Intelligence to Understand the Pains and Loves of Others
A connection of mine has a wife that works in development and philanthropy. Her job is to help larger companies decide how to structure their charitable giving to make the largest impact in a community. In her initial consultation, she asks an important question of her clients: “what is your theory of change?” It’s a foundational question, and how a corporate board or an outreach executive answers that question will result in how millions, if not billions, of dollars are directed to a particular cause.
It’s a question that is equally important for you and I and everyone else seeking to be emotionally intelligent: “what is your theory of change?”
We all have a theory of change, in the sense that we want ourselves and other people to change, and we go about this task with some default strategies. One common theory of change is that human beings will flourish if they have the right information. Transformation happens when people are properly educated. Another common theory: human beings change by habit development. Repeated positive actions and behaviors will become agents of transformation in a person’s life.
Both of these theories of change have benefits, but there are greater powers at play in the human heart that resist change rooted in education and habit. Lessons about the dangers of addiction don't seem to stop an addict from using. People trapped by the challenges of poverty need more than good habits to break through to a stable life.
Don’t skip over this very important question! Your theory of change will impact everything and everyone around you. If you think proper education leads to change, then anyone who doesn’t agree with you will seem stupid, ignorant, or malicious. If you think good habits will change someone, then you will think people who lack them deserve their misfortunes. Whether we are at home, school, the gym, church, work, or anywhere really, our theory of change colors our interactions with just about everyone.
The Protestant Reformer Martin Luther proposed a sixteenth century theory of change. After his experiences with corruption in Roman Catholicism, and after his Reformation epiphany, he came to believe that people were transformed by a one-two punch of “Law and Gospel.” God’s law, he argued, was there to cause fear, pierce the conscience, and humble.The Christian Gospel proclaimed forgiveness, offered absolution, and freed the hearer from those pangs of guilt, fear, and judgment. Preached rightly, Luther argued, this law and gospel tag-team brought about personal change.
The English Reformer Thomas Cranmer, author of the Book of Common Prayer, felt similarly. He built the Anglican/Episcopal tradition of worship around the idea that the (metaphorical, not anatomical) heart is the primary driver of human activity. One scholar summarized Cranmer’s theology with the phrase, “what the heart loves, the will chooses, and the mind justifies.” Woo the human heart with God’s love, asserted Cranmer, and everything else lines up into place.
These two beat today’s therapists and psychiatrists to the punch. The most powerful motivations for human behavior change, we are told, are suffering and pleasure, pain and gain, loss and love, or in religious terms, law and gospel. These are the wider emotions that can help unstick a person in a seemingly unchangeable situation. 12 steppers often describe a “bottoming out” moment that led to their recovery. The drunk driving arrest, missing the kid’s school play, getting fired from work -- these have been painful catalysts for recovery and lead millions to sobriety. When teenage boys, seemingly overnight, become interested in hair gel and Axe body spray, it’s because they realize that romance is a potential reality in their near future. It’s why we cry when Aslan offers himself on the stone table, or when the Iron Giant stops the nuclear missile, or when the bishop offers John Valjean his silver candlesticks.
Love, especially undeserved and sacrificial love, changes things for those in pain. Between the two, however, only love can change the heart. Pain can change behavior, but love’s transformations are the only long term transformations. Emotional Intelligence will think about behavior change through this lens. If a person struggles to change, we ask if there is pain that they are avoiding at all costs, a law driving them to flight, a suffering that is being repressed and hidden away? Is there a love that they can’t seem to give up, an allure that seems to have them in their grasp? Perhaps a greater love, a gospel love, can pull them from their tailspin.
Until we sort out our theories of change, we won’t be able to navigate the complex challenges of our time. Nor will we be able to navigate the complex challenges of the self. Perhaps here we find that a word of love, perhaps even a word of gospel love, achieves more than all the education, habit forming, carrot-and-stick incentives the rest of the world has to offer.