Chaos, Butterflies and determining development outcomes.
“Does the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas?”
You may have heard this question before. It’s known as the Butterfly effect and it is often interpreted in one of two ways.
One way, the way that you may have heard in pop psychology and dare I say it, charitable motivation circles - is that the smallest thing can make the biggest impact - so do a small thing today!
The other way, actually started a whole new movement in mathematics and science. The original concept and question is actually about predictability - can we predict the outcomes of certain events or actions. Any time travel movie you’ve seen where someone changes something in history and gets unpredicted results - is based off this idea. And the conclusion to the original question was no. We can’t predict outcomes. What we have instead is Chaos theory.
For many of us, the first interpretation is definitely the easiest interpretation. We live so much of our lives with the understanding that certain events have certain outcomes. I push on the brakes and the car stops. I swipe my bank card and it connects to the bank account. I feed my children vegetables and they grow up big and strong.
Except we all know that there are some instances when these things don’t happen. Just because something has happened before doesn’t mean that it will happen again. It just does, a lot of the time.
I think that’s one of the reasons why there are so many parenting theories. We want predictability that if we do certain things with and for our children, then we will get certain outcomes - outcomes which we hope are “better” and create a well-rounded, healthy adult.
Except of course we are talking about people not machinery and there are so many things we can’t control and we are leaving up to fate, faith, trust and all those involved in helping us heal from trauma.
All of which is to say that in any intervention you do that involves real life people, you are going to notice some chaos! Which is one reason why this whole charity, justice, development and missions sectors are so complicated. Any changes made within a community has a whole multitude of effects, some great, some negative, and the challenge is to determine which factors lead to what outcomes.
The last 30 years of development as a field has seen many of those outcomes.
We now know that increasing women’s empowerment without at the same time working with men, increases domestic violence levels - except when it doesn’t.
We know that microfinance is one of the best ways to help people get out of poverty -except when they do not always reach the lowest income members of a society and when the terminology is used in profit-making consumer loan business.
We know that antenatal education can increase outcomes for mothers and children - except for the times when it doesn’t
We know that giving straight cash is wasteful and feeds addictions except for when its been proven that actually giving money is one of the best interventions that we can give to people experiencing poverty because it lets families prioritise their needs ( the effects of raising Jobseeker during Covid last year gives us a local example of how this works).
So next time, you are reading a report from a charity, or looking for a sign to measure some sort of impact before committing to giving, remember that people are messy, and measuring outcomes is not simple. We are still in a fairly new period of world history where resources are shared and we are endeavoring to discover as much as we can about scientific understanding of people and behaviour, and economic growth, politics and culture.
Just as each child is different, each community is different and each of our ways of working with different people and different communities need to be different. And that’s why we always need to listen and learn and to walk humbly in order to be able to act justly and love mercy.
