This summer, a dedicated team at our European sister organisation, Tavistock Institut Germany, put Theory of Change methodology into action to help guide a large Horizon Europe programme of work to improve labour market policies in Europe.
As evaluation partner for the project, we facilitated two intensive workshops that brought together 20 partners from across eight organisations.
The EU-ALMPO programme aims to inform the better design and more effective implementation of active labour market policies in Europe, in part through the design and implementation of state-of-the-art AI tools.
Of course, building innovative AI tools is only part of the story. Understanding how change actually happens, and what assumptions, barriers, and real-world impacts are at play, is essential to making those tools trusted, relevant, and sustainable.
So we guided participants beyond the typical project checklist approach to examine the critical question: how exactly do we expect change to happen?
The sessions revealed essential assumptions often left unspoken: that policymakers will act on evidence, that users can build necessary AI skills, and that trust can be established across fragmented European systems.
By mapping these causal chains and testing underlying logic, we’re now developing an evaluation framework that will track not just what gets produced, but what difference it actually makes.
The approach demonstrates how Theory of Change transforms ambitious EU projects from hopeful activity lists into rigorous, evidence-based interventions designed for measurable real-world impact.