Recycled Logic Models: Why Blueprints Fade and Live Processes Win
Logic models have a dirty secret. They start as living documents, full of promise, and then they die. Somewhere between the grant proposal and the third quarterly report, the nice diagram with its arrows and boxes becomes a thing you open only when a funder asks for it. You update the dates, maybe shuffle an activity, and call it done. But here's the twist: the model itself isn't dead. The thinking behind it—the theory of change, the causal links, the assumptions—that's often still humming. This article is about the gap between the blueprint and the living process. How do you reuse a logic model without getting strangled by it? When does reuse save real time, and when does it just carry old problems forward? We'll map that terrain, honestly, without pretending there's one right answer.