COFFEE BREAK
Learn from the experts during a quick coffee break!
Join us for a Causal Pathways Coffee Break, in which experts share snippets of their Causal Pathways work and lessons learned. Grab your favorite warm drink and join us for a quick lesson!
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Current offerings
6/16/26 @ 11:00am ET
How robust are your causal pathways?
Materials
All evaluators, at some point, have to consider a mass of information from different sources about what might have contributed to an outcome and reach a conclusion about what did contribute to the outcome, and along which pathways. Now that AI can gather thousands of causal claims from text, making these decisions rigorously is particularly challenging.
This Coffee Break is about how to build rigour in an AI-assisted causal mapping workflow: how you interrogate the mass of evidence that something influences an outcome along a pathway, how to compare it with alternative explanations, how you handle weak or doubtful claims, and how you make the kind of evaluative judgements that you really don't want to leave to an AI.
Steve Powell and Gabriele Caldas (Causal Map Ltd) draw on real evaluation work to explore these questions practically. The session also refers to Jewlya Lynn's recent presentation on the Thai seafood retrospective, which raised something we've been thinking about a lot: how practitioners assess the robustness of evidence behind each causal connection.
Bring your own experiences, we'd love to hear how others are navigating this! Register here.
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Steve Powell
Co-founder and Director
Causal Map
Gabriele Caldas Cabral
Outreach Coordinator
Causal Map
Past offerings
4/14/26 @ 11:00am ET
Tackling Complexity with AI: A 10-Year Causal Mapping Analysis of Systems Change
Materials
What does it take to understand a decade of systemic change across governments, global brands, civil society, philanthropy, and migrant worker leaders? This Coffee Break explores how a ten-year retrospective of forced labor reforms in Thailand’s seafood industry was analyzed using causal mapping and historical analysis to trace not just what changed, but how, why, and under what conditions change accelerated, stalled, or reversed. Drawing heavily from the study’s methods, we’ll unpack how over 150 documents, stakeholder interviews, focus groups with worker leaders, and stakeholder validation sessions were woven into a dynamic causal analysis. We’ll also examine how AI was intentionally used to augment, not replace, human judgment in identifying patterns across time, testing causal pathways, and strengthening analytic rigor. Join us for a behind-the-scenes look at how we make sense of complexity at scale.
Jewlya Lynn
Policy Solve
11/18/25 @ 11:00am ET
Exploring Causality when Measuring Systems Change: Examples from The Freedom Fund
Materials
The coffee break session will be led by Dr. Elizabeth Anderson (Head of Research and Evaluation, The Freedom Fund) and Dr. Helen Shipman (Independent Consultant). The session responds directly to a frequently raised question: How can I bring causal pathways evaluative approaches into complex, messy systemic change work? The Freedom Fund's concrete, actionable ways of evaluating systemic change with a causal lens will be shared and brought to life through two example evaluations that examine how and why change happened as The Freedom Fund and its partners sought to address exploitative child domestic work in Ethiopia.
Elizabeth Anderson
The Freedom Fund
Helen Shipman
Independent Consultant
7/3/25 @ 11:00am ET
Attending to quality and rigour throughout causal pathways evaluation
Materials
Appropriate definitions and processes to support quality and rigour in non-experimental evaluation is a concern that theory based and participatory evaluation communities are actively engaged in. In this webinar we introduced guidance developed by the Causal Pathways initiative aimed at evaluation and learning officers in philanthropic foundations, situating the guidance and practice in broader debates on values-driven and use-oriented evaluation.
Marina Apgar
Institute of Development Studies
Tom Aston
Independent Consultant
Megan Shoji
Mathematica
Slides
4/9/25 @ 11:00am ET
Strengthening Outcome Harvesting Analysis with AI-Assisted Causal Mapping
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Materials
Heather Britt
Steve Powell
Gabriele Caldas
Enhance Outcome Harvesting analysis with AI-assisted Causal Mapping. In this coffee break, Heather Britt, Steve Powell and Gabriele Caldas discuss their pilot to enhance analysis of causal relationships in Outcome Harvesting. Their pilot demonstrated that AI-assisted Causal Mapping can reveal interrelationships between outcomes and identify new actors contributing to change. They describe the pilot process, explain how they interpreted the findings, and share five practical tips. A principle-led analysis plan and the right human expertise are key to in guiding the use of AI in analysis.
Causal Map
Causal Map
Independent Consultant
Slides
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