Photo by Harshit Rathi on Unsplash
For many nonprofits, it’s been a year of unpredictability and the collapse of many long-standing assumptions. The mix of constant change and uncertainty can be overwhelming.
Consciously attending to how you adapt to change can help create more steadiness as you weather the unknown. Adaptive strategies engages the whole team in scanning for signals of change, identifying a few high-leverage points, and exploring out-of-the-box opportunities to get ahead of change.
Start with your current situation. Then enhance your organization's commitment to awareness, responsiveness, and creativity. This will help keep everyone connected to priorities and ways to be most effective even as the ground continues to shift.
1. Today: Where are we now?
Use your existing strategic plan to take stock of these questions:
What is your hypothesis about how you effect change?
What’s working? What’s not working right now?
Regularly reviewing the answers to these questions will help you remain grounded in why your group’s work matters, how you’ll keep moving forward, and regular reality checks on the progress you’re making.
2. Awareness: What might we anticipate?
Periodically take the time to make your best guesses about what might be coming.
Identify what you can see. First, consider the disruptions you can already imagine. Brainstorm these with your team, and on a four-square graph, plot the likelihood of each happening against the level of potential impact (either positive or negative). For disruptions that land in the high-impact, high-likelihood quadrant, identify key signals of change. What can you be watching that may indicate that this disruption is emerging?
Consider what you can’t see. You also want to prepare for the change you don’t see coming, or the change you thought would have a small impact that suddenly has a large impact. Here too, look for indicators. In this case, they might be “weak signals,” which are small shifts at the edge of your awareness, perhaps in a different field of work, in another country or outside of the work arena.
Enlisting your whole team to help spot emerging signals of change can be immensely valuable, along with establishing periodic opportunities to share and reflect on what people have noticed.
3. Responsiveness: Be ready to take action.
Readiness to act on change may involve strengthening existing efforts, integrating shifts in strategy or approaches, or taking on entirely new efforts. Two useful structures to help keep your teams in a responsive mindset:
Red team/blue team review. For high-likelihood risks, a “red team” can be designated to find weaknesses in current programs. A “blue team” looks for ways to shore up security and stability.
Rapid response team. When change is coming fast, it can be helpful to have a designated team with the authority and flexibility to triage. This group identifies and responds to the most critical challenges. To ensure they can implement quickly, be sure to build in a framework for their communication with the rest of the team.
This kind of work may be a natural extension of work being done by existing teams or committees, or it could be adapted within each department for its own work.
4. Creativity: Explore the edges.
Make change easier by encouraging new ideas and small experiments from the whole team. This creates a mindset of curiosity that fosters learning and builds greater comfort with a more proactive approach to change.
Empower staff to think outside the box. Ideas can come from anywhere. Building a culture of creativity by inviting all staff to look for new ways of doing things, and making it safe to do so, can create a highly resilient team. Highlighting staff ideas at a team meeting can help foster a more exploratory approach.
Engage in contingency planning. For the risks—and opportunities—you can see or imagine coming your way, brainstorm alternative pathways: new funding sources, new partners, different ways of communicating. Some of these may fall into the “no regrets” category—worth trying even if the contingency doesn’t come to pass.
Lay groundwork with experiments. Encourage teams to find small experiments that will help with resilience. This amplifies the culture of creativity and the likelihood that you’ll be prepared to adapt to the unexpected. Start small. Experiments as short as a week with a clear hypothesis that you can test make it easy to try something new. Allow for failure, reflection, and revision.
An adaptive strategy can be seen as a series of feedback loops to ensure that your work is meeting the needs of the moment while holding to your big-picture vision. Pick any of the ideas above that fit your current needs and give it a try!