Surf the waves.  Know when and how to adjust your goals and plans in unstable times.

Nature responds to changes to maintain its own balance. El Niño and La Niña affect ocean temperatures, currents, fisheries, and weather. But trees bend during storms and plants protect soil and communicate danger to each other.*

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A short-term surge in attention can be good or bad, depending on your actions:

• Media attention around a celebrity or political scandal can overshadow your work. 

• Linking your message to current events can raise visibility, but it requires careful planning.

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When a storm hits, it can speed up and increase the complexity of an ordered, complex or chaotic system (see Chapter 2 for these definitions). The task of an effective systems thinking strategist is to decide effectively when to surf the wave and when to dive under it to avoid the crash. 

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In order to be able to identify whether we charge, shelter, sidestep or adapt, we need to quickly test our assumptions, assess the potential outcomes and move on to new approaches. In general we recommend the same approach to deal with a complex system for when a storm hits:

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1. Test - Meet weekly as a team on the overall strategy. Using your existing campaign strategy and a storm chart, test one of the strategies appropriate to the storm, as suggested in this Section.

2. Learn - Allocate responsibility for gathering data - media / social media stats, qualitative feedback from opponents or allies and more. Meet daily as a team to review results and decide whether to stop, continue or increase this activity.

3. Act - Stop, continue or increase this activity.

4. Learn - Continue this process.

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A longer-term crisis or opportunity can have huge but also subtle effects, meaning the organization needs to sidestep or adapt:

• A challenge could evolve quickly: like a PR disaster (developmental storm) could damage an NGO’s reputation (existential storm), or a natural disaster (situational storm) could destroy or disrupt an organization’s operations (existential storm)

• A success could lead to a threat: A campaign win could lead to a large donation, leading to the need for careful decision-making on next steps. It could also lead to a counter campaign or a lawsuit

• A storm you create could turn against you: A poorly planned message or campaign could backfire and opponents could use it as a way to criticize you or put your organization at risk

• An ordered storm could become complex, or a complex storm could become chaotic: Revisiting the system complexity framework from Chapter 2, consider the best strategy to deal with the way the storm is changing

In prolonged situations like this, resources and risk tolerance decrease, and people try to return to daily deliberative decision-making rather than continuing reflection and review.

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Change is the only constant. To prepare for change, use the steps in Chapter 19 to proactively build resilience, not just try to prevent immediate harm. This way organizations can stay on course for their vision or Guiding Star:

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• Acting on key principles:

  • Control: Accept what we can and cannot control. Delegate and decentralize: build a structure that supports diverse voices to gather, experiment and innovate. 

  • Commitment: Reaffirm your vision for change. Empower teams to experiment, innovate and collaborate.

  • Challenge: Embrace uncertainty as a catalyst for transformation and improvement*. Stop rewarding short-term firefighting. Work flexibly and reflect regularly.

  • Connection: Meet your team’s physical, emotional, social and informational needs. Collaborate with and amplify like-minded Shooting Stars (in the system). 

• Review changes to the system and our campaign: Why (values and system structure), Who (Key relationships, Near star, Far star and Deep loop), Where (Information flows and navigation for influencing), How (Operations), What (Inputs and outputs)

• Considering moving among the four strategies (Chapter 18)

• Prepare and simulate more than one action / scenario where you can create suspense (Chapter 19)

• Plan activity at others’ events where they are seeking to gain attention (see 350.org for more information)

More reading: 

Mindworks Lab: Different stages of a crisis https://mindworkslab.org/midwork/thedisruptedmind/the-crisis-timeline/ 

https://hbr.org/2023/06/leading-through-a-sustained-crisis-requires-a-different-approach?ab=hero-main-text 

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Sources (formal sourcing): *https://earthsky.org/earth/plants-panic-when-wet-how-plants-communicate/ **https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/challenges-leading-todays-sustained-crisis-patrick-flesner-m24ue/ 

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