Ed note: I wrote this to members of the Emergent Learning Community, but the message really applies to all of us in the business of social change, so I want to share it. – Marilyn Darling
This year, in particular, will call on us to bring our whole selves to the landscapes we find ourselves in. Regardless of your own sense of pessimism or optimism heading into January, we are stepping into “interesting times.” Around the world, people are facing so many changes in our political, economic, social and environmental landscapes. Each one could have a dramatic impact on its own, but they will also interact with each other – they will “reverberate,” as EL community member Marian Urquilla observed (see below). Some of the coming changes are predictable and some are very much not predictable. And some very predictable changes will have very unintended and unpredictable consequences. In the midst of everything else, for example, what if we find ourselves facing a new pandemic? Interesting times, to be sure.
With so much at stake, there can be a tendency to want to hunker down and circle the wagons. But that’s just one hypothesis. It is for times like this that Emergent Learning was created. In this time in particular, we need to really flex our EL muscles and ask: What will it take to bring together all of our wisdom and resourcefulness to find new (or renewed) pathways to our goals in the uncertain times ahead?
We need to return our learning to our systems. We have a rich body of recent data to draw on. First, there was the change in priorities represented in the administration change of 2016. Many of us working in the social sector pivoted our strategies in 2016. What hypotheses did we try out and what did we learn? 2025 will be different, but it would be a mistake to not draw on what we learned from that time.
Second, literally everyone reading this has been through the completely unplanned and unpredictable events of 2020. In March 2020, without warning, our world changed dramatically due to the pandemic, followed two months later by the murder of George Floyd. In 2020, we were forced to pivot not just our strategies but everything. All of our long-held assumptions about what we do and how we do it got upended. It was painful, but it also sparked innovation. We surprised ourselves. In 2020, necessity became the mother of a lot of things.
This is a time to call on our collective wisdom and remember how resourceful we know we can be in the face of the unknown. If we pivoted to prioritize state and local strategies in 2016, what is there to learn from that strategy? What can we learn from the many pivots we made in 2020? We need to re-run the movie (the game film, if you are a sports fan) of these two pivotal times and learn from them. What were the defining moments and how did we react to them? If we could turn the clock back, what would we have done the same? What would we have done differently? Who did we admire for their response and what can we learn from them?
We need to strengthen our line of sight. This is not a time to allow our goals to erode. What we learned during 2016 and 2020 was to stay true to our goals, but to challenge our hypotheses about what it will take to get there in changing conditions. Even if we don’t achieve what we hope for in the next few years, being deliberate about holding our vision and experimenting with how to get there will prepare us to succeed in the years that follow.
To help her clients respond to the events of 2020, Marian Urquilla created a hugely popular Strategy Triage Tool, which she has updated for 2025. This tool helps teams think carefully about each thing they are doing – to challenge their assumptions; to recommit or let go; to think about how both their hypothesis and who they work with will need to change. The goal of the tool was then and is now to “create the space needed to assess, adapt, and experiment forward. It’s a way of staying grounded in purpose while remaining flexible enough to meet the moment.” We encourage you to read about and consider using this tool to help navigate the times ahead.
We need to not be afraid of asking powerful questions; to challenge our deepest assumptions. In January of 2020, who would have thought to ask a crazy question like: What would it take to do our work if none of us could come to the office tomorrow? What are the questions we need to start asking ourselves now to be prepared for the months ahead?
We need to maximize our freedom to experiment. For years, in order to stimulate innovation, organizations have created bounded spaces – innovation centers, skunkworks, special projects, under the valid assumption that rigid organizational cultures and structures would squelch creativity. But we learned from the pandemic how to do this together outside of those protected spaces. What will it take to remain agile and adaptive today in everything we do?
In 2025, especially, we need to invite diverse voices to our tables and recognize the many different kinds of expertise available to us. In challenging times, we sometimes revert to early learned behaviors and listen only to the voices we know and trust. If we want to discover new pathways to the goals we hold dear, we will need to listen and learn and be willing to adjust our own deeply held assumptions. Beyond that, to actually achieve our goals in 2025, we will need to engage the hearts and hands of a lot of people who bring with them different values and perspectives and experiences from our own.
We got this. No, we don’t know what it will take to keep moving toward our north star goals in the face of the radical changes to come in 2025. We will get it wrong before we get it right. But we got this. We know how to learn from our experience; to keep our line of sight; to invite the hearts and hands of many people to our tables; to maximize our ability to experiment; to notice our results; to not be deterred by failure, but to learn from it and adjust, rather than hunkering down and circling the wagons.