Read the guide here
Executive Summary
Global events in 2020 meant it felt like one of the ‘whirliest’, disruptive and turbulent years the world and the civil society sector have ever experienced. A multitude of interconnected tensions and risks have come together to spark a tipping point of change.
This Sector Guide aims to inspire and support civil society strategic thinking and preparedness for future uncertain times. It is based on the Scanning the Horizon civil society futures community’s collective experiences and broader management insights from the past 12 months.
For many organisations, it may feel like the most momentous things have already happened. But actually what comes next and the types of strategic decisions organisations make now will be critical to whether they can remain resilient and effective agents of equity in a complex, interconnected and uncertain world.
There is clearly no way of getting strategy-making in uncertain times ‘right’, but this Guide does strongly suggest many ways in which organisations could get it very wrong.
Lessons from the ‘whirliness’ of the past year suggest five key strategic pointers for organisations to follow:
1. Focus on the values-driven ‘how’, rather than the uncertain ‘what’
2. Increase diversity to build collective intelligence to ‘look around and look ahead’
3. Use this opportunity to innovate, learn, unlearn and set the precedent for the possible
4. Use scenarios (cautiously) across multiple timescales and with the whole organisation
5. Rethink adaptable strategies to embrace emergent change within a long-term view
The overall message from this Sector Guide is that the world’s ‘new normals’ are ‘never normals’ – with always-imperfect information – and what got organisations ‘here’ won’t get them ‘there’. The fatal mistake of today’s leaders would be responding to tomorrow’s problems with yesterday’s logic – which includes efficiency and cost-reduction mindsets.
So the call to action from this Sector Guide is that now is exactly the time to invest in genuine models of inclusion and collaboration, new types of innovation, exploration and discovery skills. We need to rethink strategy to better anticipate and prepare for the uncertainty and ‘whirliness’ which will continue to emerge in future.