How we can stop letting good crises go to waste and create opportunity from adversity.
When you want to sail a boat into the wind, you tack diagonally, from side to side, in a manoeuvre called “beating”.
A tailwind might be ideal, but set boat and the sail at the right angles, and a decent headwind will still propel you forwards far faster than no wind at all.
For years now, the charity sector has faced a lot of headwinds that only seem to be strengthening. The question is, can we use them to move us forwards instead of blowing us backwards?
The economist, Nicholas Taleb, wrote book about this, called “Antifragile”, back in 2012. In it, he outlined eight strategies to help investors position themselves take advantage of potentially damaging events.
The name of the book came from his belief that, in a crisis, fragile organisations get damaged; robust organisations can weather the storm; but what he called antifragile organisations are able to take advantage of the adversity.
There’s not always a direct read-across from Taleb’s work to the nonprofit world, though some aspects are surprisingly relevant. But the basic principle is entirely transferrable.
The pandemic was an incredibly stressful time, but many of the changes charities had to make, and the innovations they had to develop and deploy in those first few months of 2020, are still around today.
Some we discarded as soon as we could, but others are now the norm, because they’ve helped. They’ve made things faster and more efficient. Often, more effective as well.
Likewise, some leadership teams ended up exhausted, but others thrived, developing levels of pace, trust, and camaraderie they’d never imagined before.
Whether by accident or design, by luck or quick thinking, some organisations came out of the pandemic running better than they went in; they found ways to create opportunity from adversity.
And that’s Taleb’s point. In a world where these challenges are coming thick and fast, often in unpredictable ways, there are things we can do not just to protect ourselves, but to position ourselves to take advantage of them.
For charities, there are “structural” things – things we can deliberately develop: a strategy designed to adapt alongside governance that ensures it will; a flexible resourcing model alongside people empowered to change how they work; strong relationships across the system, and a pipeline of innovations and experiments that we can scale up when the opportunity arises.
There are more, but I won’t bore you with them here.
And yes, some of the ones I’ve mentioned might sound daunting, or nigh-on impossible considering the constraints we’re under. But they’re not. These, and at least as many more, are all quite easy to embed. They just need us to think a bit differently.
Take the management of risk. Many of us spend a great deal of time, certainly at trustee level, worrying about risks.
That “worry” is why we look at them mostly in terms of mitigation: how can we reduce the likelihood it will happen and how can we reduce the impact if it does?
We rarely spend time asking the anti-fragile question: what’s the opportunity it might create?
The more I’ve worked with organisations on this stuff, the more I’ve come to realise that the kind of structures I’ve mentioned, and the kind of strategies Taleb describes, are only part of the answer. Perhaps not even the most important part.
They have value, sure. They can help us write a recipe, but that’s not the same as making the cake. Cooking is a craft we need to learn through practice.
Creating opportunity from adversity is about looking beyond the challenge, beyond even the solution, to the bigger opportunity it might offer.
It’s the manager who just received the resignation of a long-standing and much-valued colleague.
Whether the blood drains from their face as they worry how they’ll possibly replace them or manage in the meantime.
Or whether they’re grateful to have had their contribution so long, but they’re already thinking of the opportunity to reorganise the work or to stretch a rising star.
These are mental habits that can sometimes feel awkward. Almost uncivilised. Like hearing that the beloved dog of a close friend has passed away and immediately thinking, on the flipside, they’ll now be able to travel a lot more.
And yet, at the leadership level, these are the thinking-habits that make the difference between battening down the hatches and beating into the wind.
And personally, I think a lot of charities have been battening for too long. It’s time we learned to beat.