Transform your strategy with the Seasons
This post is the first of a two-part series on the Seasons, a powerful framework that can help each of us understand where we are in the arc of change, and thus better devise and support actions to advance the good. The first part will lay out the concept, and the second will apply it to philanthropy, where I focus my time. The framework is broadly applicable to many types of work, so even if you’re not in philanthropy I hope it’s useful to you. I learned this framework from Carlos Saavedra and Paul Engler at the Ayni Institute. If you want to learn more about it, visit the Ayni School. With the midterm elections upon us, I think the seasons framework could help us process and respond in smarter ways.
Before I get into the seasons framework, what’s it good for?
Diagnosis: The seasons framework sets the foundation for answering questions like: Why is there no energy or momentum on an issue I care a lot about? Why is my leadership stuck in a rut? Why are things growing when they didn’t before? Why are things exploding with energy? Why have things become difficult when they seemed to flow really well before? Or, more severely, why is stuff falling apart? Is it dead, or can the work come back in another form, and what do we do to make it grow?
Strategy: A lot of strategy discussion is focused on identifying pieces of work that need to fit together in order to achieve an outcome. One way to understand those pieces when it comes to major social change is through the movement ecology framework that I’ve written about here, in partnership with Carlos Saavedra and Paul Engler. Movement ecology is powerful stuff, but it doesn’t tell us when to prioritize certain pieces of work, in what order and on what timeframe. In order to know when is the right time to do something and for how long, we need the seasons. With the seasons, we can ‘read the weather.’ We can understand why certain activities just aren’t going to work. And we can establish a rhythm for long term personal, organizational, and social transformation work.
OK so what are the seasons? It’s very simple: Winter, Spring, Summer, Fall. Picture U.S. east coast seasons, with very different weather patterns throughout the year, and where summer is the most lush time.
Winter is cold and dark much of the time. Plants and many species hibernate so there’s not much external activity. Nothing is actively growing. It’s a time to be indoors, try to stay warm, and conserve energy. Moving across a landscape in winter, with heavy snow, is really laborious. We can go outside, but not for very long stretches of time.
Spring is a time of new growth, the return of warmth (though with chilly nights). It’s a time to start planting seeds and to be excited about the full range of possibilities starting to emerge in early growth. Lots of different plants are starting to spring up, though we can’t see yet which ones will really flourish. We might tend a lot of different plants until we can be sure.
Summer brings back the full heat of the sun. Plants grow at a fast rate, and we get delicious foods off the vine from the garden. There’s tons of energy and excitement for being outside. Nights are warm and relaxed, and things feel open and easy. It’s an especially active time for gathering with large groups of people.
Fall is when things start to disintegrate, leaves fall off the trees, and the nights get colder. We are reminded that winter is going to come back, which can feel stressful and hard. If we’ve had a good summer, we can have a really bountiful harvest. It’s a time to relish and learn from everything that happened in the summer, and to prepare for the colder, slower times coming.
There are a lot of other cultural associations with seasons, including holidays, school calendars, and different growth patterns depending on where you live, but for purposes of the seasons framework, focus on the points I’ve laid out above.
What does it have to do with the big strategy and analysis questions listed above? Here’s the reveal: Individuals, organizations, and movements all move through the seasons, winter, spring, summer, fall, and repeating. There are times when individual leaders, organizations, and movements have very strong outward-facing capacity to engage, and times when they need to look inward to recover and plot the next step, and there are transitions between these modes. Understanding this can help us to be more patient, proactive, and strategic as we figure out what to do when.
When first applying seasons, we should examine what season a person, organization or movement may be in – that’s the diagnosis part that I mentioned above. Is it a time of high energy and productivity? Is everything happening really big, really fast, and really successfully? Summer. Are things that used to be working starting to break apart? After a ton of protest activity, are public officials finally ready to make a big deal on an issue? Fall. Is public attention on an issue really low? Does it feel really hard to get moving? Winter. Are there lots of new organizations starting up on a topic? Do you feel like you’re excited to get out into the world for the first time in a while? Spring.
An interesting activity to try here is to list out the last 10 years and make a few notes under each one with the highs and lows as far as you can remember them. Can you see the seasons emerge? Assume that each season on an individual level may last roughly a year, though some are shorter or longer (organizational and movement seasons last longer).
Once you know what season a person/organization/movement is in, you can make an assessment of what are the right activities for that person/organization/movement, which is the strategy part. For example, if a movement is in winter, there will be no mass protest action. People aren’t paying attention to the issue. That’s a good time to rest, reflect, process, plan, and train. In spring, there are a lot of new things happening all over the place. It’s a time to plant seeds and think about what we really want to see flourish, and begin to focus on that. In summer, everything is moving so quickly outside that it’s not a great time to pause and reflect – you have to be ready to move, and you aren’t going to be able to plant new things. When we move into fall, things start to fall apart but there is the opportunity to harvest lessons and policy gains. If things are cooling down, it’s time to look for what to harvest, and to begin planning for winter (rather than trying to haul ourselves back into summer, which is a common reaction).
The seasons aren’t just moods that come and go. Rather, they build on each other: the quality of each season determines the success of the next: If we don’t plant the necessary leaders, ideas, and plans in spring, we won’t be growing it in summer or harvesting in fall. If we don’t harvest the crops (aka lessons, major policy wins and other institutional gains, etc) in the fall, we won’t have enough to sustain us through the winter. If we don’t take the winter time to plan and rest, we won’t create the best garden for the new cycle of growth.
Looking further out to multiple cycles of movement seasons, we can see how each full movement cycle (from winter to winter) sets the conditions for the next, which helps us think about long term strategy. If we want to achieve a major goal, we may need to go through several full cycles (including several strong productive summers, harvests of learning and institutional gains, winters to reset course, and spring to try out a lot of new things) to get there. Usually when we think of long term goals, we imagine marching steadily towards them until we get there. But in our experience we know that some times are easier than others; some afford a lot more forward motion. Thinking of this in terms of seasons makes that uneven progress much easier to parse, and allows us to plan out a rhythm of work to sustain us through the long term.
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One question I’ve been reflecting on is how do we prepare to have a good season, especially winter, which has traditionally been so difficult to accept? The Ayni Institute is working on this question, and so are others. See, for example, a review on the book Wintering. What is clear is that winter is a time to rest, to grieve, to replenish, and to make changes in what we are growing in the next season. It’s a time when things die, opening space for new things to grow. When we’re in winter, we have to understand that spring and summer are going to come again. That turns winter from a depressing, perhaps terrifying time, into one where we can think ahead to what should grow in the new season. This is broadly applicable in many parts of American life right now, from our psychological recovery after the pandemic to the churning of local, state, and national politics.
Unfortunately, American culture strongly favors endless summer, the time when there is the most energy, the most heat, and nature is flourishing. We want ourselves, our organizations, and our movements to constantly produce success. This is unrealistic and draining. It also creates harmful expectations of ourselves and of the work that lead us to despair when we aren’t in summer. If we are not feeling productive, if an organization isn’t putting wins on the board, if a movement is not generating a lot of attention and progress, if we are feeling a lot of pushback and difficulty, we say something is wrong. We might say, I’m in a slump. The organization is stuck. The movement is dead, it’s over.
However, when we look at the situation through the seasons framework, we don’t take fall and winter to be a failure, or spring to be sufficiently productive. We recognize that there is a natural cycle, and that different positive things can happen in different seasons.