The Professional Implications of Collapse: Deep Adaptation in Organizations

As modern societies experience further disruption and decline, how can our work in organizations help more of us ‘break together’ not apart?

Once people reach the conclusion that societies are not just being continually disrupted but that we are in a situation of actual breakdown, not everyone can quit their job and do something new. After doubt transitions into shock, grief, and anger, not everyone can ‘go wild’ like many ‘doomsters’ do. Nor would we want everyone to! How to integrate an acceptance of societal collapse into one’s professional job in a large organisation is therefore a huge issue. However, until now I did not find anyone in the field of organisational development who could try that. This intransigence even existed amongst experts on ‘sustainability’ and so moved me to write an article last year that summarised the ways they were maintaining their denial. However, five years after the Deep Adaptation (DA) movement took off, it appears that the situation is opening up a bit, as I noted in the latest DA Review. The recent engagement with both DA and my new book ‘Breaking Together’ by world-leading sustainability advisors and trainers R3-0.org, is another indicator of change. Some management consultants may prefer to speak of a polycrisis of ongoing disruption, rather than the unfolding collapse of industrial consumer societies – but an opening has appeared, nevertheless. Therefore, in this essay I will offer some initial ideas for how to work on societal collapse risk, readiness, and response, within organisations.

When talking about Deep Adaptation, the conversation typically begins with a discussion of climate chaos. That is because climate change is one of the major drivers of current and growing disruption to the operation of organizations around the world, whether directly through extreme weather, or indirectly through impacts on supply chains and financial systems. It is also because of where the DA concept and framework came from – with recognition of the society-damaging impacts of global heating. Consequently, before exploring how an organisation might deeply adapt to an era of disruption and collapse, we need to begin with some attention to the field of ‘climate adaptation’.

What is climate change adaptation (CCA)? The European Union has offered the following definition: “Adaptation means anticipating the adverse effects of climate change and taking appropriate action to prevent or minimize the damage they can cause, or taking advantage of opportunities that may arise. It has been shown that well planned, early adaptation action saves money and lives later. Examples of adaptation measures include: using scarce water resources more efficiently; adapting building codes to future climate conditions and extreme weather events; building flood defences and raising the levels of dykes; developing drought-tolerant crops; choosing tree species and forestry practices less vulnerable to storms and fires; and setting aside land corridors to help species migrate.”

When this agenda is operationalized in an organization, the lead is typically taken by the functions of risk management, business continuity, estates management, and sometimes, health and safety. Typically, managers then approach risks in three ways. First, how to reduce exposure to a hazard e.g. avoid building in flood plains, and readying buildings for extreme temperature, precipitation, winds, and storm surges. Most of us have witnessed how air-conditioning and other means of cooling buildings have become widespread over recent years. Second, how to reduce sensitivity to a hazard e.g. relocate a computer server or archives so they won’t be damaged by flooding, install water fountains and encourage people to drink during the heat, or purchasing an emergency generator. Third, how to improve the ‘adaptive capacity’ of an organization, by evolving its activities, so there is less exposure or sensitivity to a hazard (e.g. allowing people to join meetings online), or more substantially, changing the culture, training, and decision-making systems of an organization so people are empowered to act in the moment.

There are many limits faced by people in such a climate adaptation role. They know that most climate risks are only addressable outside the organization: for instance, burying power lines to reduce the threat of storm damage; starting projects for local energy and water provision; landscape management against flooding and heat; and coordination of disaster response plans involving volunteer management, maintaining key facilities, and community refuge.

Another limitation is to focus on weather extremes, rather than the broader societal disruptions that arise from indirect impacts of climate chaos. These can include impacts on food prices and availability –with implications for wellbeing, attitudes, and crime– or on the outbreak of disease, or on mental health. In addition, given that we are considering potentially catastrophic risks, foregrounding the needs of an organization rather than its staff, their families, and the wider community, doesn’t make much practical or ethical sense.

These limitations mean that a typical adaptation agenda and team is not necessarily suited to work on ‘deeply adapting’ an organisation. For instance, a team formed to address climate adaptation in organizations is typically one with technical expertise rather than some of the softer skill sets that become relevant when you consider a far broader agenda or the longer-term strategy of an organization. After all, with societal collapse in mind, the strategic direction, role and culture of the organization must be reconsidered.

Before diving into what a DA approach could look like in an organization, let’s recap on the Deep Adaptation framework. It is based on an aim of reducing harm as societies break down. Five questions help with our exploration of that:

1. Resilience – what is it we most value and want to keep?
2. Relinquishment – what can we let go of not to make matters worse?
3. Restoration – what could we bring back to help?
4. Reconciliation – with what or whom can I make peace, in the face of our common mortality?
5. Reclamation – what power can we reclaim in various areas of our life to give ourselves more options?

Over the last five years, this framework has been used quite widely in gatherings of individuals, especially in community groups. However, until now, it has not been used much, as far as I am aware, within organizations in private or public sectors. But now that there is engagement with these topics by professionals in organizational development, I want to share some ideas on a new framework for deeply adapting organizations. The framework is not one I have applied within an organization. Neither is it one I have read in a consultancy report or management text. Nor is it one I have worked out by analysing best practices. Indeed, it is a framework that has none of those normal empirical bases upon which to draw conclusions and make recommendations! Instead, it arises from my years designing and teaching MBAs as well as my previous career advising on organisational development towards more responsible and sustainable enterprise. Therefore, if you work in this field, please consider the following framework with a pinch of Himalayan salt, as you bring your own ideas to the table.

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Eight Steps for Organizations on Deep Adaptation

If an organization makes an explicit commitment to deeply adapt to increasing societal disruption and even collapse, and help its stakeholders do the same, then the following steps are likely to help in that endeavour.

1 – Face reality

Recognise that there is credible analysis that it is too late to prevent further catastrophic change affecting everyone, including your organization and its stakeholders and so it is time to ask: “what if”? Consider how such a scenario renders previous assumptions about progress, professionalism, success, and our priorities all highly questionable. For instance, it might render the ideology of sustainable development, and therefore the Global Goals (SDGs), redundant – something that many scholars have already declared.

Ask: What if societal disruptions will worsen for more than a generation and we creatively explore the implications?

2 – Level with stakeholders

Deliberately change the conversation with all people within and connected to the organisation, so that the creative exploration of how to cope better with further societal disruptions and breakdowns replaces assumptions of progress and expansion. Be clear that this new era involves all of us learning alongside each other and not assuming expertise already exists. Encourage general emotional support for everyone, not only those seeking it out, while avoiding any superficial platitudes in that process.

Ask: What are the most important conversations that our staff, clients, investors, business partners, and local communities could have with us and each other from now on?

3 – Prioritize people

Focus on the overall safety and wellbeing of staff, families, and communities, above the success of the organization. Many organisations could collapse in future, and so how we help each other to prepare and cope for future disruption is more important than an organization’s success. Changing the conversation in this way will make it clear we are in a new era which demands a new paradigm for how we work together. One example of this new approach would be to encourage and enable staff to reduce their hours below full time, or take study leaves, without any negative effects on their position, influence, or progression, so they can spend more time engaged in the community and evolving their focus and skills for a very different future. Not so much “let my people go surfing” as “let’s all go gardening.”

Ask: If this organization might not exist in five years, how could we help each other for a difficult future, while together now?

4 – Mobilize resources

Create and empower a Deep Adaptation Team to speed up adaptation to the direct impacts of climate change (such as floods, wind damage, and heat extremes), but also to the wider agenda. That includes other disruptors to the organization, but also ways of enabling resilience within local communities, such as diversifying local food and energy supplies. Comprise such a team with people from business continuity, risk management, sustainability, estates management (i.e. typical adaptation-related functions), alongside people from organisational strategy, staff wellbeing, community engagement or public affairs, trade unions, and consumer groups. To help them engage outside their siloes, a trained facilitator is also important (and avoid chairing by a senior manager or project manager). To avoid it becoming a niche or specialty area, launch staff assemblies, where any staff member can come, and invite any member of the community, or their family, to discuss how to collaborate to promote local resilience to increasing disruptions. Promise funding for the initiatives they come up with.

Ask: How can we make Climate Adaptation and Deep Adaptation defining principles for our whole organization?

5 – Reframe strategy

Consider that ‘growth of income and market share’ is now a redundant frame for organizational strategy in most sectors so anyone using that as their strategic framework would be in error. Invite all colleagues, not just a specialist team, to explore authentically what aspects of the organisation (assets and outputs) might be useful in this new era of societal breakdown or collapse.

Ask: What do we want to enable if more of society is going to break down, in more places?

6 – Evolve products and services

There is limited benefit to becoming more resilient to societal disruptions if an organisation’s activities do not help address the predicament, or even make it worse. Firstly, be brutally honest, together about what products and services likely have no future in a disrupted world, and decide to slowly wind them down. Secondly, enable and incentivise staff to drop activities that don’t make sense within the new framework and adopt activities that do.

Ask: What products and services could we offer that will help people cope better, or even thrive, as industrial consumer societies break down?

7 – Club together

Recognize that the impacts of societal breakdown are so large they can’t be addressed by any single organization and therefore it’s important to collaborate. Ask relevant unions, trade associations, professional bodies, consumer groups, subject associations, and regulators to move to a real (not rhetorical) climate emergency footing, which includes societal disruption and breakdowns, and explore what that means for everything in one’s sector, including issues that a union or professional body may not have considered before.

Ask: How could groups in our sector support us to engage with this troubling agenda?

8 – Get political

Encourage staff, customers, and business partners to find ways to engage locally, nationally, and internationally to influence powerful decision-making that affects large numbers of organizations and people, with the aim of reducing harm in an era of increasing societal disruption and even collapse. Do that with full awareness of how corporate influence on public policy unfortunately steered the trajectory that led us into collapse, and therefore seek to be transparent and accountable for any positions taken.

Ask: As an organization, what influence could we have on any local, national, and international levers of change?

The philosophical shift

In the eight steps above I have mentioned how Deep Adaptation to societal collapse should involve a major shift in how we think about our relationship to an organization. We should no longer force ourselves to care for the organization more than everyone around us, or pretend we do, or pretend that the those aims are synonymous.

This philosophical shift can be described as comprising a kind realism, prioritizing community safety and a post-growth mentality. I will now explain as if I was a senior manager espousing this philosophy. 

Kind realism – situations will become increasingly difficult for most of us, so let’s be gentle and honest.

“Most of us now recognise that the drivers of the polycrisis will not be solved, so our modern societies will likely break down around us at varying speeds. Therefore, we are asking ourselves what we will live for as things get increasingly difficult. Reducing harm is key for everyone I know. Being human comes first and being an employee comes second. We no longer uphold the existing, hidden or explicit, stories of respectability, responsibility, and success at work. Everything is open for change in this new era.”

Community safety – in the near term, let’s look after each other better within our immediate sphere of influence.

“We will use our organization’s capabilities to help people prepare themselves better for increasing material and psychological impacts from societal disruption. We accept the importance of an employer addressing “climate safety” of the workplace. Additionally, we want to help the families and communities of our staff to become better prepared, practically and psychologically.”

Post-growth mentality – for most organizations, expanding income and market share cannot be the aim in this new era, so let’s seek to provide value despite an unpredictable and disrupted context.

“We aim for our organization to stay in business during a difficult future, without expansion being the priority that everything else must relate to. Some members of senior management, the board, and shareholders might take extra time to adjust to this reality. As might our business partners and competitors. But they will come to accept that adapting to a volatile situation for every citizen must now be the central organizing principle for organizations, above growth, profits, or dividends.”

Will this fly?

Perhaps this proposal is too naïve. Perhaps it is true that people can imagine the end of the world more easily than the end of capitalism. With this framework, I’m even going beyond the end of capitalism. I am imagining the end of instrumentalizing people in service of any organization. Because anything less than that would not respond adequately to the gravity of our situation and what is unfolding. Heck, the tyranny of the bureaucratic story of how we subsume ourselves to a role might be one of the things that usefully breaks down along with the rest of industrial consumer societies.

I drafted these notes ahead of a talk at Griffith Business school, 7^th Feb 2024. The last time I was there was November 2016, when I spoke in public for the first time about anticipating collapse and a ‘deep adaptation’ framework for our responses. So I will soon discover whether there is appetite for integrating this agenda into organizations, and if these eight steps and the philosophical shift are helpful or not. I will also discover more through events with R3.0 online later this year, at Stanford University in October (tbc), and with DSR Partners in Berlin in November. Despite leadership on this agenda by people in those organisations, my guess is that these ideas won’t go far until a CEO of a large organization admits the situation is only going to get worse, and how that naturally challenges all our previous ideals about professionalism and success. If you know anyone heading in that direction, please let us all know in the DA Leadership group.

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