Adaptive strategy: our way to navigate an uncertain world

Over the last six years at Diabetes UK, I’ve helped lead a shift to adaptive strategy, an approach that’s helped us stay focused on long-term goals while responding to fast-changing circumstances. It’s brought real benefits, like agility and resilience, but also challenges around clarity and culture. In this blog, I share:

• Why we chose adaptive strategy
• What benefits it brought
• The challenges we faced
• How we’ve evolved our approach
• What we’re doing next

Why we chose adaptive strategy

When we were developing our 2020–2025 strategy, A Generation to end the Harm, we spent time listening to people with and at risk of diabetes, as well as our supporters and stakeholders. We also developed scenarios to give us ‘memories of the future’ to inform our direction.

We heard that what people most wanted from us was hope for the future – of prevention, cure and living a good life with diabetes – at a time when the world was highly uncertain and volatile.

So we built a strategy around five outcome goals that mattered most to people. These goals became our north star, to align all our work, with cross-charity commitment rather than department silos. We didn’t try to give detailed plans within our strategy – but we set out clearly how we, working with others, could make a difference to these big outcomes.

What benefits it brought

Our adaptive strategy helped us work across three time horizons:

• Now – responding to immediate needs
• Next – planning for the near future
• Beyond – staying focused on long-term change

The immediate work we had to do to achieve our big goal of people living good lives with diabetes was different – we scaled up our online support and helpline to meet new needs. At the same time were able to secure a £50 million 5-year research partnership focussed on finding a cure for type 1 diabetes. Our adaptive strategy enabled us to meet immediate needs and keep our eye on the long-term goals.

Because our strategy was outcome-based, we had to stay alert to change–to look beyond our charity and engage with lived experience and the external context. Each year we refreshed the outcome chains (our theories of change for each outcome goal) to explore what is the best way for us to effect change in the current system. This kept strategy live as we engaged colleagues and those living with diabetes in these reviews.

The challenges we faced – and how we responded

Of course, it wasn’t all smooth sailing.

We all know that ‘culture eats strategy for breakfast’ and this approach was a big culture change to our ways of working and mindsets. One of the biggest challenges was cultural. Adaptive strategy meant:

• More frequent planning
• More collaboration across teams
• A shift in mindset from fixed plans to flexible goals

Some colleagues asked, “Why are we always planning?” Others found the networked approach confusing. We listened, adapted where we could, and kept reinforcing the value of the approach, especially when we could point to real impact. Positive feedback on our Covid response, our major research partnership, and success driving Remission pathways with the NHS helped us show how big goals, coupled with adapting to circumstance, could have real impact.

One big challenge was the breadth of our outcome goals, and the difficulty sometimes to provide enough clarity or focus within these. So, in 2023, we evolved our approach again.

How we’ve evolved our approach

We introduced Ambition Programmes, more specific and targeted areas where we saw potential for big, medium and long-term change. These programmes gave us:

• Clear multi-year focus
• Flexibility to adapt annually based on insights and horizon scanning
• A way to drive new areas of work, like tackling inequity and stigma

This helped us stay adaptive, but with more clarity and direction.

What we’re doing next

This year, we come to the end of our 2020 strategy, and in engaging around our new strategy we have heard strong commitment to retain our adaptive, outcome led approach. Discussions with the NPC Strategy Peer Network helped us see that this is increasingly the way many charities are going and the benefits it can bring.

We understand better that strategy is not something you do every five years and we do not have an end of strategy cliff-edge. Our 2026–2030 strategy will enable us to re-articulate our approach, communicate our Ambition Programmes.

We hope it will inspire even more people to join us in making change happen.