Making complexity more visible matters because it changes what strategy can realistically do. Many organizations have long been able to work with more bounded problem frames and assumptions of relative predictability. In such contexts, roadmap-oriented elements of strategy can play a stronger role. But when working on challenges shaped by political volatility, ecological disruption, technological transformation, or declining trust in institutions, those elements quickly reach their limits. Cause and effect often become clear only in hindsight. New risks and opportunities emerge unexpectedly. And any intervention changes the ecosystem dynamics in which the strategy operates.

For social change organizations like iac Berlin, this creates a very real tension. Strategy is still needed to provide direction, legitimacy, and focus. Yet it is often designed and used in ways that privilege predictability, sequencing, and control more than the challenges themselves allow. The result can be a false sense of certainty: a well-written strategy that looks coherent on paper but proves too rigid, too narrow, or too slow when confronted with the dynamics of a complex environment.

A new understanding of strategy

To remain relevant in such contexts, organizations need to place greater emphasis on dimensions of strategy that have always mattered but become more visible amid complexity. Strategy cannot be reduced to a plan for implementing a predefined path. It is also a framework for maintaining orientation and the ability to act under uncertainty. This means that strategy must do more than define goals and activities. It must help us sense and interpret signals from the field, make decisions with incomplete knowledge, create room for adaptation, observe the effects of our actions, and organize learning as an ongoing practice rather than a final step.

From this perspective, staying strategic in complexity does not mean knowing the way ahead in detail. It means combining clear direction with orientation towards opportunities. Even if we do not know in advance which pathways will prove most effective, we can still hold a strong strategic ambition, define the areas where we want to contribute, and build the conditions that allow us to respond quickly and appropriately when meaningful opportunities emerge.

A layered architecture

This understanding has shaped our own strategic thinking. In our current strategy work, we have found it useful to distinguish between three layers:

1. Strategic ambition
2. Impact goals
3. Development Goals

This layered architecture helps hold direction and adaptability together. Strategic ambition provides longer-term orientation: the broader direction of travel and the contribution we want to make over time. Impact goals translate this ambition into a medium-term horizon and clarify the kinds of change we seek to support. Development goals, in turn, focus on the capacities, relationships, structures, and internal shifts needed to act strategically in a complex environment.

Each of these layers plays a distinct role. Strategic ambition provides direction. Impact goals focus the contribution we seek to make. Development goals build the organizational conditions that make this contribution viable under changing conditions. It is this third layer that becomes especially important in complexity.

This distinction matters because complex challenges require more than better interventions. They also require organizations to evolve. In more bounded and stable settings, organizational development is often treated as secondary, or even as something separate from strategy. In complex settings, it becomes central. An organization’s ability to notice emerging signals, work across silos, engage in meaningful partnerships, learn quickly, and adapt its practices is integral to strategy itself.

From the perspective of our own strategy, this becomes especially clear: organizational resilience—understood as the ability to withstand pressure and to adapt and reconfigure under changing conditions—does not emerge only at the level of ambition or programming, but through the organization’s own development. With the idea of “Becoming iac”, we describe this dimension—the deliberate strengthening of capabilities, partnerships, structures, and processes that allow an organization to stay oriented and able to act under volatile conditions. In this sense, development goals are not merely an internal support layer. They are part of the organization’s resilience architecture.

In this context, organizational learning becomes central to resilience. It is not limited to retrospective evaluation. It is the ability to notice signals from the field early, interpret them in relation to strategy, and draw consequences for priorities, resources, and action. A flexible Monitoring, Learning, and Adapting (MLA) system, shared capabilities for working with complexity, and the ability to consciously adapt or end activities are, from our perspective, not simply additional tools. They are prerequisites for remaining adaptive in complex environments.

In this sense, development goals help keep strategy alive. They allow strategic ambition to remain credible in an unpredictable environment.

Opportunity orientation

This is where opportunity orientation becomes especially important. Opportunities rarely arrive in a clear, foreseeable, or structured form. They tend to emerge through shifts in the field, new alliances, moments of openness, institutional change, or unexpected resonance around a particular issue. Organizations that want to work strategically in such conditions need more than general flexibility. They need the capacity to sense opportunities and prepare for them.

Here, we have found the concept of opportunity management helpful. It means building the capacity to identify relevant signals, assess their strategic significance, and mobilize the attention, resources, and partnerships needed to respond. It is not about opportunism or constant reactive movement. On the contrary, it depends on having enough clarity of direction to distinguish between noise and genuine openings. Teams can assess which opportunities matter because they know what they are trying to contribute to.

This also changes how learning is understood. It must be built into strategy as an intentional and ongoing process. This includes creating learning spaces, engaging in deliberate exploration, and treating small-scale experiments as legitimate ways of understanding what may be possible. Not everything can or should be explored. But where challenges are genuinely complex, intentional exploration becomes part of responsible strategy rather than a departure from it.

Holding ambition and humility together

This is particularly relevant for philanthropy, because many foundations still operate with planning, reporting, and accountability expectations shaped in more bounded and predictable contexts. The shift toward a more opportunity driven and complexity-aware strategy therefore involves a real cultural and institutional transition. It requires organizations to move away from the comfort of assuming they can know enough in advance to plan the right sequence of action. Instead, it asks them to become better at exploring the unknown(able)—sensing, interpreting, testing, and adjusting. This can feel unsettling, especially in contexts where legitimacy is still closely tied to clarity, control, and demonstrable certainty.

There are also tensions to navigate. Foundations cannot abandon direction in the name of openness, nor can they dissolve accountability in the name of complexity. The challenge is not to replace all planning with experimentation. It is to become more precise about which elements of work require stability and which require exploration, where commitments need to be firm and where adaptive space is necessary, and how to hold ambition and humility together. In this sense, strategy in complexity is not less disciplined than other forms of strategy. It is disciplined differently.

Staying strategic in complexity

What emerges from this is a broader and more explicit understanding of strategy. Strategy is not only a map, but also a living architecture. It is not a guarantee of control, but a way of preserving direction and agency under uncertain conditions. And it is not a means of eliminating complexity, but of engaging with it more consciously.

For foundations, making this shift more explicit is both demanding and promising. It requires rethinking how strategy is designed, how impact is understood, how learning is organized, and what kinds of internal development are prioritized. But it also opens up a more realistic and potentially more effective way of working in the face of the complex challenges that increasingly shape the philanthropic field.

Staying strategic in complexity, then, does not mean knowing the future better. It means becoming better equipped to act under uncertainty. It means combining clear direction with opportunity orientation, linking impact goals with development goals, and treating learning and exploration as essential parts of strategic practice.

(Atje Drexler, Senior Vice President, Futures and Networks, Robert Bosch Stiftung
and Darius Polok, Managing Director, iac Berlin)

This text is based on discussions, articles, and exchanges with colleagues from around the world. We are grateful for all the inspiration and perspectives that enrich our work and thinking.

If you want to know more about strategy in complexity, please do not hesitate to get in touch with:

Darius Polok
darius.polok@iac-berlin.org

This article has been taken from our Activity Report 2025.

You can download the entire publication here: