Acting under Uncertainty

Most of our articles lay out our best guesses about what’s going on in the world and what to do about it. We present a series of analyses and outline a possible strategy, which implicitly contains a “theory of change” – our assumptions about how (revolutionary) social change can be brought about.

That’s a point we can’t stress enough: We always work from assumptions, based on implicit theories of how things work. We don’t know if they’re correct, especially not in times as complex and ambiguous as ours. If we want our strategies to be successful, we need to make developing them a process of continuous learning.¹Marginnote strategy-sensemaking1See the strategy cycle described in our article on sensemaking. ↩

We don’t know if, when, and how collapse will impact our plans. We don’t know how (and how violently) the state and the Right will react to them. We don’t know if what we are proposing will work. We have to prepare ourselves not only to learn, but to learn from failure, and to learn under pressure.

Building Skills and Infrastructure

This means our collective work will not just be about implementing a specific plan, but about building the skills and infrastructure needed to adapt as collapse expands and accelerates. We need to equip people to navigate the uncertain terrain autonomously, in groups and networks that support continuous learning.

We will need facilitation and research for this, but also education and training. Organisations can offer their skills as services to others or help others do it themselves.²Marginnote examples2We as the Movement Ecology Collective are doing this, as are NEON, Climate Vanguard, the Movement Research Unit and many others. ↩

Strategic Wagers

Even as we learn and develop our understanding, we won’t be able to foresee or predict which opportunities for collective action will be open to us – and which will turn out to be fantasies. We need to prepare for multiple possible futures, and then we need to “roll the dice” about which to work towards.

One way of doing this systematically is by making different strategic wagers that anticipate different emergent opportunities. This means investing enough in each of them (through training, organising, outreach) to be prepared for their moment, but spreading them wide enough to catch as many moments as possible. Building “just enough” capacity for diverse strategies will be a key meta-strategy.³Marginnote diverse-strategies3Large parts of what All In is proposing can be seen as implementing this meta-strategy (Eden & Rodrigues 2025). Another examples are Plan C’s “political units” that prepare for different strategic opportunities (Plan C 2025). ↩

Collective Learning

But most importantly, all of this needs to be a truly collective effort – we need to practice collective learning as we become a collective agent in order for this agent to be responsive and adaptive as a whole.

As Sinan Eden put it:⁴Marginnote sinan4In personal conversation. ↩ The goal of a good strategy is not to “win,” it is to change social reality now so we have more and better options tomorrow – so we can go the next step towards winning. Our organisations, movements, and the larger collective agent they might form need to be oriented towards this step-by-step approach.

This can be done in a myriad of ways, but of course some theories of change and strategies are more relevant than others to meet particular people in a particular context at a particular time. Collective learning will also mean arguing about this – without falling back into the divisions and paralysis that have plagued the Left for so long and helped create the conditions for our situation.

We need to learn how to disagree while moving forward. Or in the words of another comrade: If the alliance we’re in doesn’t make us feel uncomfortable at times, it’s probably not broad enough.

We hope this paper can serve as a contribution both to finding coherence and alignment, and to feeding a constructive debate with new and helpful ideas and arguments.

References

• Eden & Rodrigues (2025): All In: A Revolutionary Theory to Stop Climate Collapse
• Plan C (2025): “We need movement structures – Plan C is open!”