Sense, orient and decide

Start with a short period of sensing and observing. This will give you a first opportunity to assess the potential impact of the crisis on the mindsets of you and your audiences and allow you to imagine possible futures emerging from the crisis.

Sensing is best done with the whole team. Each team member should start by observing their own reactions: how has the crisis affected you? What emotions or thoughts are you feeling yourself? Which narratives or common behaviours seem to be breaking down? This will help you fine-tune the questions you want to ask the community and help sharpen your own awareness.

You can then start to focus on the affected community. Begin by having as many conversations as possible, especially with your key audiences. Be careful to avoid mixing what you hear with your own experience of the crisis. You can also spend some time just observing what is happening around you and how people behave differently. Don’t shy away from using sensing work done by others, but try to focus on reliable research and avoid isolated opinions. This can also be complemented with audience research, for instance, lean polling or social media monitoring.

Next, hold a workshop to map out the possible scenarios for how the crisis could impact the future (think of the coming months rather than years.) It is important to do this in a larger, diverse group, as diversity is known to reduce the risk of blind spots, and with those that did some of the initial sensing.

When aiming to create societal mindset change, observe and map your scenarios by focusing on the potential shifts in narratives, values, emotions, norms, identities and environments (i.e. mindset factors).

This scenario planning will create a common understanding of the unfolding crisis and what it means for your work. It will also help you decide upon the most promising opportunities to drive change and how to deal with the possible threats. This could entail letting go of some of your pre-crisis objectives.

As change happens very quickly during a crisis, make sure you regularly assess the assumptions your scenarios or strategies were built on as the crisis develops. Be prepared to alter or pivot if necessary. The Sensing, Observing, Deciding should be repeated whenever you anticipate or start to feel a major change in the situation.

A major change could be, for example, an aftershock. This could cover more of the same, like another earthquake or further infection wave, or it could be a secondary crisis, like a cholera outbreak or water shortage after a disaster or an economic crisis resulting from a lockdown. You should consider what is new about this further disruption and reassess the situation.