I don’t know if it’s the holiday lights, chimney smoke, or the gratitude of family gatherings, but every year around this time I reach back for one of my favorite books by Professor Christensen: How Will You Measure Your Life?
It’s not a book that “prescribes a set path to happiness” or tells you what to think. Instead, it teaches you how to think about purpose, integrity, and the future, and it cleverly does this through business and management theories.
This time, that book came to mind again after I read a Devex opinion piece about a crossroads the international development sector is facing. The article made one thing clear: what comes next depends on how we choose to respond. And in business management language, how we respond is our strategy, which is revealed not by what we say, but by how we allocate our resources.
The bifurcation point in development
The article argues that “the international development system we knew is gone.” We’ve reached a tipping point, what it calls a bifurcation, the moment when something becomes too unstable to maintain its previous structure. There’s no going back to “business as usual.” The only option is to build something new.
The piece describes two possible paths forward. A probable future, marked by polarization, aggression, fear, and retrenchment. And an “improbable future,” where we acknowledge what wasn’t working, act with humility, and create the conditions for collaborative leadership.
That word—improbable—sounded discouraging to me. But maybe it’s used deliberately: because this future isn’t inevitable. It requires active choices, the kind that Professor Christensen would argue are made visible in how we deploy our resources.
The responding strategy
One of the many lessons in How will you measure your life? is about strategy. Strategy can be deliberate or emergent.
As a short explanation, deliberate strategies are analytical and top-down. They’re often used in projects with properly defined problems and clear solutions. For deliberate strategies to work, three conditions must be met:
- The strategy must encompass and address all of the important details required to succeed, and those responsible for its implementation must understand each important detail;
- the strategy must make sense to everyone implementing it, not just the leaders who design it, but to those it affects as well, so that everyone involved will act appropriately and consistently; and
- the strategy must be implemented with little unanticipated influence from outside political, technological, or market forces.
Emergent strategies on the other hand are employed when there isn’t a clear solution to a complex problem. They emerge from responses to unforeseen challenges. Emergent strategies can adapt, improve, and evolve. And, eventually, once an emergent strategy’s efficacy is recognized, that strategy can be formalized and turned into a deliberate one, one that has a clear solution to the problem.
Right now, the development sector is squarely in emergent strategy territory. We know what wasn’t working. We don’t yet know what will. And we’re facing instability—political, technological, financial—that no one actor can control. That means the old, deliberate, strategy won’t help us navigate what comes next. A new one has to emerge.
But emergent strategy only works if we’re honest about our values and consistent in how we act on them. As the article puts it, this requires us to “reconnect with our deepest values and convictions and live up to the capacity we all have to contribute.”
Strategy is what you do, not what you say
That line is about resources. It’s about what we choose to fund, prioritize, speak about, and make space for. Our time, attention, money, and language are not neutral. They shape the future from this bifurcation point on.
The article summarizes it well: “Which future emerges is not inevitable — it is the sum of the choices we make in response to the chaos.”
Those choices are strategy.
So if we believe that solidarity, innovation, humility, or collaboration should define the next chapter of development, then they must show up in our budgets, our partnerships, our career decisions, our communications, and how we measure success. Strategy isn’t what we admire in theory, it’s what we commit to in practice.
The questions for all of us
It might sound ironic to read these words from someone who works with theory. But I’m offering them as a reminder to myself, and to anyone working in or around the international development field.
So I’ll ask myself the same questions I’ll ask of you: What wasn’t working in the old system? What possible solutions exist today? And how will I allocate my resources (my time, attention, partnerships, and voice) toward those solutions?
The international development system will not be rebuilt by hoping for the “improbable future.” It will be shaped by the emergent strategies coming out of this chaos. Stability will return eventually, the question is: what will we have built by then?
Now more than ever, our strategy matters. And strategy is simply how we choose to spend what we have.
