Finally, once you’ve created a movement, it starts moving. The journey will encounter unexpected events to which you, as a creative leader, need to respond. It might cross borders, for which your leadership requires a new kind of attention. We make the analogy of riding waves, which, any surfer will tell you, requires the ability to maintain morale and energy. How do you take advantage of sudden opportunities as these arise? Your role is to protect against sudden trouble by creating a healthy assortment of projects in the air, which require the ultimate of strategy under uncertainty, and of adaptive, courageous leadership.
At some stage, the strategy might be to “pivot”. The pivot is that we such drastic changes in certain circumstances that we have to revisit our entire purpose, existence, product, and service. This means that we return to phase one and find what it takes to delight our users anew.
It may seem counterintuitive to place this at the final stage but as any entrepreneur will tell you, lasting purpose often reveals itself only once the users, vision, and movement are in place and the journey is on.
* * *These are the four elements of a successful endeavor that contributes to solving a social challenge at scale. These elements need to all be in place and follow each other naturally in a perpetual virtuous cycle. It is an endeavor of many, not one individual creative leader, carrying each of the fundamentals on their own shoulders. You can become truly distinctive at one stage of the cycle, so long as the organization or movement is good at all.