It’s Advent. For those of us who follow the Christian year, this is the time we are invited to practice a paradox: living in the now and in the not yet. Peace, joy, love, healing: we wait for these (actively) while paying attention to how they are already here in ordinary ways. The season trains our eyes. It asks us to notice small lights, not just long nights. Like all important things, it’s a paradox; like all paradoxes, it’s an invitation to keep going.
Living the Now and the Not-Yet in organisations and partnerships
Last week, we were working with a group of leaders on how to collaborate across their organisations while also welcoming their wider community—other organisations, networks, local residents, the people who often live with the outcomes but rarely get to shape them. And there it was again: the practice of the now and the not yet.
Their aspirations were generous. They want a way of working where the community feels ownership; where all voices can speak up and be heard; where the skills and capabilities of smaller, less powerful stakeholders are cherished and celebrated without being exploited or exhausted. That’s the not yet.
And yet, the work still has to live inside a paradigm where dominant institutions take the lead because it’s deemed less “risky.” Funders and trustees need to see single lines from one “low‑risk” body to another. Assurance prefers neat diagrams. If we build something too different, the system‑as‑is will chew it up and spit it out. If we build something too familiar, we’ll replicate the very patterns we’re trying to change. So we hold the question: what’s aspirational, what’s achievable. And where does our hope belong in the now versus the not yet?
Community Ownership vs Institutional Risk. Now vs Not-Yet.
In organisational transformation, the hard bit isn’t persuading people that change is needed (evidence abounds), nor that the destination is desirable (equity, trust, participation…who’s arguing). The hard bit is seeing the way there without being overwhelmed by the not yet. Apathy and despair look very tempting in the face of all that will not be dealt with in today’s half day workshop (we’ve written about this before). So we need to look for small signs of the now and orient towards them. Taking tiny, slow, purposeful steps that make things more true without breaking the whole.
This is what Advent practices teach us: active waiting is not passivity. It’s attentive movement. It’s the discipline of noticing what is already here and letting it shape what comes next. In our context last week, that looks like acknowledging moments when ownership already appears: a resident who brings a story everyone pauses to hear, and that story actually shifts a decision. It looked like the quieter voice that speaks and isn’t just “included,” but changes the brief. It looks like someone naming the risk to smaller partners (energy, capacity, unpaid labour), and the group choosing to honour it rather than quietly absorbing it. These are present‑tense sprouts. They matter because they are both true in themselves and directional for the future.
A favourite quote from Russell Ackoff comes to mind: “I have no interest in forecasting the future, only in creating it by acting appropriately in the present.” Giving full Advent energy! When we act appropriately in the present by noticing, honouring, and repeating the good that is already happening we create pathways the system can recognise and sustain. We don’t pretend the constraints have vanished; we work within them without being ruled by them.
Paying attention to how our aspirations already show up also helps us look, unflinchingly and without falsity, at how far we still need to go. We name the gap where decision‑making still flows along single lines of authority; where accountability gets defined as “protect the institution” rather than “serve the common good”; where it feels “less risky” to keep the circle small even when the work itself demands a wider table. Naming the gap isn’t failure. It’s direction. It tells us where to place the next small, purposeful step.
Practising the paradox together
And we do this together. Living in the now and the not yet requires community. We encourage each other by pointing out patterns we’ve seen before (“notice how that small change opened space for a new voice”). We pay attention to new shoots of hope in the now (“did you see how the group paused and chose to protect the energy of the least powerful?”). We remind each other why we started waiting (actively) together in the first place (because the work matters, and because relationships matter more than processes).
None of this is glamorous. Most of it is awkward. Some days it feels like learning a dance in public: wrong steps, right instincts, occasional brilliance, plenty of laughter. That’s okay. Paradoxes don’t resolve on command; they invite practice. The point isn’t to flip a system overnight. The point is to make it more possible for the system to learn without exhausting the people inside it.
So here’s our Advent leadership practice, as cleanly as we can say it pay attention to the hope you see around you now, so we can face the not yet without pretending and without catastrophising. Notice the present‑tense sprouts. Repeat the good. Protect the vulnerable. Keep the table open. Take the next small step. And then another.
Thanks for being part of our Building20 community. For noticing, for naming, for encouraging. Here’s to a hopeful 2026, made not by modelled forecast, but by acting just right, right now.