My fascination with coyotes began not in the field, but in the pages of beat poetry, where writers like Gary Snyder and Allen Ginsberg wove the trickster figure from Native American mythology into modern landscapes of adaptation and survival. Reading these works led me to Dan Flores’ “Coyote America,” which revealed the remarkable story of an animal that not only survived human expansion across North America but actually thrived because of it. The coyote came to represent something essential to me—the ability to adapt, persist, and find opportunity in changing circumstances. So much so that my first tattoo, a coyote portrait on my forearm, serves as a daily reminder of these principles.

Today, as I work with professional development organizations across the Great Plains, I see a similar survival challenge playing out in conference rooms and strategic planning sessions. Organizations that structure themselves like wolf packs—dependent on single funding sources or narrow service offerings—often struggle when their primary resource disappears. Meanwhile, those that adopt coyote-like strategies build resilience through diversification and opportunistic adaptation.

Understanding Coyote Adaptability

Coyotes represent one of nature’s most successful adaptation stories. While wolf populations declined dramatically due to habitat loss and hunting pressure, coyote populations have actually expanded their range and increased their numbers. Their secret lies in behavioral flexibility and resource diversification that wolves, despite their intelligence and social sophistication, couldn’t match.

Coyotes demonstrate what biologists call “dietary plasticity”—the ability to shift food sources based on availability. A single coyote might hunt rodents at dawn, scavenge human food waste at midday, and catch fish in irrigation ditches by evening. This opportunistic approach extends beyond diet to include hunting strategies, social structures, and even reproductive timing. When resources are abundant, coyotes form loose social groups. When food becomes scarce, they operate independently or in pairs.

This adaptability stems from what researchers term “ecological release”—when human activities create new niches and opportunities rather than just threats. While wolves require large territories and specific prey, coyotes learned to exploit fragmented landscapes, suburban environments, and diverse food webs that emerged from human development.

The neurological basis for this flexibility appears linked to higher problem-solving capabilities and stress tolerance compared to more specialized canids. Coyotes can learn new behaviors quickly and adjust their strategies based on success rates, creating what amounts to real-time optimization of survival tactics.

The Wolf Pack Model’s Limitations

Professional development organizations often structure themselves around what I call the “Wolf Pack Model”—centralized leadership, specialized roles, and dependence on large, coordinated efforts to secure substantial funding. Like wolf packs hunting elk, these organizations focus on landing major grants, institutional contracts, or conference sponsorships that can sustain the entire operation.

This approach works well in stable environments with predictable resources. A organization might secure a multi-year federal grant that funds staff salaries, program development, and operational costs. The team coordinates their efforts, each member playing a specialized role in delivering comprehensive professional development services.

But when the primary funding source disappears—budget cuts eliminate government grants, economic downturns reduce corporate training budgets, or policy changes shift funding priorities—these organizations face the same crisis that wolves encounter when their primary prey becomes unavailable. Their specialized structure, which created efficiency in good times, becomes a liability during resource scarcity.

I’ve watched several professional development organizations struggle with this dynamic over the past few years. They built impressive programs around major funding sources, hired specialized staff, and developed comprehensive service offerings. When their primary grants ended or institutional contracts weren’t renewed, they faced difficult choices: dramatically downsize operations, abandon programs entirely, or struggle to maintain services with insufficient resources.

The Coyote Strategy: Diversified Resource Acquisition

Coyote-inspired organizations build resilience through systematic diversification of resource streams. Rather than depending on single major funding sources, they develop multiple smaller revenue channels that can expand or contract based on opportunity and necessity.

This approach might include pursuing both public and private grants simultaneously, rather than focusing exclusively on federal funding. A coyote-strategy organization might write proposals for small foundation grants, corporate social responsibility programs, and state-level educational initiatives while also developing individual service contracts, consulting arrangements, and product sales.

The key difference lies in scale and flexibility. Instead of one $500,000 grant supporting the entire organization, a coyote approach might combine twenty different funding streams—small grants ranging from $5,000 to $50,000, individual consulting contracts, workshop facilitation fees, digital product sales, podcast advertising revenue, book royalties, and membership fees.

My current division within BHSSC, Compass Partners in Learning, exemplifies this approach. We maintain baseline operations through a combination of recurring revenue streams: subscription-based professional learning communities, monthly workshop facilitation contracts with different school districts, and sales of curriculum resources we’ve developed. When opportunities arise—emergency professional development needs, new grant competitions, or requests for specialized consulting—we can quickly adapt our capacity to pursue additional revenue.

This requires different organizational DNA than the wolf pack model. Team members need broader skill sets rather than narrow specialization. The organizational structure must be flexible enough to scale up or down quickly. Decision-making processes need to accommodate rapid pivots when new opportunities emerge.

Building Organizational Dietary Plasticity

Successful implementation of the coyote strategy requires developing what I call “organizational dietary plasticity”—the ability to pursue diverse revenue opportunities while maintaining quality and mission alignment.

• Revenue Stream Mapping: Start by informally or formally inventorying all potential funding sources relevant to your mission. This includes obvious options like grants and contracts, but also less traditional approaches like product development, affiliate partnerships, speaking fees, and digital content monetization.
• Capability Development: Coyotes succeed because they can hunt, scavenge, fish, and forage effectively. Organizations need similar versatility. This might mean developing grant writing expertise alongside product development skills, or training team members in both workshop facilitation and digital course creation. The goal isn’t to do everything, but to maintain enough capability diversity to pursue opportunities as they emerge.
• Opportunistic Infrastructure: Build systems that can quickly scale efforts in response to opportunities. This includes maintaining relationships with freelance specialists who can join projects as needed, developing modular content that can be adapted for different contexts, and creating proposal templates that can be customized for various funding sources.
• Resource Sharing Networks: Coyotes sometimes form temporary alliances when pursuing larger prey. Professional development organizations can create similar collaborative relationships—sharing resources for major projects, cross-promoting services, or jointly pursuing funding that requires broader expertise than any single organization possesses.

Strategic Scavenging vs. Predatory Innovation

The coyote model includes both proactive hunting and opportunistic scavenging. For professional development organizations, this translates to balancing planned revenue development with responsive opportunism.

Planned revenue development involves systematic cultivation of funding relationships, regular proposal submission cycles, and ongoing service delivery improvements. This provides the baseline sustainability that keeps operations functioning.

Opportunistic scavenging means staying alert to unexpected funding opportunities, emergency consultation needs, or market gaps that suddenly emerge. When a school district faces a crisis requiring immediate professional development support, or when new legislation creates sudden demand for specific training services, coyote-strategy organizations can respond quickly.

I’ve seen this work effectively during the pandemic transition to remote learning. Organizations with coyote-like flexibility quickly developed virtual training offerings, pivoted existing programs to online formats, and secured emergency funding for technology support. Meanwhile, organizations structured around traditional in-person conference models struggled to adapt their business model to the new reality.

The key insight from coyote behavior is that scavenging isn’t a last resort—it’s an integrated survival strategy. Coyotes don’t apologetically scavenge when hunting fails; they strategically incorporate both approaches to maximize resource acquisition efficiency.

Avoiding Resource Trap Specialization

One risk of the coyote strategy is losing focus and pursuing revenue opportunities that don’t align with organizational mission or capabilities. Coyotes avoid this trap through what biologists call “optimal foraging theory”—they assess the energy cost of different food acquisition strategies against the nutritional return.

Professional development organizations need similar cost-benefit analysis for potential revenue streams. A consulting opportunity might offer substantial short-term revenue but require skills development and time investment that doesn’t build long-term organizational capacity. Conversely, developing a digital product might require significant upfront investment but create ongoing passive revenue that supports mission-aligned work.

The assessment framework should consider both immediate resource needs and strategic positioning:

• Does this opportunity build capabilities that will enable future opportunities?
• Does it strengthen relationships with key stakeholders?
• Does it enhance the organization’s reputation in ways that attract additional resources?

I’ve worked with organizations that successfully balanced this tension by establishing clear criteria for opportunity evaluation. They pursue diverse revenue streams while maintaining discipline about alignment with core mission and long-term sustainability goals.

Leadership in Uncertainty

Coyote-strategy organizations require different leadership approaches than wolf pack models. Instead of coordinating large-scale, specialized efforts, leaders must excel at rapid assessment, resource allocation, and team coordination across diverse projects.

This leadership style emphasizes sensing over planning and thus maintaining awareness of environmental changes and resource opportunities while preserving organizational agility to respond effectively. Leaders need comfort with ambiguity and skill at helping team members navigate uncertainty without losing focus on quality service delivery.

The most effective leaders I’ve observed in these contexts excel at pattern recognition by identifying which opportunities align with organizational strengths and strategic goals while avoiding resource-draining distractions. They create organizational cultures that view adaptation as strength rather than instability.

Implementation Framework: The Adaptive Resource Strategy

To implement coyote-inspired resource diversification:

• Environmental Scanning: Regularly assess the full landscape of potential revenue opportunities, including emerging trends, policy changes, and market gaps. This requires broader awareness than traditional grant monitoring.
• Capacity Assessment: Honestly evaluate current organizational capabilities and identify minimum viable expertise needed to pursue different revenue streams.
• Portfolio Balance: Maintain a mix of stable recurring revenue, opportunistic project income, and development investments in future revenue streams. Avoid over-dependence on any single category.
• Response Speed: Develop decision-making processes that can quickly evaluate and pursue time-sensitive opportunities without compromising ongoing commitments.
• Quality Standards: Establish clear criteria for maintaining service quality across diverse revenue streams. Growth through diversification shouldn’t compromise the reputation that enables future opportunities.
• Network Development: Cultivate relationships across multiple sectors and funding communities. Coyotes thrive partly because they understand diverse ecosystems and resource patterns.

Challenges and Limitations

The coyote strategy isn’t appropriate for all organizational contexts. Some professional development work requires the deep specialization and sustained focus that the wolf pack model provides more effectively. Large-scale research initiatives, comprehensive curriculum development, or complex institutional change efforts often benefit from concentrated expertise and substantial resource commitment.

Additionally, constant adaptation can create organizational stress and identity confusion. Team members may struggle with role ambiguity, and stakeholders might question organizational focus. The flexibility that enables survival can also create perception problems with funders who prefer clear, stable organizational identities.

Resource diversification also requires sophisticated management capabilities. Tracking multiple funding streams, maintaining diverse relationships, and coordinating varied service delivery demands creates administrative complexity that some organizations struggle to manage effectively.

Learning from Resilient Ecosystems

The coyote’s expansion across North America while other species contracted offers valuable insights for professional development sustainability. Success came not through superior strength or efficiency in specific contexts, but through superior adaptability across varied contexts.

This adaptability emerges from behavioral flexibility, resource diversification, and environmental responsiveness that allows thriving in both stable and changing conditions. For professional development organizations, these same principles can create resilience that sustains mission-driven work through uncertain funding cycles and changing educational priorities.

The goal isn’t to abandon strategic planning or specialized expertise, but to build these capabilities on foundations flexible enough to evolve with changing circumstances. Like coyotes that maintain their essential nature while adapting their survival strategies, organizations can preserve their core mission while diversifying their resource acquisition approaches.

Every time I look at the coyote portrait on my forearm, I’m reminded that survival often depends more on adaptation than optimization. In a world of limited resources and changing priorities, the organizations that learn to hunt, scavenge, and forage effectively will outlast those that depend on any single prey, no matter how abundant it might seem in the moment.

Key Points

• Resource diversification creates organizational resilience in unstable funding environments
• Multiple smaller revenue streams often provide more stability than single large funding sources
• Successful adaptation requires building versatile capabilities rather than narrow specialization
• Opportunistic resource acquisition should complement rather than replace strategic planning
• Leadership in adaptive organizations requires comfort with uncertainty and skill at rapid assessment
• Quality standards must be maintained across diverse revenue streams to preserve reputation
• Some work requires sustained focus that diversification strategies might compromise

Questions for Reflection

• How dependent is your organization on single funding sources or narrow service offerings, and what risks does this create for sustainability?
• What diverse revenue opportunities exist in your professional development ecosystem that you haven’t explored due to organizational structure or mindset limitations?
• Think about successful pivots your organization has made in response to unexpected challenges. What capabilities enabled that adaptability, and how could they be strengthened?
• What skills would your team need to develop to pursue more diverse funding and service opportunities while maintaining quality standards?
• How do you currently balance strategic focus with opportunistic flexibility in resource acquisition decisions?
• What collaborative relationships could help your organization access funding or service opportunities that exceed your individual capacity?

This piece continues our exploration of how natural survival strategies can inform sustainable organizational development. While nature can’t solve all organizational challenges, understanding adaptive strategies helps us build resilience that sustains mission-driven work through changing circumstances.