I would guess that evolution would be helped along if organisms initiated greater variations when conditions became adverse; this would be just a general search for alternatives, not “knowing” or “deliberately aiming” at inventing something helpful or beneficial. No purpose or teleology is implied here.

Many organisms normally use asexual reproduction (fission or budding) when environmental conditions are favourable; yeast is an example. But they switch to sexual reproduction under adverse conditions, since sexual reproduction produces more genetic variety. with greater variety, natural selection has a chance to favour the more successful variations and eliminate the less successful ones. We can observe this directly in real time when bacteria adapt to our use of antibiotics and become resistant to them.

We would then have alternating periods of quiet growth in good times (a plateau) and periods of rapid change (crises) when organisms are challenged by something like climate change or hostile attack. In other words, a run and rise scheme, like a staircase. A punctuated evolution.