Trying to describe the techniques used by the Org to present "new light" and their efforts at "tacking" can be difficult without the right words. I just finished Robert Crompton's Counting the Days to Armageddon and thought I'd share his definitions for these actions, which are so hard to put into words. It's also validating (read: it helps to know I'm not crazy) to realize how many others - including published authors - recognize the games the Org plays
To handle the complexities, it is useful to identify the range of basic ways in which millennialist systems may be adapted in response to the divergence between expectations and reality. The first possibility, which is hardly a modification at all, is displacement, whereby new areas of concern are brought to the fore and attention is diverted from potentially disillusioning scrutiny. The second possibility is redefinition of terms, whereby a system which had apparently failed can be retained with fulfilments matched to developing affairs rather than to orginal predictions. Thirdly, there is the bolder step of reassignment of expected events to different dates to produce a revised system. The fourth sort of response to perceived failure, of course, is replacement of one whole system by another. Finally, a millennialist system may be modified by attrition, or the unwitting loss of detail from otherwise unamended areas as modifications elsewhere, or simply the passage of time, force their own revisions.
One other technique is the development of "prophetic types" from subjects that went ignored until it was determined they could be useful.
With the passage of time, any predictive system must undergo change; there must come an accumulation of greater detail in the historical component of the system and a corresponding reduction in the predictive component. In the most straightforward case, yesterday's forecast becomes today's report. In the least satisfactory case, by contrast, the balance of detail between the two parts remains the same as unfulfilled expectations are continually deferred.... It has already been observed that developing events may be allowed to redefine predictions, as happened in the case of the Seventh-Day Adventist understanding of the cleansing of the sanctuary, and as was implicit in the later Watch Tower understanding of the end of the 'times of the Gentiles.' But further, the exposition of the prophetic corpus in the light of developing events may begin to treat areas which had previously received little or no attention and which had not, therefore, generated any predictions. Rutherford's treatment of Elijah, Elisha, Jehu and Jonadab is an example of this process.