Organizational and Individual Leadership Capabilities Supporting Adaptability

Part One of Three - in the Adaptability From The Inside Out Series

By Hubert Saint-Onge

I have been thinking and writing about how organizations can best succeed in the turbulent, volatile, and ambiguous environments like the ones we have had for some time. The main conclusion is that adaptability is the key capability they need to thrive. This article outlines how best to develop this keystone capability. It is the first article in a three-part series, Adaptability from the Inside Out, which explores what genuine adaptability requires at the level of practical capability, individual leadership development, and collective organizational thinking.

A definition of organizational adaptability

Adaptability is the capacity to recognize changes in the marketplace and adjust to new conditions and challenges as they emerge. In the current context where ambiguity reigns, adaptability becomes essential to the vitality of an organization. These organizational and individual capabilities, described below, are interlocked with one another like the bricks of a Lego set. The block they form provides the base on which this keystone capability rests.

This paper sets out five organizational capabilities — sensemaking, organizational resilience, organizational learning, vertical and horizontal integration, and building emergent strategy — and five individual leadership capabilities — learning agility, strategic thinking, foresight, courage and calmness, and engaging people in adaptability — that together determine an organization’s capacity to adapt.

A. The key organizational capabilities supporting adaptability

I. Sense Making

A deep-sensing leadership infrastructure is essential to cultivating the collective capacities to co-sense and co-create at the level of the whole system.

In an increasingly volatile, turbulent, and complex environment, many leaders face the critical challenge of understanding market dynamics that affect their ability to build presence in a variety of markets. Layers of ecological, technological, cultural, demographic, social, and economic changes interact. Under these conditions, understanding early signals of change proves elusive.

Unanticipated events keep coming up in a fast-moving geopolitical context. The resulting level of ambiguity makes it difficult to shape appropriate responses.

It is in these contexts that sensemaking becomes essential. The process consists of deploying members of the organization to engage directly with external stakeholders. They then return to the organization to debrief what they have heard in meetings, where they compare notes. Patterns are identified, and hypotheses are generated for validation in further stakeholder discussions.

Once confidence is gained in the conclusions from this exercise, a variety of initiatives are launched to gain traction in the marketplace. Sensemaking serves as the basis for co-developing effective responses to emerging challenges and opportunities.

At its core, sensemaking is a continuous, iterative process that yields sharp insights and concrete market initiatives capable of outdistancing the competition: the foundation of an organization’s capacity to sense its environment and develop effective responses to it.

II. Organizational Resilience

When an organization experiences setbacks, its resilience allows it to absorb the initial shock and minimize the immediate damage. A resilient organization bounces back readily, takes stock of what happened, and keeps moving forward. It will retain its confidence and be ready for the next challenge without losing energy and commitment. This capacity is built rather than assumed.

Organizations become resilient when leaders create psychological safety for people to name what went wrong without blame, when decision-making is sufficiently distributed that no single setback paralyzes the whole system, and when setbacks are treated as a source of learning rather than simply a problem to be moved past.

Adaptability and resilience are often confounded. Resilience is the precursor to adaptability and provides the strength and determination to move forward despite disruptions or failures.

III. Organizational Learning

Sensemaking provides key insights that support the generation of strategies and innovations that competitors cannot easily replicate. Organizational learning becomes a purposeful activity as rapidly changing markets render their operating methods obsolete. Even when they remain dependent on those methods and find it hard to adopt new ones, their ability to learn as an organization enables them to identify what is not working and design new approaches to meet clients’ needs.

Organizational learning embeds new lessons into a company’s collective knowledge, turning fresh insights into how the organization actually works and equipping it to realize its mission. What distinguishes organizational learning from individual learning is that it survives staff turnover: the insight gets written into how decisions are made, not just carried in one person’s head. This happens when new understanding is translated into revised processes, shared language, and updated decision rights, so that what one team learns becomes available to the next.

What makes organizational learning genuinely difficult to sustain — and what lies beneath the surface of even the most carefully designed learning processes — is explored in depth in the third article of this series, The Thinking Organization.

IV. Vertical and Horizontal Integration

Today’s organizations are complex and highly interdependent. When new learning is generated and adopted in one area of the organization, the new ways of working must be understood across other areas and levels of the organization.

Agility is important, but a lack of organization-wide orchestration will create obstacles that will erode effectiveness. When changes are adopted in a given part of the organization, it is key that the groups with whom they interact can work seamlessly with them. Once interdependencies are identified, the groups involved can connect effectively across them.

If, because of sensemaking exercises, new ways of working are put into place in one function, the functions or teams they interact with must be willing to find ways to work with processes across the board. This ongoing harmonization of processes requires a high level of collaboration and integration, particularly as different parts of the organization adjust to the new requirements these changes create.

It is key for responses to changes in the external environment to be aligned across the organization. Higher levels of renewed adaptability will depend on the coherence that can be achieved.

V. Building Emergent Strategy

In an environment marked by high volatility and ambiguity, a rigid, top-down approach to strategy development can no longer keep pace with external developments. Deliberate, top-down strategy formulation is now too slow and too distant from the market to remain effective.

The emergent strategy approach deals with real-time information by leveraging findings from sensemaking, front-line customer interactions, market-based experimentation, and action-driven learning. The information obtained serves to test new ideas and determines what sticks. There are no longer any gaps between planned intentions and realized strategy.

The capabilities developed in identifying what works eventually point to a way forward to defining a coherent strategy grounded in the reality of the marketplace.

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B. The individual leadership capabilities supporting adaptability

I. Learning Agility

Learning agility is the ability to adjust one’s thinking, behaviour, and decision-making in response to changing circumstances, enabling leaders to navigate uncertainty and strengthen team resilience. It shows curiosity, flexibility, and readiness to learn when encountering new situations.

When a leader demonstrates curiosity and openly questions assumptions, it opens others’ minds to new ways of thinking and acting. It lowers resistance to change — both the leader’s own and that of others. Leaders with strong learning agility treat mistakes and unexpected outcomes as information rather than failure, actively seek out feedback that challenges their own assumptions, and draw on experience from one context to inform action in an unfamiliar one. This willingness to be wrong in public is part of what allows them to update quickly rather than defend a position the situation has already outgrown.

How leaders develop this quality of learning agility — and the metacognitive awareness that underlies it — is the subject of the second article in this series, The Thinking Partner.

II. Strategic Thinking

This ability to move from sensing to helping shape collective intent becomes key. Leaders who think strategically give attention to external dynamics, openly articulate the changes they perceive, and recognize the need to exercise proactive ownership alongside their colleagues.

Strategic thinking is what turns scattered observations into a coherent narrative that others can act on. It requires holding the immediate operational reality and the longer-term competitive position in view at the same time — resisting the pull to solve only for what is urgent today at the expense of where the organization needs to be positioned tomorrow.

This capability is strengthened when leaders create regular opportunities for shared reflection, where emerging signals are interpreted collectively and translated into clear strategic priorities.

III. Foresight

Leaders with this ability anticipate challenges and opportunities by recognizing new patterns, and focus on clearly articulating what they see emerging.

They recognize the need to exercise proactive leadership with their colleagues to shape strategic responses to emerging challenges. They see the need to drop obsolete responses and reach for new ways of facing external realities.

They become increasingly confident in supporting and proposing new ideas to move forward, with less pull toward previous ‘tried and true’ practices. They see the need to reshape their organization’s strategic thinking and engage their colleagues in conversations to better navigate rapid technological changes and market disruptions, driven by their clients’ new strategies.

This capability is strengthened when leaders create regular opportunities to test emerging patterns against multiple future scenarios, sharpening the organization’s ability to anticipate rather than merely react.

IV. Courage and Calmness

Courage and calmness allow leaders to provide steadiness when uncertainty rises. They regulate their own responses so that anxiety does not become the organizing force in the system. This gives others permission to pause, reflect, and respond rather than react. In this sense, courage is not bravado; it is the willingness to face difficult realities, challenge outdated patterns, and maintain confidence that new responses can be found.

Calmness also creates psychological safety. When leaders model composure, compassion, and clarity, they make it easier for others to speak honestly about uncertainty, resistance, and emerging risks. This same steadiness helps others stay engaged long enough to find a constructive way forward, rather than disengaging from difficult realities.

This capability becomes most visible when leaders help people move from awareness to action. By staying steady while difficult choices are being considered, they enable teams to experiment, take thoughtful risks, and adopt new practices without feeling overwhelmed by the disruption involved.

V. Engaging People in Developing Adaptability

The need for adaptability often emerges unexpectedly. Change is demanding: it adds to the burden of ongoing work, disrupts established plans and activities, and understandably provokes resistance. Yet in an unpredictable business environment, adaptability is no longer optional; long-term competitiveness depends on it.

For this reason, leaders must work with their teams to build readiness for adaptability before pressure makes change unavoidable. This begins with conversations that help employees develop a shared understanding of why flexibility is needed and what it will require in practice.

As these conversations deepen, they can move people from debate to reflective dialogue, where they think together about emerging realities and possible responses. Conversational capability therefore becomes central to shifting established patterns and strengthening the organization’s capacity to detect external and internal trends early and respond quickly.

• They create collective ownership of the required changes and help manage adaptive work in ways that reinforce people’s commitment to the organization.

• They accelerate the organization’s capacity to respond to market changes in line with its strategic intent, strengthening its overall strategic capacity.

• They also build organizational strength while preserving the essence of what the organization stands for.

  
  

In this way, adaptability becomes sustainable when people are not merely asked to accept change, but are actively engaged in making sense of it, shaping it, and translating it into coordinated action across the organization.

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Bringing the capabilities together

These ten capabilities do not operate independently. Sensemaking feeds organizational learning; learning is only useful once it is integrated across the organization and translated into emergent strategy. Individually, leaders who bring learning agility, strategic thinking, and foresight to this process are the ones who can act on what the organization senses: their courage and ability to engage others determine whether the organization actually moves. Remove any one block, and the structure they form together becomes weaker.

Organizations that build both sets of capabilities — the organizational infrastructure to sense, learn, integrate, and strategize, and the individual leadership capacities to think, act, and bring others along — are better positioned to convert ambiguity into advantage. Adaptability, in this sense, is not a single skill to acquire but a system of interlocking capabilities to cultivate.

The companion articles in this series explore two dimensions that this framework opens but does not fully address: how individual leaders develop the metacognitive awareness and relational intelligence these capabilities require, and how organizations address the collective cognitive layer that either enables or quietly undermines all ten capabilities described here.