The Adaptability Imperative

Introduction

Some organizations see the change coming and still cannot move. I have watched it happen more than once.

Consider a composite, built to show a pattern rather than to describe one company. A large enterprise is at its market-value peak. Its balance sheet is strong, its operations are efficient, and analysts praise its discipline. Then supply lines shift, and a regulatory change makes its core delivery model obsolete within months.

The warning was not missed. The company’s data flagged the shift early. Its leaders understood what it meant.

The organization itself slowed them. It took 45 days to set up a steering committee, 60 more to settle the budget across departments, and another 90 to renegotiate vendor contracts. More than six months passed before the first real change reached the market. By then, a smaller, less well-funded competitor had taken more than a fifth of its market share.

The strategy was not wrong. The structure couldn't execute it at the speed the market required.

The company needed to change direction in about 90 days. Its own processes needed more than twice that.

This article is about closing that distance. It is written for leaders who suspect their own organization might behave this way, and who want to do something about it. I will not offer a formula. I will describe what I have seen work, and I will ask you, at several points, to test it against your own organization.

Adaptability is a capability. You can build it, and building it is a leadership task.

The adaptability gap

Volatility is now the normal condition of business. It is not an interruption.

For decades, leaders were trained to treat volatility as a storm to be weathered before conditions returned to a predictable baseline. That habit made sense. Long periods of stability rewarded it, and many excellent companies built their practices around it. The habit outlived the conditions that justified it.

Volatility is only one of the conditions leaders now face. In recent articles, I have written about ambiguity, uncertainty, volatility, and unpredictability. They interact, and they won't go away. I've concluded that adaptability is the capability that addresses all four. By adaptability, I mean the capacity to recognize marketplace changes and adjust to new conditions and challenges as they emerge.

When the market changes faster than an organization can respond, a gap opens. I call it the adaptability gap: the distance between the environment's pace and the organization’s capacity to act. It seldom appears on a financial statement. It shows up as decisions waiting in queues, capable people leaving because they cannot act, and opportunities seen but not taken.

Past success widens the gap. The more successful an organization has been, the more its excellence can work against it. A practice that once served well hardens into a script. People protect the methods that made the company great and stop asking whether the terrain has shifted. I call this the success trap: practices that drove past success harden into doctrine, and questioning them starts to feel disloyal. Levitt and March described a version of it as the “competency trap”: organizations keep favouring familiar routines that produce acceptable results, and each success makes those routines harder to question.

The liabilities that matter most here are often not on the balance sheet. They are approval chains with many layers, business units that don't share information, and legacy systems nobody can change quickly. Each one slows the response a little. Together they set the speed of the whole organization.

Adaptability is often confused with resilience. They are related, but not the same.

Resilience is the capacity to absorb a shock, recover, and keep going with confidence and energy intact. Adaptability is the capacity to change what the organization does in light of what it has learned. Resilience comes first. Adaptability is not possible until an organization has regained a minimum level of resilience after a shock. Exhausted, frightened, or defensive people cannot explore, ask questions, or learn.

Resilience is also not enough. An organization can bounce back to exactly where it was and be just as exposed to the next shock. Recovery gives it the strength to move forward. Adaptability decides where it moves.

After the last major shock, did your organization recover first and then change? Or did it only recover?

Adaptability is not a heroic response to a crisis. It is a capability the organization builds and keeps.

In earlier articles, I have described adaptation as a loop of five activities:

sense-making → shape → mobilize → learn → adapt

The loop is not strictly linear, but the sections that follow take their parts in turn.

•   Sense-making is reading what is changing in the market and what it means.

•   Shape is turning what you sense into insight, strategic hypotheses, and a shared direction.

•   Mobilize is committing decisions, money, and talent to test those hypotheses. It depends on integration, the ability to act in step across the organization.

•   Learn is turning each experience into a better response next time.

The last section turns to the leader’s role, because none of this works without everyone involved exercising leadership.

Sense-making: reading the market

Adaptability starts with seeing clearly what is changing, and that is harder than it sounds.

Fundamental market changes seldom announce themselves. They are hard to detect because they are unexpected, or because their impact is unclear. People in organizations that have served well-defined markets successfully carry assumptions that their success has validated. Those same assumptions can blind them to emerging threats. The more radical the change, the easier it is to dismiss, because it doesn't resemble anything the organization has dealt with before.

Competitors increasingly change the market in ways that are hard to read. In these moments, sense-making helps. It is a shared, iterative process of interpreting patterns in complex, ambiguous situations. People gather information, look for patterns, and build a coherent account of what is happening. The account is not one person’s. It draws on the collective knowledge of a cross-functional team, which sees more than any single function can.

Sense-making is not forecasting. It does not claim to predict. It aims to reach a shared understanding clear enough to act on, and to keep revising it as new signals arrive. When people help build that understanding, they also gain confidence that they can make things happen in ambiguity.

Three questions can help you test how well your organization does this today:

•          Which signals did we dismiss last year that, in hindsight, should have been taken into account?

•  Who sees our customers most directly, and how does what they see reach the people who decide?

•  Which long-held assumption would we be most uncomfortable testing?

Once the organization has a clear picture of the patterns that matter, it can decide where to defend and where to move. That is the work of the sections that follow.

Shape: turning patterns into direction

Shaping turns what you have sensed into a direction the organization can act on.

Sense-making identifies patterns. Shaping translates them into insight and into hypotheses: specific beliefs about the market, customers, and competitors that the organization can test. Strategy then becomes a set of hypotheses to be tested, not a conclusion to be defended.

This is why a rigid, top-down strategy process struggles in volatile conditions. It is slow and far removed from the market. An emergent approach keeps the direction provisional. The organization moves forward, tests the direction against reality, and refines it from what it learns. The gap between planned intention and realized strategy narrows because the organization shapes the strategy through what it does and discovers.

Strategic thinking does the shaping. It turns scattered observations into a coherent account that others can act on, and it holds today’s operations and tomorrow’s position in view together. Leaders strengthen it by creating regular opportunities for shared reflection, where they interpret signals together and turn them into clear priorities.

Two questions test this in your own organization. Which of our strategic commitments are really hypotheses? And what would we need to see to be able to change them?

Integrate: acting in step across the organization

The organization chart most of us work within was built for a slower world. It took its familiar form in the nineteenth century, shaped partly by large railways and military models, when information moved slowly, and markets changed over decades.

Today that structure sends modern information through a long chain of approvals. By the time a frontline insight has been summarized and passed up several layers, the opportunity it described may be gone. No single layer is unreasonable. Together they set the speed of the whole organization.

Complexity makes this worse. Teams and functions depend on each other so heavily that the organization’s pace settles well below the speed of its market. Customers set the market's pace, and the organization must be able to keep up.

The answer is not to remove structure. Synchronized agility is not chaos, and it is not an absence of oversight. It is a way of working in which cross-functional teams have the authority to act on what they see within clear guardrails and stay coordinated through a shared direction.

A jazz ensemble is a fair picture. Each player responds to the others in the moment, inside a shared key and tempo. Nobody waits for a conductor to approve the next note, and the music still holds together.

Three things make this possible:

•  A shared direction. People know what the organization is trying to achieve and what is not negotiable.

•  Decision rights close to the information. People who witness the change are encouraged to voice their point of view.

• Information that moves across units. What one team learns reaches the others without waiting for a report.

Trust underlies all three. Leaders delegate only what they believe will be handled well, and teams act only if they believe they will not be punished for a reasonable judgment. Psychological safety is key to validating decisions across the teams involved.

Here is a test for your own organization.

Where does a decision travel the farthest before someone approves it? Does it need to travel that far, or could it be made where the information already sits?

Mobilize: moving decisions and money to where they are needed

An organization mobilizes when its decisions, money, and talent can move as fast as the teams agree. Decisions are starting points that are refined as clarity gradually increases.  

Sort decisions by how reversible they are

Analysis paralysis is a symptom of an organization that has been successful for a long time. Every choice gets a business case, a committee, and a consensus search. A simple distinction breaks the logjam. Jeff Bezos described it in his 2016 letter to shareholders, and it is worth borrowing.

• One-way doors are decisions that are hard or impossible to reverse, such as a major acquisition, the sale of core intellectual property, or entry into a new regulated market. They deserve deep deliberation, senior sign-off, and thorough data.

• Two-way doors are decisions that can be undone or corrected within days or weeks, such as a pilot product, a change of campaign, a local supplier, or an adjustment to pricing. They belong with the teams closest to the work.

Bezos also suggested making most decisions with about 70 percent of the information you wish you had. Waiting for certainty feels like diligence. For a two-way door, it is usually an expensive delay, because the cost of a wrong turn is low and the cost of waiting is high.

This only works if two things are true. People must know which kind of decision they are facing, and they must know that a reasonable judgment will be respected. Teams should also record what they decided and why. That record feeds the learning described in the next section.

Make capital able to move

The annual budget is the second common bottleneck. Department heads protect headcount and capital for twelve months at a time. When the market shifts in month three, the money is already committed to plans written the year before.

Capital works better when it can flow. One way is to fund business units for their base operations and hold back a share of the enterprise’s capital and talent budget, say 15 percent, in a central pool. A small, fast investment group meets monthly. A unit that sees a sudden disruption or a gap in customer demand can make its case for part of the pool, and the organization aims to commit funds, reassign people, and stand up a team within about 30 days.  Such a gradual approach suits situations that keep changing.  

The numbers matter less than the question behind them. If your organization could not move a meaningful sum of money and a group of its strongest engineers to a new threat within a month, the limit is not strategy. It's how the organization is built.

How long would that take in yours?

Learn: turning change into capability

Learning is the hinge of the loop. It bridges identifying a change in the market and applying that knowledge to adapt the organization to the market’s new state. It turns experience into insight, and insight into wiser action. Without it, each response is a one-off, and the organization starts from zero the next time.

Four things happen when learning is working:

• Surprises become understanding. A strange customer trend or a missed target stops being noise and becomes an explanation people can act on.

• Assumptions stay current. Obsolete assumptions lead an organization astray. Chris Argyris distinguished two kinds of learning. Single-loop learning corrects an action to get the intended result, without questioning the logic behind it. Double-loop learning examines the assumptions and governing values that shape that logic. It lets the organization change direction before the distance between its thinking and reality becomes a crisis.

• Response gets faster and safer. Lessons from earlier changes give teams a head start. Small tests and pilots produce evidence before the organization commits resources, and failed experiments become inexpensive teachers.

• Strengths do not harden into traps. This is the success trap described earlier. Learning keeps testing whether present strengths still fit.

What one unit learns also needs to travel. When a team develops an effective approach, the organization should share it so a local fix becomes a shared capability.

Two practices make this concrete.

1. Hold a short review after every significant decision or experiment. Ask what we expected, what happened, what we learned, and what we will do differently. Keep it brief, keep it blameless, and share the result beyond the team.

2. Revisit your assumptions on a schedule. Once a quarter, have the leadership team list the five beliefs the strategy depends on and ask what evidence would tell them each is no longer true.

These are small habits, but they are essential in today's highly volatile market.  They carry weight because they are repeated. In practice, I suggest a rhythm: a short weekly team review, a broader monthly learning review, and a quarterly strategy refresh. I describe this rhythm in more detail in “The Learning Link: Turning Experience into Adaptability.”

Ask yourself: when did your organization last change a long-held belief because of what it learned? Who noticed, and what happened next?

The leader’s role: architect, not hero

When an organization’s procedures are too rigid to respond, it turns to individuals. Senior leaders appoint a heroic leader to fix the situation, someone called in to correct things quickly.

Heroic leaders see no need for consultation. They trust their judgment and move fast, confident they know what must happen. They appoint people they see as competent and willing to do what they are told. When they report results, they speak in the first person. The structure below them stays anonymous.

In a stable market, this style's compliance aspect can deliver predictable, incremental results. In a volatile one, it becomes a threat. People wait to be told instead of acting on what they see.

A heroic leader is the wrong person to lead adaptability initiatives. They cannot build trust beyond their close circle, and adaptability depends on that trust. It needs people willing to learn, collaborate, and take reasonable risks to reach a new shore.

Relying on heroes is not a strategy. It is a vulnerability. When adaptability depends on the extraordinary efforts of a few people, it cannot scale. It produces burnout, concentrates risk in a handful of individuals, and gives talented people reasons to leave.

The alternative is not a leader who does less. It is a leader who does different work. Three tasks stand out.

• Set direction and guardrails. Make clear what the organization is trying to achieve and what is not negotiable, so teams can act without asking.

• Build the trust that makes autonomy safe. Listen to the people closest to the change. Admit what you do not know. Treat a reasonable miss as something to learn from.

• Develop people’s capacity to adapt. Adaptability is a capability. It is developed, not innate. Give people real decisions on two-way doors, ask others to lead sense-making, move them across functions, and make time to reflect on what happened.

The structures described in this article make adaptability possible. The leader assumes the challenge of ensuring internal and external alignment.

A simple test: whose decisions would stall in your organization if they were away for two weeks? The answer shows how much of your adaptability depends on a person and how much on the organization.

Final thoughts

Stability was never guaranteed. It was a condition we got used to.

Volatility is now the setting in which organizations operate. The ones that do well won't be the largest, and they will not be the ones with the most polished five-year plan. They will be the ones that can see what is changing, organize so the right people can act, move resources quickly, and learn from each attempt.

Adaptability is not a trait of a few gifted leaders. It is an organizational capability we can build.

No advantage lasts in a volatile market. What lasts is the capacity to renew it.

References

•          Argyris, C. (1977). Double-loop learning in organizations. Harvard Business Review, September–October.

•          Bezos, J. (2017). 2016 Letter to Shareholders. Amazon.com, Inc.

•          Levitt, B., & March, J. G. (1988). Organizational learning. Annual Review of Sociology, 14.

Further reading from Hubert Saint-Onge

•          Saint-Onge, H. (2026). Part 1: The Anatomy of Adaptability. Adaptability from the Inside Out series, SaintOnge Alliance, July 16.

•          Saint-Onge, H. (2026). Part 2: The Thinking Partner for Leadership Development. Adaptability from the Inside Outseries, SaintOnge Alliance.

•          Saint-Onge, H. (2026). The key to adaptability: unlocking the organization’s tacit knowledge. SaintOnge Alliance, September 2.

•          Saint-Onge, H. (2026). How organizations learn, decide, and act when the future is unclear. SaintOnge Alliance, March 24.

•          Saint-Onge, H. (2026). The Learning Link: Turning experience into adaptability. SaintOnge Alliance, March 11.

•          Saint-Onge, H. (2026). The leader’s moral compass: Staying on course in times of volatility. SaintOnge Alliance, June 24.

•          Saint-Onge, H. (2026). Leadership potential: The new currency of organizational resilience. SaintOnge Alliance, August 10.