About the Institute
Exploring and advancing adaptivity in people, leadership, and organizations.
The Institute for Adaptivity connects research, ideas, and practice to better understand how people, leaders, and organizations learn, transform, and develop the capacity to meet what changing contexts and purpose require.
We are interested not only in how people respond to change, but in the deeper work of adaptivity: how we anticipate and notice what is changing, question assumptions, learn and unlearn, develop new capacities, and transform without losing what matters.
The principles are not new. The conditions are.
Our work draws from established thinking across adaptive leadership, human development, organizational learning, systems thinking, leadership formation, and transformation.
The Institute brings these perspectives together while asking a contemporary question:
What helps people, leaders, and organizations become more capable of what the next season requires?
We explore that question through research, synthesis, practical frameworks, conversations, and work with leaders and organizations facing real adaptive challenges.
Founder
Norbert Woo
Founder, Institute for Adaptivity
Executive Leader · Advisor · Coach · Facilitator · Guide
aka The Adaptivity Monk
Norbert has spent more than 25 years leading, advising, coaching, and facilitating across Asia and North America in multinational, entrepreneurial, advisory, nonprofit, and mission-driven environments.
His work sits at the intersection of adaptive leadership, transformation, human development, and organizational change. He partners with leaders and teams to make sense of complexity, surface assumptions and patterns that may be limiting their response, and develop the capacity to navigate what their next season requires.
His perspective on adaptivity has been shaped by both leading inside organizations and working alongside leaders facing change. Over the course of his career, he has led and advised across strategy and execution, finance, business development, product management, sales and marketing, digital transformation, and operations — often where multiple functions, priorities, and perspectives intersect.
His leadership and advisory experience includes work with organizations such as Microsoft, Asurion, Coach, Rogers Communications, Merrill Lynch, KPMG, and the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement.
Today, Norbert brings that operating experience together with executive coaching, advisory, facilitation, leadership development, and reflective practice. His interest is not simply in helping leaders solve the challenge in front of them, but in exploring what the challenge may be asking of the leader, the team, or the organization itself.
What is this challenge asking us to see differently — and who might we need to become because of it?
Norbert is a Certified Public Accountant, a certified coach through the Institute of Executive Coaching and Leadership, and a member of the International Coaching Federation. He is also a practitioner in Hogan Assessments, Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), Leadership Circle, Working Genius, and Immunity to Change (ITC) — a research-based approach developed through the work of Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey at Harvard. He is also active as a community board member, advisor, and volunteer.
From ideas to practice
The Institute is not intended to stop at ideas.
Through coaching, advisory, facilitation, workshops, and partnerships, we work with leaders and organizations to bring adaptivity into the challenges they are actually facing.
Research can illuminate the challenge.Work With Us →
Transformation still has to be lived.