About Adaptivity
Adaptivity goes deeper.
Adaptability is often understood as our ability to adjust when circumstances change.
Adaptivity is the capacity to sense what is changing, examine what may need to change in us, learn and experiment in real time, and transform for what lies ahead — while remaining anchored in what matters.
Adaptivity begins with four foundational questions:
- 01
What is changing around us?
- 02
What needs to change in us?
- 03
What must not be lost?
- 04
What might we try next?
Where did these ideas come from?
The principles aren't new.
The conditions are.
The Institute For Adaptivity does not claim to have invented a new management theory. Instead, we explore and connect established ideas about how people and systems respond when existing answers are no longer enough — and ask what they mean in a world of continuous change.
The roots
Established ideas, new conditions.
Adaptive Leadership+
Ronald Heifetz and colleagues distinguished between technical problems, which can often be solved using existing knowledge and expertise, and adaptive challenges, which require people themselves to learn, change, and develop new capacity.
Sometimes the challenge is not simply knowing what to do. We may need to become capable of doing what the new situation requires.
Immunity to Change+
Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey's work helps explain why sincere intentions often fail to create lasting change.
We can genuinely want one thing while simultaneously protecting competing commitments, assumptions, habits, or identities that keep the existing system in place.
The question shifts from “What should we do differently?” to “What may be keeping us from changing?”
Adult Development+
Adaptive challenges often ask more of us than new skills. They ask us to reconsider assumptions, release old patterns, and grow in how we see, think, relate, and lead.
That is why adaptivity attends not only to what an organization does, but to who its people are becoming.
Organizational Learning & Systems Thinking+
People and systems respond in patterns. What looks like resistance is often a system protecting itself.
Looking at the whole — structures, incentives, relationships, habits — reveals what would actually need to change for something new to hold.
Dynamic Capabilities+
David Teece describes dynamic capabilities as an organization's ability to sense opportunities, seize them, and continually transform by reconfiguring resources as markets and technologies change.
Unlike ordinary capabilities that help organizations perform today's work efficiently, dynamic capabilities help leaders reposition the organization for what comes next — often relying on entrepreneurial judgment, not just established routines.
Continuous Adaptation+
Today, AI and accelerating disruption are pushing these ideas further. Deloitte describes a shift away from episodic change toward adaptive capability embedded in everyday work — where people continually experiment, learn, receive feedback, and evolve.
Organizations successfully cultivating this approach were 2.4 times more likely to report stronger financial results and more meaningful work.