Adaptivity
What is adaptivity?
Adaptability helps us adjust when circumstances change. Adaptivity asks a broader question: what should change, what should remain, and how do we learn our way forward? It includes the ability to adapt, together with discernment, anchoring, alignment, and experimentation.
Capability matters. Capacity reaches deeper.
A new skill or process may be necessary. An adaptive challenge can also ask us to rethink assumptions, change relationships, exercise different judgment, let go of an old identity, or become a different kind of leader or team. Capacity names that wider readiness to see, choose, act, and keep growing.
The four questions
- 01
What is changing around us?
What signals matter, and what are we assuming they mean?
- 02
What needs to change in us?
What patterns, capabilities, relationships, or ways of leading does this reality ask us to develop?
- 03
What must not be lost?
Which commitments should anchor the change, and which familiar practices can be released?
- 04
What might we try next?
What meaningful experiment could help us act and learn before we have certainty?
NoticeEvaluateFocusAlignTransformAnchorExperimentLearn
These practices recur; they are not a rigid eight-step method.
Where the thinking comes from
The principles are not new. We connect established work on leadership, development, learning, and organizations, then ask what it means under conditions of continuous change.
Adaptive LeadershipRonald Heifetz and colleagues: technical problems versus challenges requiring people to learn and change.
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 ChangeRobert Kegan and Lisa Lahey: competing commitments can protect the existing pattern despite sincere intentions.
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 DevelopmentGrowth in how people see, think, relate, and lead, beyond acquiring skills.
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 and Systems ThinkingStructures, incentives, and relationships shape what a system can change.
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 CapabilitiesDavid Teece: sensing, seizing, and transforming resources in changing conditions.
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.
This is Teece's account of organizational strategy. The Institute's four questions draw on it alongside the other ideas here; they are not part of his framework.
Continuous AdaptationLearning, experimentation, and feedback in everyday work.
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 an adaptive approach were 2.4× more likely to report better financial results and more meaningful work. (Source: Deloitte, 2026 Global Human Capital Trends.)