Research worth bringing back to the room.

Deloitte argues that traditional change management and training are struggling to keep pace with continuous disruption. The alternative is an adaptive experience in which people learn, experiment, receive feedback, and evolve in the flow of work itself.

Instead of preparing people for each new wave of change, build their capacity to keep sensing, learning, and responding as conditions evolve.

A useful provocation: traditional resilience assumes some kind of return to baseline. But when disruption is continuous, there may be no stable “before” to return to. Leaders need the capacity to continually rethink teams, assumptions, hiring, and how they themselves lead. A global CEO survey cited in the piece found 92% believed they needed to cultivate adaptability beyond anything previously imagined.

Don't just become better at recovering. Become better at evolving.

Peter Hirst argues that the AI question is shifting from Are we adopting the technology? to Is the organization itself evolving sufficiently to create sustained value from it?

That means rethinking work, workforce, and workplace — redesigning tasks, developing distinctly human capabilities such as judgment and curiosity, and changing structures rather than simply layering AI onto existing ways of working.

Technology adoption without organizational adaptation leaves the underlying system unchanged.

The World Economic Forum article highlights a widening gap between employer optimism and workforce confidence. It identifies three important shifts: using AI to augment work and employability, moving from linear careers toward more fluid portfolio careers, and strengthening managers as anchors of trust and continuity.

Organizations and people cannot adapt separately. Sustainable adaptation requires both sides to evolve together.

Drawing on Purolator's experience navigating logistics disruption, CEO John Ferguson makes a practical case for developing flexibility before it is needed — using data, scenario thinking, predefined signals, customer insight, and the willingness to pivot as conditions change.

Preparation for uncertainty is different from predicting the future. Build capacity and optionality before the pressure arrives.

Adaptivity is appearing well beyond organizational leadership. Decristan and Dumont define it in education as the fit between instruction and learner characteristics that stimulates learning — integrating cognitive research with the messy realities of real classrooms.

Adaptivity is contextual. The same response is not necessarily right for every person, team, or situation.

One of the most recent Adaptive Leaders articles observes a familiar leadership tendency: organizations are much better at adding priorities, initiatives, and expectations than removing them.

The piece uses Curiosity, Courage, and Care to explore what leaders may need to stop doing in order to make space for what matters most.

Transformation is not always about becoming capable of doing more. Sometimes it requires releasing what no longer serves the next season.

What are we carrying forward simply because we have not had the courage to stop it?