What are we learning now?

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.

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.

Perhaps the most interesting finding is that stalled AI adaptation may not begin with employee resistance at all. Studying leadership teams, the researchers found executives often privately recognized difficult changes that were needed — yet collectively softened, deferred, or abandoned those conclusions when they came together.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.