You’ve just closed the books on another successful quarter. Your team overcame some challenges to deliver for your customers, and your market share is steady. Employee morale seems stable, and all signs indicate your organization is in a good position—resolute and ready to handle whatever comes next.
But don’t get too comfortable. You ain’t seen nothing yet!
Change is happening faster than ever before, and it’s only accelerating. Companies in every industry face an onslaught of potential perils: tough competitors, a looming labor shortage (Source: Lightcast), supply chain issues, and disruptive technology. The survival statistics are startling: nearly half of new companies don’t last five years and over 65% close within a decade (Source: BLS). Even among the Fortune 500, 88% of companies that existed in 1955 are gone (Source: AEI). The average lifespan of S&P 500 companies has fallen from 61 years in 1958 to less than 18 by 2025, and McKinsey has predicted that 75% of today’s S&P 500 won’t make it to 2027.
Consider the following:
- BlackBerry, the mobile device of choice for business users…until the iPhone redefined what a mobile device could do.
- Kmart, whose groundbreaking “Blue Light Special” made them a retail innovator…until they failed to adapt to e-commerce
- WeWork, a juggernaut, growing like gangbusters on the remote work trend, only to miscue on COVID workplace changes and file for bankruptcy in 2023.
- Peloton, which built a cult-like following during COVID but failed to pivot as pandemic restrictions lifted and gyms reopened again.
The fact is, most organizations are only prepared for the situations they know and can see coming. Disruptions are within their scope of expectations, and they know they’ll only have to adapt so far in order to roll with the punches.
Assuming you can adapt to anything because you’ve always adapted before is a fatal mistake. That false sense of security becomes apparent when a Black Swan event strikes. And make no mistake: they’re coming.
Today, we see entire business models evaporate in months, not years. Supply chains are being completely redesigned around dynamic geopolitical turmoil, and more AI technologies like DeepSeek are waiting in the wings.
Are you truly ready? Or is your comfort masking an inconvenient truth? Here are the hidden signs your organization isn’t quite as adaptable as you think:
The Corporate Ego Looms Large
We often hear the phrase “too big to fail” in reference to global Fortune 500 institutions or banks. But the truth is any size organization can fall victim to an overinflated ego. Maybe you’re the market leader or you feel very confident in your customers’ loyalty. Or perhaps you’ve been first to market with an innovative product or service. But what good is being first if the second one is better?
Operating under the assumption that you’ll always be a winner is foolish and creates complacency among your team. When there’s no incentive to push the envelope, why bother innovating or sticking your neck out for a new idea? Ultimately, this ego creates an environment where individual and organizational Adaptability bottom out. And as soon as there’s a disruption, it causes chaos.
Adaptability is like a muscle: you have to work it in order for it to stay strong. Don’t assume that you’ll always be the biggest, strongest or fastest because there’s certainly a sleeper waiting in the wings.
Treating The Symptoms As Individual Problems
We’ve probably all known —or maybe even experienced it for ourselves—someone who had a myriad of medical issues. They see numerous specialists and take multiple medications to treat their symptoms, only to discover that the root cause is a single underlying disease or syndrome. Once that’s addressed, all of their symptoms fade away.
Just as the human body is a complex system, so is an organization. At first, many of the issues seem unrelated. Slumping sales, staff turnover, missed deadlines, and order backlogs might seem like separate issues to be addressed with each department: sales, HR, engineering, and production. But just like doctors, companies also often fail to see the holistic issues at the core driving all the outward symptoms.
Operating in this piecemeal manner is a sign that Adaptability Intelligence is lacking. A successful business strategy requires holistically addressing all of the individual parts so that when change is on the horizon, you can move and respond as a whole. In an organization, just as in medicine, a cohesive approach is essential in triage, treatment and prevention.
Focusing On The Wrong Issue
You’ve no doubt heard the adage, “When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” When looked at through the lens of Adaptability Intelligence, the idea manifests as organizational shortsightedness: when you’re in the thick of a situation, it’s hard to see outside your comfort zone or beyond your past experiences.
For example, it’s easy to assume that a decline in sales is because you have a sales problem. Maybe you should hire new salespeople? Send them for training? Change up your strategy? Reach out to more customers?
But what if the problem isn’t with your sales team? What if the problem is your market has shifted (looking at you, Peloton and WeWork)? Your customers value something different now, yet you’re losing ground because you’re still trying to solve their previous pain points.
Adaptability Intelligence requires being able to see outside of your sphere, to look out onto the horizon and understand the forces at work in your market and in the world at large.
Things Are Too Calm
You know that moment in a horror film, just before the villain strikes? It’s eerie. The victim’s unsuspecting sense of calm is unsettling. You know something is about to happen, but you’re still startled when it does.
If it’s been 6-12 months since your last big change, you should probably start to question your adaptability. Your calm is likely to be shattered—soon. Disruption has increased 33% year over year, and 183% over the past four years (Source: Accenture). Over the last couple of centuries, companies had to reinvent themselves every 25 or 30 years to survive. Now, that cycle is compressed: by some estimates, delaying reinvention beyond 4 years can be catastrophic.
This accelerated timeline means you need to be just as concerned about stagnation as you are about change that comes too fast or unexpected. Research shows a direct correlation between increased transformation and success (Source: McKinsey). If you’re not innovating, learning and adapting on your own volition, you can bet that your competitors are, and sitting idly to wait for the next big thing is just as dangerous as major upheaval.
The Friction Is Too Coarse
With any change or adaptation, there’s bound to be some friction. Even in the most adaptable organizations, things don’t go perfectly smoothly all the time, and that’s OK! In fact, if it did, you’d never get to flex that Adaptability muscle. That friction is where the fine-tuning takes place. It’s where you put on the finishing touches and polish up the program or implementation to optimize the outcome.
The problem arises when that friction turns from delicate polish into coarse sandpaper, eating away at the integrity of the program or organization’s culture itself. If every change—whether self-implemented or thrust upon you—creates tension, resistance, and erosion, it not only slows progress and detracts from outcomes but also becomes exhausting. Soon, your team is burned out, miserable, and just plain over it. That’s especially true if leadership is out of touch with the realities of how rough it is at the operations level.
Being honest about the level of friction in the organization is essential. You need to understand the organizational environment in its truest, raw form in order to make adjustments to reduce that friction and optimize adaptability.
The bottom line is this: if you think you know what’s coming, think again. While it sounds hyperbolic, the monster under the bed is real, and it’s waiting for you to become lulled into a false sense of security before it strikes.
Adaptability Intelligence isn’t something that just happens—it has to be intentional, undertaken with purpose, and practiced daily.
Start now with an AQai Adaptability Assessment to gauge your organization’s true Adaptability Quotient (AQ). With this baseline, you can begin implementing strategies to practice agility and become more adaptable—to be both a change maverick and resilient in the face of unexpected hurdles.