Adaptability is at the heart of Open Work (along with Humanity and Systems Thinking).
From our upcoming book, The Open Executive:
After the relative peace, predictability, and steady growth of the second half of the 20th Century in most of the developed world, there is a fundamental shift happening — in society and in technology (especially digital, material, and biological). New generations of staff — and customers — see the world very differently to their bosses. Nobody can foresee what technology will enable even a few years ahead, COVID started spreading in 2020. ChatGPT was released at the end of 2022. We are sure you’re well aware of how the game has changed. Forecasts and plans were always bets, but the odds used to be pretty good. Now the future is increasingly unknowable. There is a quote we always come back to, from General Stanley McChrystal, leader of the US forces in Iraq against the Taliban:
The 21st Century is a different game with different rules… The pursuit of efficiency was once a laudable goal, but being effective in today’s world is less a question of optimizing for a known (and relatively stable) set of variables than responsiveness to a constantly shifting environment. Adaptability, not efficiency, must become our central competence.
Which means all organisations have to change how they work, from defined, repeatable, and optimising, to aware, loosely coupled, and constantly adapting.
It is outside the scope of this book, but in brief, here is our view of adaptability:
