Adaptability

A key outcome of development of an individual leader or team or organization is building increased capability to adapt to meet the organization’s challenges.^[1] Adaptability for the purpose of performance is an effective change in behavior in response to an altered or unexpected situation.^[1]

Tip	Not all organizations stress adaptability. Typically it is only those organizations impacted by the rapid pace of events and the dynamic changes that impact their operations.

History is replete with accounts of adaptation, hinging on a leader’s ability to have uncanny insight into the situation, to be keenly self-aware, and to have a mindset and knowledge that promotes adaptation.^[1]

Adaptability for an individual means having broad and deep knowledge and a good mix of skills and characteristics (see table 5-3). Critical and creative thinking skills are needed when new situations are encountered and the team does not have existing knowledge to use in adaptation.

Table 1. Skills and characteristics of adaptability
Skills	Characteristics
Quickly assess the situation.	Open-minded.
Recognize changes in the environment.	Flexible, Versatile, Innovative.
Identify critical elements of new situation.	Sees change as an opportunity.
Apply new skills in unanticipated contexts.	Passionate learner.
Change responses readily.	Comfortable in unfamiliar environments.
Use multiple perspectives through critical and creative thinking.	Comfortable with ambiguity.
Avoid oversimplification.	Maintain appropriate complexity in knowledge.

Adaptability for a team means having a variety of skills within the team to enable adaptation.^[1] Adaptability is enhanced when members of the team apply unique knowledge to a problem in new ways.^[1]

Developing expertise is important to enable adaptable performance later.^[1] Having multiple cues to knowledge determines whether atypical, yet useful, knowledge is recalled when needed.^[1] Automatic recall can allow greater spare capacity to deal with novel and complex aspects of a problem.^[1] Automatic recall, such as pattern recognition, can develop through repeated training beyond performance standards.^[1] Being able to adapt depends on the effort ahead of time that goes into developing the capability to adapt.^[1]

While many think of adaptability as a constant good, changing from a known, workable response is not always the best course.^[1] Adaptation involves knowing or deciding whether to adapt, what to adapt to, over what timeframe to adapt, and how to adapt.^[1] Adaptability is enabled by:

Recognizing the need for change or recognize a need to take action.^[1]
Knowing the cues that point to real, meaningful differences and cause-effect relationships.^[1]
Having a keen ability to discriminate among environmental cues.^[1]
Having flexible knowledge triggered from different cues. Useful knowledge is likely structured in modular chunks that can recombine in new ways. Understanding the principles and theory behind facts can contribute to novel application of knowledge. This characteristic is cognitive flexibility.^[1]
Seeing multiple sides of an issue and a drive to work toward the best one. Often, multiple sides need integration to derive the best perspective. Openness, seeing opposites, selecting the best of opposing approaches, designing compromise, or resolving contradictions aid integration.^[1]
Thinking in reverse time. This involves being able to think from a desired end state through the prior steps that reach it. It may involve going from constraints or possibilities to figure what is doable, what are plausible goals.^[1]
Handling multiple lines of thought. Involves tracking multiple issues or questions, prioritizing among them, remembering lesser issues while maintaining an overarching perspective, and returning to think about lesser issues when there is time available to think about them.^[1]
Changing perspective. This is referred to as decentering and involves an ability to move away from one’s center or viewpoint to overcome thinking obstacles and blind spots.^[1]
Thinking in progressively deeper ways. Involves thinking at the right level of depth and breadth that optimize effort on thinking to match the gravity of the situation.^[1]
Predicting. Involves going beyond first-order or obvious meaning, to broaden thinking to future classes of situations.^[1]
Visualizing and conceptualizing. Involves ability to imagine complex or unusual relationships, possibilities, or unforeseen consequences and relationships.^[1]
Thinking holistically. Involves seeing wholes, sets of relationships and interactions, instead of analytical, decomposed, individual, or isolated parts. Relates to an ability to "see" in dynamics— moving pictures—instead of a static snapshot.^[1]
Mentally simulating what could happen. Mental simulation means to mentally construct and think through a model of a problem, situation, or potential solution to determine important relationships. The process will gauge how much of some action or resource does it take to create a noticeable difference in an outcome?^[1]

To develop adaptability, leaders encourage the following by planning individual or unit events or reinforcing them as they occur during the normal course of collective training or operations:

Develop sound foundational knowledge and encourage the search for other sources of information. Having a substantial base of knowledge allows leaders to have something ready to apply to new situations and to adjust from the known to the unfamiliar.^[1]
Expand ways of thinking through emphasis on improving critical and creative thinking. Since adaptability opportunities occur in unfamiliar situations, leaders will not have a past answer to apply. Leaders can adapt by thinking through the change using principles of critical and creative thinking. Critical thinking helps make fine-distinctions and connections among concepts, which is useful when analyzing a situation or generating and evaluating solutions.^[1]
Practice with repetition under varied, challenging conditions intentionally selected to prompt adaptability. Practice should allow adequate time for feedback and reflection. Many practice experiences allow leaders to learn about their ability to form situational understanding and the fit of their thought process to multiple problems and the variations that can occur.^[1]
Take advantage of daily events as opportunities for learning,practice,and reflection. Leaders who have a mindset for learning from all activities will be creating knowledge and patterns of thought that can apply to unpredicted situations.^[1]
Create and maintain a supportive culture of innovation, autonomy, and freedom to fail. Learning organizations support the conditions where learning and development will thrive.^[1]

1. U.S. Army Leadership Development Manual, FM 6-22

Updated on 27 Nov 2019