In the current economic environment, advice about anything but survival seems superfluous. So, let’s talk about survival.
Survival of the fittest.
Charles Darwin was, if nothing else, a keen observer. He traveled the world for many years, when doing so risked life and limb, to uncover the patterns of life across generations of species.
What did he observe about “fitness” for survival? Here’s what he found:
“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one most adaptable to change.”
Adaptability. The essential element of survival. Oh boy. Great. We all so-o-o-o love to change.
Right?
WRONG.
Most people LOATHE change. Change involves death. Death to old patterns of behavior. Death to old mental maps of reality that need to be revised. Death to complacency and laziness.
Change is scary…and FEAR kills. Fear FREEZES action.
Worse, in my experience, teams resist change more than individuals do. Why? Because a team needs to accept the need to change as ONE. Everybody, or at least a large majority of the team, needs to agree together that change is needed, and given the individual’s resistance to change, a team can take a long time denying and deciding about that need.
That’s what LEADERSHIP is for.
Great LEADERS know that change is inevitable. They don’t wait for the crisis to prepare their teams for change. They build adaptability into the team by routinely injecting a little chaos into the team’s routine. A team that has had practice adapting to change AS A ROUTINE will meet a crisis with far more confidence than will a team that has grown fat, dumb, and happy with the status quo.
Think “Stegasaurus.”
If you don’t like change, how do you feel about obsolescence?
Confidence is the opposite of fear. Confidence to adapt can only be gained through practice adapting to change, and the right practice always involves stretch, and growth, and risk, and failure. But on a controlled basis. Deliberate discomfort. Requirement for growth. Quick death. Small failure. HUGE learning.
What are your plans for practice?
How do you approach process innovation?
Yesterday I learned something new about this. I attended a great day-long seminar on Managing the Service Enterprise at the Fisher College of Business right here in Columbus on the OSU campus. In 2002, the faculty of the Fisher College teamed up with a number of Ohio-based firms to form the Initiative for Managing Services. Yesterday’s program included four brilliant speakers who all presented ways to deliberately build adaptability into the enterprise. The melody line? DON’T miss this. The is HUGE.
Have a method to deliberately BREAK your most cherished processes.
Set up a “challenger” to compete against every “champion” you’ve got.
Make a commitment to take nothing for granted. Build small experiments alongside your core processes. Let them run for a while. Measure the results. Crown the winner, and move to the new way. Make process innovation a core process. Your team will come to see that change is inevitable. They’ll begin to embrace change, rather than fear it. They’ll gain confidence.
Who knows? They’ll begin suggesting new things to break.
How cool would that be?
Pretty cool.
BUILT TO LEAD 
Great post. Adaptability is a critical capability for the leaders of tomorrow. It is not hard to see that change is happening right in front of our faces. Even our president-elect ran on a ticket of bringing change. Change will happen rather we like it or not. The leaders of the future will be highly adaptable and prepared for the unknown challenges that they may face. However, according to a recent study by IBM only 14% of organizations feel prepared to adapt to change. It is not enough to merely tell your leaders to be adaptable. If that worked we would have much more that 14%. Businesses that recognize the importance of adaptability must select, train and develop leaders to be adaptable so that the business will survive through the ages.