Lessons from the Book 📚 The Adaptation Advantage

What’s in it for me? Learn how to embrace adaptability in the workplace.

Listen. 

That was the sound of one second. And what happened while you were listening?

Well, among other things, Visa processed 1,700 transactions; Amazon robots packed 17 packages; Twitter users posted 9,000 tweets; and people searched 76,000 things on Google. Oh, and 2.8 million emails were sent as well. 

It’s hard to imagine the sheer scale of it all. 

Stuff is changing fast these days. And if all this happens in a single second, imagine what happens in a day, a week, a year.

One of the many consequences of “things happening” is that the world of work is evolving at a pace that will make your head spin. You know this already – the media’s constantly declaring that robots are taking over our workspaces and coming after our jobs.

And it looks like we have a pretty good reason to be afraid – before too long, we’ll be out of work, sitting at home with nothing to do . . . 

But, according to Heather McGowan and Chris Shipley, authors of The Adaptation Advantage, perhaps the opposite is true. Instead of believing we’re in competition with tech, we can use technology to our advantage, benefitting from the additional time that tech saves us in order to continue evolving. And this is our big advantage: our capacity to adapt. 

Things are changing fast at the moment – and you’re already adapting.

Not to freak you out or anything, but if you think things are changing fast now . . . just you wait!

The rate of change is increasing exponentially. Which means that right now is actually the slowest rate of change you’ll ever experience.

Here’s just one example of the huge-scale changes that are underway.

When you think of the biggest populations on Earth, you probably think of China and India. But what about social media populations? 

There are 2.2 billion Facebook users, compared to China’s 1.34 billion people. And 1.9 billion YouTubers, compared to 1.23 billion Indians. 

WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger also beat India when it comes to population size. And these are communities that have sprung up over just a few decades.

And there are other changes too. Demographically, huge shifts are taking place in the Western world in terms of race, religion, gender identity, aging populations. While attitudes towards issues like racism and sexual harassment have changed almost overnight. So it’s hard to imagine where exactly we’ll be in a decade’s time.

And when it comes to changes in the workplace, there’s, of course, the impact of technology, but that’s been going on for a while now. Computers have been changing the workplace for decades. So have smart digital assistants – like PalmPilot which launched wayback in 1996. 

And there’s a good reason for this change: machines are genuinely better than humans at routine and well-defined tasks. That is just a fact. 

But this doesn’t mean we’re about to lose our jobs to robots, in fact, we might say the opposite is true. Think about all the ways that technology already helps you in your work. Most of us use phones or laptops daily, we stay connected with people all over the world. You might use platforms like Upwork or Fiverr to outsource work, platforms that help you break down big tasks into smaller, more manageable units – also known as the atomization of work.

Meanwhile, tech is also behind the automation of many work processes, from batch-sending emails to automatically updating calendars. We use tech in some cases to enhance human capabilities, a concept called augmentation. Just think of surgical robots helping doctors in ER – or of GPS systems allowing drivers to navigate their city quickly. 

So, yes – tech is rapidly changing the workplace. But we are accommodating it. And it’s helping us. Thanks to these three A’s - atomization, automation and augmentation - tech is far from stealing our jobs, it’s actually giving us back precious moments which we can re-invest in ourselves; from learning new skills to re-prioritizing romantic relationships. 

We need to stop defining ourselves by “what” we do.

So, how do you capitalize on this additional time? How do you figure out what to do with it? What to achieve in your personal life and career? 

A good trick is to begin by shifting that question from “what exactly do you want to do?”, to “why exactly do you want to do it?”

How often have you been asked, “What do you do for a living?” And, be honest, how often have you asked the question yourself?

The exchange is ubiquitous. Chances are, when you meet someone, this is one of the first things you talk about. In fact, we define ourselves by our work – and we expect people to have clearly defined careers like “lawyer” or “doctor.”

We even encourage this attitude in young people. We ask children what they want to be when they grow up – and subtly nudge them in sensible directions when they tell us they’d like to grow up to be “a unicorn.” We also ask students what they want to major in; even in those incredibly formative years, we’re expecting them to specialize.

The narratives we tell ourselves about our careers are limiting. They drive people down particular paths that may not suit them and reinforce stereotypes – just think, for example, how few women have traditionally gone into scientific fields. 

And these narratives do something else as well. They shield us from the most important truth about the world of work today: we cannot just do one thing any more! The world of work is changing incredibly fast and we have no option other than to adapt. 

So, instead of thinking about a career in terms of a “What” question, think of it in terms of an evolving “Why” question.  

Along the course of your career, you’ll experience setbacks – everyone does. Even the mighty Steve Jobs was famously fired from his own company, Apple. But as he reflected afterward, getting fired turned out to be a huge positive. Jobs found himself starting again. He tapped into a rich, new stream of creativity, founding Pixar and achieving huge success in a new industry – before triumphantly returning to Apple and steering the company to enormous global success.

We all need to develop an agile mindset and tap into what makes us unique as humans.

So how do you put your adaptation advantage into practice? 

In short, it comes down to being agile – and to do this, you need to be constantly learning.

You’ll need to learn on an individual level, but also on the level of your business. There are four stages in the learning process that form a kind of S-curve on a graph: explore, experiment, execute, and expand. 

In the first stage, you’re exploring what you or your company needs to improve. Maybe sales are sluggish; maybe your product is out of date. Then you start to experiment with new ideas –  that’s when the curve of the S starts to shoot up in the middle. The execute stage puts the best of your new ideas into practice, and the expand phase optimizes them as you continue to learn about performance.

This isn’t just a one-off process; it’s something you need to repeat over and over, as and when your business requires it. Explore, experiment, execute, expand. And this is where agility comes into the equation. As other variable change you need to be able to keep moving – to keep embracing new projects, or new approaches to old projects. 

Now, you may find yourself panicking at this stage. Maybe you’re wondering whether all of this continual, agile learning is also going to involve devoting time to picking up a bunch of brand-new skills, like engineering or coding. But thankfully, these aren’t the kind of skills that are going to be most useful to you on your journey.

According to the Institute for the Future, the skills that we need most of all, in fact relate to social intelligence and thinking in novel and adaptive ways. The World Economic Forum similarly values creativity and emotional intelligence above so many other skills. 

In a nutshell, social skills are key. They’re critical – maybe even more important than the tech skills we tend to want to prioritize, like STEM subjects in education: science, technology, engineering, and math. All across the world, it’s assumed that these hard, scientific skills are the ones we need in our new digital age. But according to PricewaterhouseCoopers’ 2019 survey, 77 percent of CEOs said they couldn’t find workers with the uniquely human skills they needed: skills like creativity, problem solving, leadership, and – it’s in the title – adaptability.

If you think about it, it makes perfect sense. Tech is getting ever more effective at carrying out well-defined, mathematical tasks. But it’s still largely useless when it comes to things like creativity. These are our skills, they are our opportunity, with our non-machine brains, to excel. 

The new world of work will require different things from its leaders.

So, who is going to be taking the lead in this bold new world of work? 

Not the robots, that’s for sure! As we’ve learnt, leadership requires a uniquely human skill set.

But not everyone is a born leader. And in fact, many people have alarming tendencies when given positions of power. An amazing experiment from 2015 proved the point well. Dr. Dacher Kelter from the University of California, put groups of three people together to collaborate on a routine task. He randomly put one of the three people in charge and left them together in a room with nothing else but a tray of four chocolate chip cookies – four cookies between three people. 

Dr. Kelter observed something interesting: in each study group, every single time, the person to take the extra cookie was – surprise, surprise – the leader. And according to Dr. Kelter, they enjoyed themselves – gleefully covering themselves in crumbs as their subordinates looked on.

If we look to history, as well as science, it becomes clear, there’s something inherently corrupting about power. So, how do we take steps to prevent bad leadership? We have to devote time to learning good leadership skills. 

According to the author there are two key components to good leadership: first, you must model the way, next, you enable others to act.

Modeling the way is leadership in the truest sense: it’s being unafraid to go first, allowing yourself to be vulnerable and making sure your employees trust you. Given how much change is required in the workplace these days, leaders need to act with confidence when taking leaps of faith; this will help their employees to trust them. 

Enabling other people to act, meanwhile, is about leaders trusting other people. Things aren’t just complicated these days; they’re complex – there’s an element of unpredictability. So a single leader is probably not going to be able to understand every part of their company’s work in detail. Leaders need to be OK with their employees knowing more than they do on certain topics. Leaders also need to create a work environment that allows other people to thrive, with an emphasis on wellness, respect, and psychological safety. Leading, quite simply, is not all about the bottom line any more – it’s about creating a great place for other people to work.

One last aspect of good leadership in a fast changing world: you need to know when to pivot. It sounds crazy, but it’s often the most profitable companies that find themselves at the greatest risk these days. Because when we get too comfortable, we forget the advantages of adaptation and we get stuck in old habits. 

An adaptive organization is one that puts culture and capacity first.

We’re going to end by asking the question,  what makes a successful organization? One traditional view is that organizations exist purely to serve their shareholders – that’s the view famously put forward by Milton Friedman in 1970. Friedman’s belief was incredibly influential for many years. But these days? Not so much.

Instead of focusing so relentlessly on the financials, it’s possible to look at organizations across two key areas: culture and capacity.

We’ve already touched on culture. It’s the atmosphere that leaders help to create within a company. A healthy company culture is likely to lead to prosperous and innovative work. Think of culture as your company’s heart.

Capacity, on the other side, is your organization’s brain. It’s how able you are to respond to challenges and opportunities  – how well you cope as things change. There are practical concerns, like how much product you can make and which markets you can reach – but it’s also about your company’s mental capacity to handle change.

This is a more radical suggestion than it sounds at first. The goal of your organization isn’t value creation. It’s increased capacity – the ability to do more of what you do, even as things around you change.

The products that you’re creating, become an expression of your culture and proof of your capacity. They’re not the point of your company in and of themselves – not in a world where you might have to pivot at any moment and start making something else.

Recruiting for this adaptive organization is therefore extremely important. Let’s start with how not to recruit: by using job descriptions and resumes. That is far too old-fashioned. Because what an employee has to do today might not be what they’ll have to do tomorrow.

Imagine your company suddenly pivots to produce a new type of product out of necessity. Meanwhile, your employees continue doing exactly what their job description specifies. It doesn’t work. 

Instead of a job description, offer potential employees a description of the company plus a description of your ideal candidate. Recruiting purely for specific talents isn’t quite right either – instead you should be aiming for people who are a good cultural fit, with a similar – but not too similar – sense of purpose. 

In other words, diversity is also a key component – in every sense. Neurodiversity is hugely important, as well as employing people across different age ranges and from different backgrounds. Everyone can, and should, be learning from everyone else.

After all, that’s the advantage of being unique – take that, robots!

Yes, the robots are coming – but they’re not here to take away all our jobs. In fact, the three a’s: atomization (the ability to split large tasks into smaller ones), automation (the ability to do things automatically, like send bulk-emails and update team calendars) and augmentation (using tech to enhance human capabilities) all these things are actually freeing up time and giving us more opportunity to tap into the skills that make us uniquely human – to work in ways that are truly suited to us. Leaders, for instance, can work on their emotional intelligence and social skills, while employees can devote time to creativity and innovation. As the world of work changes ever more rapidly, adaptation, the ability to pivot and change tack, is key. If you can harness this agility-mindset you’ll be able to create products that are a reflection of your company culture and proof of your capacity, rather than necessarily being the main-event. Ultimately, capacity and culture are the two main areas organizations need to focus on – It’s no longer just about the bottom line. 

And to give you just one last piece of actionable advice. If you’re feeling nervous about the fast-pace of change, take some time to reflect on one of the hardest lessons you’ve learned.

Steve Jobs isn’t the only person whose worst career moment turned out to be his best. In fact, things that initially feel like bad news often have a way of benefitting us in the longer term. This is because we’re forced to adapt and go beyond what we initially thought was the limit of our capacity. So, think about the hardest experiences you’ve faced so far in your career, take a moment to write down the answers to these questions: What did you learn from the experience? How did you adapt? You’ll probably discover that you’re already much more agile than you thought, so, hold onto that, and before you begin to worry about not being skilled enough in tech or science, take a deep breath and remind yourself of your uniquely human skill set.  This is what is really going to give you the edge in life.