In this second installment on leading well in uncertainty, I’m inviting you to consider your corporate culture. It might seem like a bit of a leap, but how it feels to work in your organization can powerfully strengthen people’s adaptability, or undermine it. Adaptability is what you most need to encourage in your people during turbulent times.
Continue reading “Set the Tone”Driving Fast in Fog
Today I am starting a series on leadership behaviours that help in contexts of uncertainty and accelerated change — and ones that don’t.
Deloitte’s 2026 Global Human Capital Trends report indicates that one third of workers experienced at least 15 major changes in the past year. These include changes in the work, in the skills required to do the work, in the tools used to do the work, and in customer expectations of the work. That’ll make your head spin! The report goes on to describe that the effects on workers have been largely negative, with 68% experiencing decreased wellbeing and 58% feeling less relevant or left behind. And leaders themselves aren’t immune to this pace of change — they are experiencing it even as they must lead through it.
Continue reading “Driving Fast in Fog”Revise the Proverb
I’m writing this from Nairobi, Kenya.
In my hotel room, the body lotion mounted on the bathroom wall looks like this:
Continue reading “Revise the Proverb”Changing Our Mind
What is something you used to think?
Not as a toddler, but as an adult. Something you used to believe, that you’ve changed your mind about?
Unlearning is a key skill in boosting our adaptability. I think of it as updating our operating system and/or decluttering. It’s removing ways of thinking and being that likely served us well at one point, but don’t anymore. It usually accompanies curiosity and mental flexibility in people — they’re interested in learning and can lean into the grey zones of life rather than seeing things as black and white. And being good at it is way harder than it sounds. We tend to cling to our ways of knowing for longer than they actually serve us.
Continue reading “Changing Our Mind”Surfing Lessons
I don’t know how to surf.
But as a metaphor for adaptability and responding in uncertainty rather than waiting for calm seas — that I do know something about.
I’ve recently been upgrading my adaptability intelligence coaching through AQai. We’ve been talking about Change Uncertainty (Cu) as a dimension of adaptability, and why it matters. It’s exciting because it is so very relevant.
Continue reading “Surfing Lessons”