Adjust the Dial

I’ve been thinking about real-life use cases for adaptability.

One is knowing when and how much to “adjust the dial” when something you’ve been doing needs to change.

A friend of mine recently had her first baby, and this weekend we talked about the seismic adjustment of being fully responsible for another human being. I commented that you need to learn constant vigilance when the baby is born, and you need to unlearn it during the emptying nest phase. Dial up, dial down. Both require adaptability.

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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.

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 Curated Content on Adaptability

Old narratives about change are themselves slow to change. Although we might rationally acknowledge that change is constant, emotionally we continue to resist and resent it, subconsciously waiting for things to settle down and ‘get back to normal.’

Have a look at Nadya Zhexembayeva’s recent piece in the Harvard Business Review. It describes both the pace of change and workers’ unhappiness with it. A couple of elements jumped off the page at me:

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In Between

Let’s talk about the time in between.

William Bridges refers to it as “the neutral zone.” But it’s more like putting a car in Neutral than something we feel neutral about.

Futurist Marilyn Ferguson has referred to this time as like being “between trapezes,” with nothing to hold onto. Emotionally, that seems about right. I’ve written about it before, as the “hell of the hallway.” We’re in suspended animation for a time. But how long?

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