🛑 Stop Asking People to Be More Adaptable Without First Looking at Their Environment

As the pace of change increases, we quite rightly encourage people to become more resilient, curious, flexible and comfortable with uncertainty. But there is a danger.

We can start to make adaptability entirely the responsibility of the individual.

If someone struggles with change, are they resilient enough? Do they have the right mindset? Are they simply resistant? These are legitimate questions, but perhaps we should ask another one first:

Have we created an environment in which people are actually able to adapt?

You can recruit adaptable people and develop adaptable behaviours, but put those same people into an environment where they feel unsupported, overloaded or psychologically unsafe and their capacity to adapt can quickly diminish.

This is one reason I value the environmental data within the AQai – Adaptability Assessments & Coaching assessment. It explores five distinct dimensions:

⚪ Company Support — does the organisation REALLY care about its people, or do they feel like another number?
⚪ Emotional Health — do people have the emotional capacity to navigate uncertainty and continual change?
⚪ Team Support — is there genuine support and the psychological safety to speak up, challenge, experiment and learn?
⚪ Work Environment — do the culture and ways of working enable people to respond to disruption and allow change to thrive?
⚪ Work Stress — does pressure support performance or drain people’s capacity to adapt?
Individually, each tells us something.

Together, they begin to tell us a story.

That’s where we can move from:
🤔 DATA → INFORMATION → KNOWLEDGE → MEANINGFUL ACTION

Because collecting data isn’t the objective.
What are we going to do differently because of what we now know?

At Resourceful People Group Ltd, we combine the amazing AQai insight with our experience of helping organisations, teams and leaders successfully navigate change and disruption.

Our role is to help turn the data into understanding, and that understanding into targeted, meaningful action that creates value for people, teams and organisations.

It’s an important part of what we mean by:
People First. Change Ready.

Because being change ready isn’t just about developing more adaptable people.
It’s also about creating an environment in which their adaptability can flourish.

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