You can’t build a change-ready organisation with change-resistant leadership.
3 November 2026We encourage innovation, ask people to embrace change and challenge them to think differently. But are we genuinely creating an environment that enables them to do so?
Because there’s a contradiction I see all too often. We encourage people to challenge the status quo, but become defensive when our own thinking is challenged. We ask people to experiment, but focus more on what went wrong than what was learned. We tell people to embrace uncertainty, but expect them to have all the answers before trying something different. And then we wonder why innovation stalls!
Adaptability isn’t simply something we can demand from others. It’s something leaders need to demonstrate AND organisations need to enable.
This is one of the reasons I’m so passionate about our work with AQai.
Two particularly important sub-dimensions within the AQai model are:
🔹 Work Environment – Does your organisation encourage self-disruption, rapid experimentation and regular adaptation, or does it inadvertently create barriers?
🔹 Team Support – Do people have the support, trust and psychological safety to challenge assumptions, explore new ideas and navigate uncertainty together?
These aren’t just interesting questions. Through AQai, we can actually measure how people experience these conditions, helping leaders move beyond assumptions towards informed action. And this is where our work with the Reinvention Academy adds another important dimension: challenging established thinking, embracing unlearning (which is another AQai sub dimension) and developing the capability to reinvent before circumstances force us to.
As a result one of the phrases I’ve increasingly adopted in my own work is: “Experiment fast. Experiment safely.”
Because meaningful experimentation requires both the freedom to explore AND the responsibility to learn. Perhaps the question leaders should be asking isn’t simply “How do we make our people more adaptable?” But rather…
“What might we be doing as leaders that’s making it harder for them to adapt?”
After all, being ‘People First. Change Ready.’ starts with the behaviours we demonstrate and the environments we create.
