If you work with people in any capacity you’re working in a complex environment. Cause and effect aren’t always knowable, and regardless of your market position, intellectual property, or capacity for hard work, your success depends on adaptability.
By Nicole Yeary
More than coping with the constantly changing world around you, to thrive you need to predict, test, and rapidly adapt your materials, processes, and behaviour.
Here are three excellent ways to enhance your capability for adaptability.
Practice Emotional Detachment
Different than disinterest, detachment is recognizing emotional reactions to change and responding appropriately. This tactic is about consciously moving from reacting within an emotional state to recognizing the multiple emotions at play in any situation and responding accordingly.
Practice activating your “observer” in low-stress situations and make note of your emotional reactions within those situations.
This means observing in the present how you feel and how you perceive your partners, colleagues, customers and/or clients’ emotional states. It gives you the chance to learn and adapt within a situation. It gives you choices.
Practice Creative Thinking
You know how you became a concert pianist without practicing, how the first strategic plan you wrote was perfect, and how you learned to duck-dive or turtle roll to get out of the beach-break right away?
Exactly.
Creativity and thriving within change (adaptability at its best) are inextricably linked. Engage in positive creation outside your work environment, observe your environment and what you’re learning, and adapt that new knowledge to your most important tasks.
Practice this regularly to inform your thinking and learning from multiple perspectives.
Practice Noticing Which Rules can be Broken
Red tape and bureaucracy are two great enemies of adaptability. Rules and processes designed to last forever will always fail.
Forces outside our control, whether that’s within or without our organization(s), are changing the world we live in faster than ever before.
When you come up on rules you feel are holding you back, consider whether they protect you from making a serious mistake or just protect the status quo.
Rules are often built to protect plans.
Some are critical – You plan to pay the lease on your office space, so you make a rule that you must maintain a minimum balance in that checking account.
Others are not – Worried about software support you decide any vendor you work with needs to be a certain size or have a certain set of characteristics.
One keeps a roof over your head, while the other ensures your capacity to adapt rapidly to changing opportunities and pressures is up to an external vendor at least as slow to respond as your own organization, and you’ve probably lost some really bright, creative, and impatient people along the way.
Spend a little time each day developing your ability to detach and observe, think creatively, and figure out which rules to break – increasingly you’ll be able to perceive, adapt, and thrive within the state of constant change that is our new reality.