One more after this. Next week I’m publishing the final behavior and opening paid membership at the same time, including founding member pricing for the first 25 subscribers, locked for life. KLIR, the diagnostic tool I mentioned last week, will be available exclusively to paid members. Full details next week. Today: the behavior that determines whether you keep moving when the path changes.
The Leader Who Keeps Doing What Stopped Working
There’s a particular kind of leadership frustration that doesn’t get talked about enough. It’s not the frustration of failing. It’s the frustration of doing everything right, the same way you’ve always done it, and watching it slowly stop working.
The strategy that drove results two years ago now feels like pushing a boulder uphill. The communication approach that used to land clearly now seems to miss. The process that once made your team efficient has somehow become the thing slowing everyone down. And the honest, uncomfortable question sitting underneath all of it is this: when did I stop adapting?
Most leaders don’t abandon adaptability on purpose. They drift away from it gradually, usually while trying to stay consistent. Consistency is a virtue, until it becomes a cage.
The Data Isn’t Subtle
In Deloitte’s 2026 Global Human Capital Trends survey, 7 in 10 business leaders say their primary competitive strategy over the next three years is to be fast and nimble, to quickly adapt to and capitalize on changing business, customer, or market needs.* Seven in ten. That’s not a trend. That’s a consensus.
And yet, most leadership development still treats adaptability as a personality trait, something you either have or you don’t, rather than a behavior that can be observed, practiced, and built. That gap between what organizations say they need and what they actually develop in their leaders is where performance quietly erodes.
As the writer Anaïs Nin once put it: “Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it.”
She wasn’t writing about leadership, but she could have been.
What Adaptive Thinking Actually Is
Adaptive Thinking isn’t about chasing every new idea or reinventing your approach every quarter. Leaders who do that don’t build trust, they exhaust people. Real Adaptive Thinking is something more disciplined than that.
It’s the ability to stay completely anchored to what you’re trying to achieve while remaining genuinely open to changing how you get there.
That distinction matters more than it sounds. The goal doesn’t move. The destination stays fixed. What changes is your willingness to question whether the current path is still the best one, and your ability to generate new options when the answer is no.
Leaders strong in this behavior separate purpose from process. They hold the what with conviction and the how with curiosity. And that combination, conviction plus curiosity, is what allows them to keep moving when conditions shift instead of doubling down on methods that have stopped delivering.
What It Looks Like When It’s Missing
You’ve seen this leader. Maybe you’ve been this leader. I certainly have been!
They’re not resistant to change because they’re lazy or arrogant. They’re resistant because what they’re doing used to work, and there’s a kind of loyalty to methods that once served you well. It feels like integrity to stick with what you know. It feels like discipline to not jump at every new idea.
But there’s a version of that loyalty that crosses a line, where staying the course stops being principled persistence and starts being avoidance of the discomfort that comes with trying something new and possibly failing at it.
The tell is usually this: when someone suggests a different approach, the first response is an explanation of why the current approach should work, rather than genuine curiosity about why it isn’t. The energy goes into defending the method instead of interrogating it.
That’s the moment Adaptive Thinking breaks down. Not in a dramatic way. Just quietly, steadily, until the gap between what the leader is doing and what the situation actually needs becomes too wide to ignore.
The physicist Richard Feynman had a phrase he used when confronting problems this way: “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.”
Most leadership blind spots aren’t born from ignorance. They’re born from familiarity.
The Behaviors That Signal It
Adaptive Thinking shows up in observable, specific ways, and its absence shows up just as clearly.
Leaders who demonstrate it consistently do a few things worth noting:
When results stall, their first move is curiosity, not defense. They ask what’s changed before they ask who’s responsible.
They create enough psychological safety on their teams that people feel comfortable surfacing problems early, before they become expensive.
And they treat experimentation not as a sign of uncertainty but as a sign of rigor, because testing an idea before scaling it is smarter than scaling it before testing.
McKinsey research found that one of the top reasons employees chose to stay in a role was working with people who trust and care for one another, and that adaptability in leaders directly improves their capacity to build those relationships, especially in high-pressure or virtual settings.** This is worth sitting with. Adaptive leaders aren’t just better strategists. They’re better at holding teams together when conditions get hard.
They also do something that’s harder than it sounds: they reward learning, not just outcomes. When someone on their team tries a new approach and it doesn’t land, the conversation is about what was learned and what gets adjusted, not about the miss itself. That single behavior does more to build an adaptive team culture than any workshop or framework ever will.
Margaret Mead, who spent her career studying how humans navigate change across cultures, put it plainly: “A small group of thoughtful, committed people could change the world. Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”
The same logic applies inside organizations. Adaptive culture doesn’t start with policy. It starts with a leader who models it.
Developing It Intentionally
Like every behavior in The Ready Set, Adaptive Thinking isn’t fixed. It can be built. But it requires something most development plans skip: creating actual structural space for it rather than just encouraging it in the abstract.
A few things that work in practice:
First, separate your goal-setting from your method-setting. When you define what success looks like, do it with rigor. When you define how you’ll get there, hold it loosely and revisit it at regular intervals. Build a standing question into your own rhythm: is this method still serving the outcome, or am I serving the method?
Second, actively study how people outside your function or industry solve similar problems. Not to copy what they do, but to break the assumption that your current approach is the only reasonable one. Borrowed thinking, adapted to your context, is often more innovative than ideas generated from scratch inside a familiar system.
Third, and please DO NOT skip over this one, reward the learning in your team publicly and specifically. Not just “great effort.” Call out what was learned, why it matters, and how it changes what you’ll try next. That kind of specific recognition signals that adaptation is a genuine value, not just a slogan.
And finally, the hardest one: get comfortable with being visibly uncertain. Adaptive leaders don’t pretend to have all the answers before trying something new. They say things like, “I’m not sure this will work, but here’s what we’re testing and why.” That kind of honesty doesn’t weaken authority, it models the behavior you need from your team when they’re navigating their own uncertainty. You can’t build an adaptive culture if you’re performing certainty you don’t actually have.
Adaptive Thinking isn’t about being flexible for the sake of it. It’s about being disciplined enough to stay anchored to your purpose while remaining honest enough to admit when your current path has stopped serving it. The leaders who master that balance don’t just survive change, they use it as fuel. And in a world that won’t stop shifting, that’s not optional anymore. It’s the price of staying relevant.
A Note Before Next Week
Nine behaviors in. One left.
When this series wraps next week with Shared Success, I’m also opening something I’ve spent a considerable amount of time building, a diagnostic tool called KLIR that takes everything we’ve covered across these ten behaviors and gives you a personalized picture of where you actually stand.
Not where you think you stand. Not where you’d like to stand. Where the data puts you, with a development path that’s specific to your profile, not generic to every leader.
More on that next week. For now, the question worth sitting with: what method are you still defending that the situation stopped requiring a while ago?
*https://www.deloitte.com/us/en/insights/topics/talent/human-capital-trends.html
**https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/people-and-organizational-performance/our-insights/the-organization-blog/the-great-attrition-the-power-of-adaptability
***https://blogs.psico-smart.com/blog-what-are-the-emerging-trends-in-leadership-potential-evaluation-software-for-2024-126006