How has your business changed in the last year? Moving HR and IT to the cloud? Did you migrate products or essential internal systems to the cloud? Are AI and big data changing your business? Have you digitized your customer-facing interactions? Maybe you entered a new market or discovered your most powerful competitor is a company that didn’t exist two years ago. The pace of change is relentless. Instead of anticipating known risks, organizations now exist in a state that the U.S. Army War College calls VUCA (Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, Ambiguity). Now, consider that every one of these changes requires people to learn new skills, forge new ways to communicate and alter their perspective about their work. And remain calm and focused.
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A 2016 Harvard Business Review survey identified the ability to adapt as the most important skill for companies undergoing a digital transformation—more important than technical knowledge, communication skills or even customer-focused problem-solving. Adaptability should be in everyone’s job description. Unfortunately, it’s not taught in school or learned by reading a couple of paragraphs during new hire orientation. And it’s a compounding problem in a large organization, because every person who doesn’t adapt to change is a drag on the organization’s change efforts, making it less flexible and less able to match faster-evolving competitors.
Change is the New Normal. How will you handle it? In the past, leaders predicted threats and planned responses with a risk-management strategy. Today, however, the nature of risk itself is different. Instead of anticipating known risks, organizations must cope with an environment that is volatile, uncertain, always complex and often ambiguous. Transformative models like agile empower people to move quickly in a dynamic environment, but they also require employees to re-imagine how they work.
In a world of constant change, non-adaptive behavior is the killer problem.
Expecting employees to tough it out is wasteful and expensive…and can easily backfire. In such situations, reports Towers Watson, employees “fear they will not get the support they need to successfully navigate these changes and therefore have a preference for stability.” Instead, individuals need to acquire resilience in the face of uncertainty. Resilience—the ability to bounce back in the face of change—is the starting point of adaptive behavior.
In times of change, an organization builds adaptive behavior progressively through three phases:
1. Build Individual Resilience
Employees eager to acquire new skills have a whole new attitude toward change. The World Economic Forum declares, “individuals’ mindset and efforts will be key… for people to become creative, curious, agile lifelong learners, comfortable with continuous change.”