Why Adaptability Is the Most Important Business Skill of the Next Decade, and How to Build It

Most organisations know they need to be more adaptable. The restructures keep coming. The market keeps shifting. The technology keeps changing. And yet the people expected to navigate all of it are still being asked to respond to change the same way they always have, with resilience, flexibility, and a positive attitude, without ever being given the tools to actually build those things.

That is the gap at the centre of most organisational change challenges. Not a strategy problem. Not a communication problem. A human capability problem. And it is one that most change management programmes never adequately address.

“Adaptability is not a personality trait. It is a learnable skill. And organisations that treat it as the former will always be at the mercy of the people who happen to have it naturally.”

What Adaptability Actually Means, and What It Doesn’t

Adaptability is frequently misunderstood as enthusiasm for change. It is not. An adaptable team is not one that cheers when a restructure is announced. An adaptable individual is not someone who is unaffected by uncertainty. Those things are not adaptability, they are either performance or denial, and organisations are right to be suspicious of both.

Genuine adaptability is the capability to respond effectively to changed conditions regardless of how welcome those conditions are. It is the difference between coping, absorbing the impact of change and waiting for stability to return, and adapting: recalibrating, finding the new path, and moving forward with purpose rather than inertia.

In frontline policing, this distinction is not theoretical. When a situation changes, and in that environment, situations change constantly, often dangerously, the question is never whether you feel good about it. The question is whether you can adjust fast enough to stay effective. That capability, built under those conditions, is what the Frontline Formula I speak about is designed to transfer to the organisations I work with.

Why Organisations Struggle to Build It

The most common failure mode in organisational adaptability is not resistance to change, it is a lack of infrastructure for change. Leaders communicate what is changing; they rarely provide a framework for how to navigate the psychological experience of changing. The announcement goes out. And then people are expected to simply get on with it.

What that approach misses is that the human response to change is not primarily logical. It is emotional, and it follows predictable patterns that are well understood in high-pressure professional environments. Uncertainty activates threat responses. When people do not understand what is expected of them in a changed environment, they default to self-protection rather than contribution. They perform stability rather than admitting confusion. They preserve the status quo in their own behaviour even as the organisation officially moves on.

The result is the implementation gap that most change programmes experience: the strategy is clear, the communication has happened, and the organisation is still not moving at the pace it needs to.

Three Things That Actually Build Adaptability

• Make adaptability explicit, not assumed

Adaptability grows when it is named, practised, and recognised, not when it is assumed as a baseline expectation. Organisations that build genuine adaptability treat it the way they treat any other critical capability: they define what it looks like, they create conditions for it to be developed, and they build it into how performance is understood and rewarded.

• Build psychological safety before change happens

The single greatest predictor of how well a team navigates change is not their skill set or their experience. It is the degree to which they trust that being honest about difficulty will not cost them professionally. Teams with high psychological safety adapt faster because they surface problems earlier, communicate more accurately, and learn from what isn’t working without waiting for it to become a crisis. This is not a soft metric. It is a performance variable, and it needs to be built before the change arrives, not after it.

• Give people a framework, not just a message

Telling people to ’embrace change’ or ‘stay flexible’ is not a framework. It is an aspiration. The Frontline Formula gives individuals and teams specific, named tools for the specific moments that change creates: the moment when the plan changes and clarity is needed; the moment when pressure peaks and decision-making quality is most at risk; the moment when someone is carrying something they haven’t been able to say out loud. Those moments are predictable. The tools for navigating them can be prepared in advance.

The Cost of Getting This Wrong

Organisations that do not invest in building genuine adaptability do not avoid the cost, they defer it. The cost shows up in the implementation gap between strategy and execution. It shows up in the attrition of high performers who have learned, correctly, that the organisation’s change demands are unsustainable. It shows up in the engagement data that HR teams spend considerable energy trying to explain, and that senior leaders often attribute to the wrong causes.

The people most likely to leave a high-change organisation are not, as is often assumed, the least committed. They are frequently the most capable, the ones with options, who have looked honestly at the trajectory and concluded that the organisation does not have what it takes to sustain them through what is coming. Adaptability is a retention lever as much as it is a performance lever. The organisations that build it genuinely are building something that keeps their best people, not just something that gets them through the next restructure.

What the Evidence Shows

The research on organisational adaptability is consistent across sectors and contexts. Teams that have been explicitly developed for adaptability, given frameworks, practiced under conditions of uncertainty, and supported by psychologically safe cultures, outperform comparable teams that have not on every measure that matters in fast-changing environments: speed of response to disruption, quality of decisions under uncertainty, rate of learning from failure, and capacity to sustain performance over time rather than peaking and crashing.

This is not surprising when you understand the mechanism. Adaptability is not magic. It is the result of specific capabilities, built deliberately, in specific conditions. The organisations that have those capabilities perform better when the environment changes, which, in the current climate, means they perform better most of the time. The organisations that do not have those capabilities are dependent on the change going according to plan. It rarely does.

“The organisations that will thrive in the next decade are not the ones with the best change management plans. They are the ones whose people can adapt when the plan changes.”

Rob Hosking is a TEDx motivational speaker, former front-line police officer, and mental health advocate. Known for his authentic delivery, he shares powerful narratives of resilience and wellbeing, helping businesses prioritise mental health and cultivate positive work cultures. His talks balance humour with vulnerability, leaving lasting impressions on audiences.